[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met.  He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week.  Cheers C&B.]

To me modern German music has always been about the monosyllabic pioneers of Krautrock.  Can.  Faust.  Neu!   Or perhaps the ear-shattering crunch of Einsturzende Neubauten’s strategies against architecture.   Brilliant stuff, but forbidding too; and sometimes a little too Baader-Meinhof for my bourgeois ass.   But in the last year or so I’ve discovered three people who’ve made me seriously rethink my assumptions about German music, and this post is about those three.

The first is Haruko. Her real name is Susanne Stanglow, and while she looks from her photos to be about 14 years old, her music comes from an old soul.  She first came to my attention a month or so ago, when DC played one of her gorgeous songs on The Waiting Room.  She has a record out called Wild Geese, but she hasn’t received nearly enough blog love.  Yet.  Regular readers of Song by Toad will recognize her style, and no one will be terribly surprised to find Alela Diane and Mariee Sioux among her myspace “top friends,” although I also hear quite a bit of Porlolo in her voice.  Lovely melodies are present in abundance, and the recording has a consciously woody, crackly feel, like it was recorded on a big stone hearth in front of a warm fire.  There’s also a dreamy, child-like innocence to the lyrics and delivery that I find particularly moving, especially on the stunning The Mountain Adventure, which forms a sort of centerpiece for the record. Comparisons to Joanna Newsom will inevitably be made, and musically there may be something to that, but fortunately Haruko does not sound like a cat being strangled.  Haruko’s record is now available on vinyl, so get in line.

Haruko – Welcome To Loveland

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Haruko – The Mountain Adventure

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Next up is Andre Daners, who records as My Laundry Life.  My Laundry Life is all about late-80s and early-90s bedroom guitar pop in the fine tradition of Postcard Records and Sarah Records.  I first heard him back in late 2008, when Sons and Guns was released as a split single on the terrific Cloudberry Records.  I was completely hooked then, and I’m still hooked. Some people just seem to have an intuitive understanding of what the perfect, pure pop song should sound like. In early 2009 My Laundry Life came out with his debut full-length, called The Art of Science, on Vollwert Records in Berlin, which has recently emerged as sort of the “European Cloudberry.”  The best points of reference for My Laundry Life’s sound are probably The Go-Betweens or The Field Mice, which ain’t a bad place to start.  Apparently there’s a new My Laundry Life record in the works, entitled How To Wallow In Shame, and the preview tracks on his myspace are really promising.  I defy you to listen to these tunes without bobbing your head.

My Laundry Life – Sons and Guns

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My Laundry Life – Sunday’s Best

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Last up is Sibylle Baier, who is both old and new.  In the late 60s and early 70s Sibylle Baier was an aspiring folk singer and actress in Germany, and she evidently appeared in one of Wim Wenders’ early films.  Between 1970 and 1973 she wrote a few dozen songs at home and recorded them on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, purely for her own edification I guess.  Life then intervened, as it will, and she moved to the States with her husband, where she chose to focus on raising a family.  Fast forward 30 years, when Sibylle’s enterprising son starts handing out CD versions of his Mom’s old reel-to-reel recordings as family gifts.  Somehow one of these CDs wound up in the hands of J. Mascis, who in turn alerted the good folks at Orange Twin Records in Athens, Georgia, current home of Neutral Milk Hotel and Elf Power among others.  In 2006 Orange Twin released Sibylle Baier’s recordings as a full-length called Colour Green, and it’s a complete revelation.   Quiet, smoky vocals over a gently strummed guitar, as if she fears waking the children but is nonetheless compelled to get her ideas down on tape before they slip away.  It’s like Nico if she weren’t a junkie. Magnificent.

Sibylle Baier – I Lost Something In The Hills

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Sibylle Baier – Forgett

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