Please be a pawn in my music search!

June 24, 2007 1:03 AM

It's a minimalist album, the title of which is a chess move...it exists, right?

Last year, someone recommended what they thought was an amazing minimalist (but possibly leaning towards electronica) album to me, but I can't remember the name and need some help finding it. All I can recall is:
-The composer's name is probably something Eastern European sounding
-The album title is a chess move, like A1-B2 (but not that one specifically; as much fun as it would be for me to try Googling as many legal chess moves as I can think of...)

Does this sketchy description pique anyone's music-fu?

posted by thisjax to media & arts (8 comments total)

Manuel Göttsching, E2-E4.

(Your description was spot-on, by the way.)
posted by xil at 1:07 AM on June 24, 2007

AskMetafilter FTW
posted by thebigdeadwaltz at 8:09 AM on June 24, 2007

Woah, that was scary fast.
posted by thisjax at 8:43 AM on June 24, 2007

Wow, 1981? That's amazingly modern sounding! I love it, thanks for asking this.
posted by wzcx at 10:53 AM on June 24, 2007

What wzcx said; thanks for this. Allmusic calls the album "one of the most important, influential electronic records ever released" and "the earliest album to set the tone for electronic dance music; simply put, it just sounds like the mainstream house produced during the next two decades..."

The Manuel Göttsching bio has more:

The day before he left Göttsching sat down in his studio to create a piece of music to listen to on the airplane; the end result was a 58-minute experimental piece dubbed E2-E4, a collage of treated guitar lines, icily atmospheric synths, and cutting-edge beats. Never intending for the track to see the light of day, he did not issue it until 1984, the first of his albums to appear under his own name. E2-E4 soon became a major favorite on the underground club circuit, where it was regularly spun in sets featuring New Order and other key innovators of the moment despite its creator's admission that it was never created with dance audiences in mind.

Thanks again for the question.
posted by mediareport at 11:28 AM on June 24, 2007

xil: Great catch, but a spot-on description? "Manuel Göttsching" sounds Eastern European now? ;-)
posted by wackybrit at 2:32 PM on June 24, 2007

Well, maybe not spot-on, but pretty detailed as these kinds of questions go.

BTW, thanks for asking the question too, that was the perfect music to put on while staying up too late on a Saturday night.
posted by xil at 2:41 PM on June 24, 2007

Sorry, I just had a funny picture of a German seething at the keyboard at the thought of being considered Eastern European ;-) Anyway, as wzcx says, it's remarkably modern sounding! Cool!
posted by wackybrit at 3:19 PM on June 24, 2007