All music books have their own soundtrack, an imaginary playlist that we listen to as we read. Elaste goes through the trouble of compiling one for you — a real playlist of primitive electronica, weird synthpop, apocalyptic post-punk ballads and thrashy trash electro. These are selections from Elaste Records, companion label to a German magazine that called itself “the soundtrack of an attitude, played out between two covers.”
All three soundtracks — the imaginary, the attitude and the real one — converge in the form of ELASTE 1980-1986. The edition is part artbook, part omnibus, about as thick as a bible and as consequential as one.
It was an era when revolutions were erupting but you might miss them if you didn’t read the right magazines. Elaste was one of those magazines.
Elaste was a magazine published in Hanover, Germany, produced in 16 issues over seven years. Along the way they managed to showcase a surprisingly vast array of artists that in retrospect you’d say captured the zeitgeist of the era: David Bowie, Depeche Mode, Keith Haring, Klaus Nomi, Boy George, Johnny Rotten, Duran Duran, Kraftwerk, Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, whose picture appears on the cover of the book.
The interviews in particular are notable for their aggression — they’re certainly not hostile, but almost unconcerned with the notion of politeness or deference to genius. You can read countless articles about Warhol — even in “grown up” magazines — that tiptoed around his private life. Elaste, on the other hand, took advantage of the slightest crack in Warhol’s cautious and hardened façade to rush in:
WARHOL: Yes, in Frankfurt. We’ll visit them tomorrow. They are some “beauties.” They are gay.
ELASTE: Are you gay too?
WARHOL: No.
You can almost hear a minder off-camera dropping a latte and warning they’d never get access one of his clients again. Elaste‘s founders — Thomas Elsner, Michael Reinboth and Christian Wegner — didn’t seem overly concerned about having their access journalism pass revoked. These were self-described “dreamers” who without much in the way of a professional CV managed to elbow their way into junkets to meet and write about and sometimes photograph some of the most interesting people in very interesting times. This was the early 1980s, when one could build on punk rock’s ethos and aesthetic or consciously disavow it, and the same choice was presented for the remnants of ’70s radicalism, New Age navel-gazing and neon materialism. Music and art scenes seem to rise and fall almost monthly and maybe they were never much more than a couple dozen kids in a converted Bronx garage that would generate enough energy that the seismic waves could be registered across a continent. It was an era when revolutions were erupting but you might miss them if you didn’t read the right magazines. Elaste was one of those magazines.
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What even is a magazine now? If you haven’t noticed, nobody really creates new titles anymore. What is an album? What is a track? What is a review and why is it inferior to adding a track to a playlist with 7000 bot listeners? These rudimentary questions about form and shape, seemingly settled a century ago, are inquiries we put to artists with some frequency here. No wonder people prefer the “certain uncertainty” of an earlier age, when Elaste would ask Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk whether or not “love, happiness and hope” could exist in the computer world. (Yes, was the answer, with Hütter advocating a cooperative relationship akin to a “friendship with machines.”)
Though remarkably internationalist for its time, these questions of course were asked and mostly answered in German. The first several hundred pages of ELASTE 1980-1986 are also in German, enriched by unadorned but penetrating English translations of the texts in the back. It’d be an odd thing to say that a non-native speaker isn’t missing much — they certainly are. But the book is exceptionally well-designed — you can page through it like an art book through dazzling shots of Bowie, Robert Smith, Nomi & Co. Hardly a dozen pages pass without coming across a spread that would make for a phenomenal wall poster. It’s the rare art book that you can read without feeling like you’ve just waded through a broad but shallow Wikipedia page of its subject.
And you can also listen. Michael Reinboth would go on to found Compost Records and its large family of sibling labels, one of which is named “Elaste” after the magazine you’re reading here. Among the treasures included on the soundtrack available with a download code from that label are several tracks from Indoor Life, the acclaimed post-punk outfit from San Francisco produced & recorded by Patrick Cowley and considered “lost” for many years. It’s a lovely addition to a brilliant project, made in Germany but made for us.
ELASTE 1980-1986 is out now, as is ELASTE Essentials Vol. 1.
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