VA - Ende vom Lied: East German Underground Sound 1979-1990 (2018)

ENDE VOM LIED* is a genre-spanning collection of punk, post-punk and avant- garde bands from the former East Germany, chronicling the work of free spirits pitted against government restraints and implied genre limitations. The underground scene in the GDR was a hydra, a noisy mix of musicians, poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers, punks and freaks. In the immediate aftermath of the primal scream that was punk, music often bred with poetry or painting in short-lived liaisons or enduring collaborations to produce a new generation of genre bastards. With the lines blurring between forms, a search for new shapes began. In the German Democratic Republic, this search constituted a tightrope walk, a dance for expression between subculture and a dictatorship.
*In German, ENDE VOM LIED literally translates to “The end of the song”, but is more commonly understood as a saying roughly meaning “The upshot”, “The end of the story” or simply “The end”.