Artist:  	BOGNER, URSULA
Title: 		Recordings 1969-1988
Label: 	FAITICHE (GERMANY)

This is the debut release on Jan Jelinek's label Faitiche: a collection of unheard electronic experiments from an unlikely source. Ursula Bogner's was a pharmacist, wife and mother, and she was obsessed with electronic music -- an obsession that drove her to build her own studio for extensive recording and experimentation. Ursula Bogner was born in 1946 and raised in Dortmund -- she moved to Berlin at 19 to study pharmacy. She immediately went to work for pharmaceutical giant Schering, followed by marriage, children and a successful yet by no means sensational scientific career within the multinational heavyweight. At the same time, she developed a keen interest in electronic music. Throughout her early 20s, she followed the activities of Cologne-based Studio Für Elektronische Musik, attended seminars by Studio founder Herbert Eimert, exhibited great enthusiasm for musique concrète and, later on, shared her children's enthusiasm for British new wave pop. Nevertheless, Ursula Bogner never involved herself in any scene, never made her music public. Besides composition, she also tried her hand at painting, printing (the booklet features reproductions of two of her linocuts) and developed a strong fascination for mysticism, esotericism, and Wilhelm Reich's "orgonomy," the psychoanalyst's bizarre late work on his discovery of "orgonenergy" or life-force. Her compositions are studies and sketches: humorous and -- in view of her biography -- almost silly, rather than mystical or scientific. Nevertheless, it is remarkably hard to grasp or classify her work as a whole. Over the course of 20 years, she dabbled in many different styles, leading to a huge wealth of work and a bewildering variety of titles, from filter modulations, tuba tweaking, bass anthems, looping experiments, synth-pulse symphonies, to rhythmic patterns trapped in echo chambers. In the late 1960s, Ursula Bogner started to record her own music on reel-to-reel tapes. With some of these titles, Jelinek only found individual tracks of pieces recorded on a four-track-recorder -- in these cases, he had to recombine the separate tracks to recreate the original piece. Invoking the original's authenticity might seem insensitive, yet there was no other way to release them in their entirety. Ultimately, only three of the tracks featured on this CD/LP are such "reworkings." All other titles were taken straight from the original reels. Covering a fairly short period of her creative career, they also convey a peculiar coherence in both form and content. A coherence that reflects her accessible, rhythmic and sometimes even "poppy" side. An exhilarating find from a truly undiscovered electronic artist.