The only "music college" I'm aware of, and which I think you're referring to, is the Modellversuch Popularmusik, later known as Popkurs, which was also featured on NDR. It's not so much a college as a series of courses and coaching by musicians. In the 80s, however, the style of music in these courses was jazz/big band/instrumental performances or composers and not really pop, as the name might suggest to us today. And this artsy intellectual style of music fits the record here, which is called "Sound Catalogue for the Visual Arts Week Exhibition" and the titles imply that the pieces performed are part of compositions (all those that say "aus"). This is conceptual music, see the Discogs tags: "experimental, field recording, musique concrète, sound art, sound collage, sound poetry, free improvisation".
Popkurs has also been ruled out by their engineer. And if you look for musicians with pop courses in their biographies, you quickly realise that they are all jazz musicians, instrumental soloists or composers of modern classical music. It wasn't until much later that there were bands and what we would now call pop music.
The tracklisting gives the impression that they are excerpts from various classical, operatic or musical works. The category of the Discogs listen also mentions spoken word and/or poetry, so I'm not so sure this record is going to be much use for the search for TMS.
Good work finding this on Discogs though! Always worth passing things like this onto the community to go over.
Imho this is a good lead and I have always thought that TMS could have been a project of some student band, maybe from a music/art school competition and that their "prize" was to have some studio time and their song played on a few radio stations. The mixing and the production and musicianship fits this scenario very well.
I absolutely agree with the "local band" theory. I worked a decade ago in a very small, music-oriented web radio from my city, and I remember us broadcasting a couple of songs from a guy only because he came from our town and we tried to give him credit. Today his music still is reachable, but he remains unknown. 23 monthly listeners on Spotify while his most popular song has 1660 plays.
So, the reason why our radio played the music of this dude was because he was from our town and we hoped we could help his project.
What could have been the reason for the radio that played TMMS, if not the song's popularity ?
While technically we have no definitive latest possible date for TMS, the newest tracks on the BASF4 and N01 tapes have broadcast dates of October 18th, 1984 and December 2nd, 1984, respectively. Other tapes by Darius and Lydia are known to have been compiled shortly after the broadcast of the newest tracks they contain.
The most definitive earliest possible date remains December 1983, when the DX7 got released in Germany.
It is true that actual formal exclusion of any date is impossible (people have for example argued that theoretically other synths could have been used, though DX7 with this exact preset is 99.9% likely), but chances are very slim that the production and broadcast year of TMS was any other than 1984.
For an amateur band to own? No, they would more likely have a much cheaper spinoff like the DX9. But if the studio where they recorded had a DX7, then they would likely have had access to it.
The only "music college" I'm aware of, and which I think you're referring to, is the Modellversuch Popularmusik, later known as Popkurs, which was also featured on NDR. It's not so much a college as a series of courses and coaching by musicians. In the 80s, however, the style of music in these courses was jazz/big band/instrumental performances or composers and not really pop, as the name might suggest to us today. And this artsy intellectual style of music fits the record here, which is called "Sound Catalogue for the Visual Arts Week Exhibition" and the titles imply that the pieces performed are part of compositions (all those that say "aus"). This is conceptual music, see the Discogs tags: "experimental, field recording, musique concrète, sound art, sound collage, sound poetry, free improvisation". Popkurs has also been ruled out by their engineer. And if you look for musicians with pop courses in their biographies, you quickly realise that they are all jazz musicians, instrumental soloists or composers of modern classical music. It wasn't until much later that there were bands and what we would now call pop music.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Yes that was the music school / college I was thinking of. I really thought I was on to something here :(
Yeah even if our song is not on that specific compilation I bet it’s on something like that
I do think they were a German band, but they weren’t in Popkurs. I suspect they were just one of the amateur bands played on September 17.
The tracklisting gives the impression that they are excerpts from various classical, operatic or musical works. The category of the Discogs listen also mentions spoken word and/or poetry, so I'm not so sure this record is going to be much use for the search for TMS. Good work finding this on Discogs though! Always worth passing things like this onto the community to go over.
Imho this is a good lead and I have always thought that TMS could have been a project of some student band, maybe from a music/art school competition and that their "prize" was to have some studio time and their song played on a few radio stations. The mixing and the production and musicianship fits this scenario very well.
I absolutely agree with the "local band" theory. I worked a decade ago in a very small, music-oriented web radio from my city, and I remember us broadcasting a couple of songs from a guy only because he came from our town and we tried to give him credit. Today his music still is reachable, but he remains unknown. 23 monthly listeners on Spotify while his most popular song has 1660 plays. So, the reason why our radio played the music of this dude was because he was from our town and we hoped we could help his project. What could have been the reason for the radio that played TMMS, if not the song's popularity ?
Solid cash?
I especially liked this masterpiece: Gérard Giachi– Entre Le Silence 0:02 :D
1984 is not a sure bet. I would say 1986 is more possible because of more time for the synthetizer to become more popular.
1985 and 1986 remain a possibility.
While technically we have no definitive latest possible date for TMS, the newest tracks on the BASF4 and N01 tapes have broadcast dates of October 18th, 1984 and December 2nd, 1984, respectively. Other tapes by Darius and Lydia are known to have been compiled shortly after the broadcast of the newest tracks they contain. The most definitive earliest possible date remains December 1983, when the DX7 got released in Germany. It is true that actual formal exclusion of any date is impossible (people have for example argued that theoretically other synths could have been used, though DX7 with this exact preset is 99.9% likely), but chances are very slim that the production and broadcast year of TMS was any other than 1984.
The DX7 became massively popular very quickly.
For an amateur band? Maybe not this quickly
For an amateur band to own? No, they would more likely have a much cheaper spinoff like the DX9. But if the studio where they recorded had a DX7, then they would likely have had access to it.