limited. Begin of a new re-issue series on the Tapete label, aiming to rediscover lost pop pearls. Please note the higher than usual prices for the CD and the vinyl versions!! Limited to 500 copies. Re-issue of their second album from 1973. Left-wing intellectual film critic Uwe Nettelbeck, who had good connections to Polydor, had set up his own studio in rural W?mme, disrupting the mainstream with pioneering sounds by the likes of Faust, inventively engineered by the boffin's boffin Kurt Graupner. By the time Anthony Moore, one of Nettelbeck's charges, approached his third album in 1972, Polydor's accountancy department was fast losing patience with all that experimentalism. So Nettelbeck suggested to Moore that he might write some straight songs (relatively speaking), which in turn prompted Moore to invite his old schoolfriend Peter Blegvad over to Hamburg to form the band Slapp Happy. Dagmar Krause, a young singer from Hamburg and Moore's girlfriend, joined them both on their trip to W?mme to record what was to become Sort of, using Faust as a backing band. A second album emerged, eschewing even more clearly than the first the heavy rock idioms of the era for an anti-macho playfulness that presaged the sparseness of post punk and the dry jangle of early indie. Nonetheless, Polydor pulled the plug, and Uwe Nettelbeck signed Faust and Slapp Happy over to Richard Branson's nascent Virgin imprint. At the Manor they would re- record their second album with UK musicians, bells and whistles for a 1974 release as Slapp Happy, burying the original version in the vaults not to reemerge until 1980 as Acnalbasac Noom. Asked which version they prefer today, the band does not take long to choose: “For the more direct approach it would have to be Acnalbasac Noom. It had a na?ve spontaneity to it. Na?ve in the nicest sense of the nicest sense of the word.”
