When it comes to posthumous re-releases it is often hard to make an objective judgment on the quality of the album. The question of how well this music works as an album is made difficult when you consider that Wolfgang Riechmann’s Wunderbar is thirty-one years old. How can I appreciate this album, as a critic, without experiencing it in its time of origin amongst its peers?

I ask this because many of the early German krautrock-electronic pioneers, such as Kraftwerk, had a heavy influence on the coming wave of hip-hop and later electronic musics. So, it is no easy thing to evaluate it in isolation.

Within Wunderbar, I hear shades of Jan Hammer’s synth washes and neon aesthetic. For example, “Abendlicht” has Hammer’s slow, rotating synth in the background, but with a foreshadow to house music in a constant bass thump. Contrastingly, the title track feels as though it should be part of the early 80s Tour de France soundtracks, to which Kraftwerk themselves scored a whole album. It’s cheesy at times, but by no means annoying; it gets trapped between the unconscious desires of dance music and the more intellectual side of electronic music. Meanwhile, “Weltweit” just gets lost in a noodle soup of arpeggiated synthesizer goo.

Overall, I don’t think Wunderbar has the same effect or place in the canon of 70s synth rock that Kraftwerk’s albums do, or even some of Herbie Hancock’s pre-hip-hop funk musings, such as “Rocket."

That said, it still remains difficult to say this without some hesitation, because Riechmann was brutally, and fatally, stabbed before Wunderbar was ever properly released. There is a vast soundscape of possibility in a future that no longer exists for Riechmann, and Wunderbar is all we’re left with. I would certainly recommend this for one of those times when you’re in a mood to listen to something evocative of Logan’s Run or any other wacky 70s sci-fi films that rode the edge of trippy.

-Gabriel Bogart