The original Uludag was formed in Berlin circa 1980, as an improvising band playing "anarchistisch-experimentelle-rock-musik", with one foot in the new-wave and the other in the arts. By 1983 they'd gone through a lot of changes, and settled down as the trio of Werner Cee, Peter Hollinger and Lothar Reitz, with a new musical focus, blending art-rock and jazz elements with ethnic textures. In 1985 this trio recorded their first major work "7 Für Nichts", however only an extract ever made it onto record. In parallel to all this, the duo of Sabine Schäfer and Helmut Bieler-Wendt had been working as Panta Rhei, scoring theatre and ballet works. After both bands became involved in the same project, Uludag was reborn as a quartet of Cee, Hollinger, Schäfer and Bieler-Wendt.
Uludag's album MAU MAU saw the creation of an original fusion of Oriental musics, Embryo and Missus Beastly type jazz-fusion, with diversions to Henry Cow (also Fred Frith and Massacre) type realms, in an album spanned by a single thematic suite. Peter's rhythmic structures had a kind of punk-jazz energy to them, embellished with lots of complexities, and in cohesion with Sabine's keyboards they conjured up a Chinese cum Gamelan hybrid, given even more oriental flavour by Helmut's violin work. A fascinating and complex suite from start to end, MAU MAU is one of those unique unclassifiable albums born out of the Krautrock scene. It's a great shame that they never made a sequel.
Peter Hollinger is also known as a percussion soloist, and has worked with Alfred Harth in Gestalt Et Jive, with Guru Guru's Mani Neumeier, and many other projects. Sabine Schäfer now seems to work solely in electronic music with works premiered at the German Society for Psychology of Music at Karlsruhe.
MAU MAU (1/1988)
Seite A+B
LP Review RERE 128 (1988)
Werner Cee (bass, saz),
Peter Hollinger (drums, jews-harp, objects), Sabine Schäfer (keyboards),
Helmut Bieler-Wendt (violin, violectra)
Mediafire
