Igra Staklenih Perli: Soft Explosion Live / Tiha eksplozija u živo deutsch

"Soft Explosion Live" was the first Kalemegdan Disk-Publication in summer 1991 and will remain - whatever will happen during the years - something very special and personal forever: the realization of my trip without any commercial interests and calculations.

In 1989 I met Predrag “Pedja” Vuković at Moma Rajin´s place in Belgrade and was then his guest periodically every two or three months. We talked about Igra Staklenih Perli, Rock in Yugoslavia, and about the rest of the world, the way it looked from the Belgrade perspective. Pedja introduced me to some material that the group had recorded on cassettes for private use at the end of the Seventies. One time he copied two rustling tapes with spherical music for me, amongst others a part of a concert, whose strange effects conquered my heart and soul during the next months ...

Pedja and I agreed very quickly that it was a pity that their remaining material only caught a lot of dust and that nobody could listen to it. So I asked myself more and more seriously, what I - as a vinyl freak - could do to present their music to an interested public. Although (or because?) it was clear to me that Igra Staklenih Perli was an exceptional group not only in Yugoslavia and that nobody except me would engage himself for this band, I hesitated until October 1990, because we didn´t succeed in finding the master-tapes of their two RTB-LPs.

The 26th of November was then the decisive date: I had already been in Belgrade for two days, when I followed a sudden emotional impulse in the early evening to visit Pedja, although I had other appointments (but that was exactly the way I enjoyed being in Yugoslavia). Pedja is really at home - together with a friend, whom he introduces to me as Vojkan Rakić, their former guitar player. That after one more hour (after Zoran Lakić´s arrival) the whole group´s core sits together, was then no more surprise. Actually, it was clear from the beginning that we wanted to do something together, but it turned out that Igra Staklenih Perli didn´t own a single studio-recording. Their whole material was completely recorded on ordinary cassettes.

Studio-quality or not, at the end I didn´t care and we decided to bring out two LPs with unpublished recordings ("Soft Explosion Live" and "Inner Flow" were to be their titles). The first edition of the live album (500 copies) was published in summer 1991, but I was not satisfied with it: the sound was unevenly mixed, the trebles rattled a bit, on the B-side the bass was too weak and the order of the songs didn´t make much sense.

In April/May of 1992, when I was in Belgrade for the last time during this period of my life - nevertheless for five weeks - Pedja and I came to the understanding to produce a new overworked version. At the 20th of June 1992 Michael Carstens, Vesna and I rearranged the recording in only four hours studio time, this time analogue without many changes of the original cassette-sound. The sequence of the songs is now the same as it was at the concert in the Stomatološki fakultet (College of Dentistry), recorded without a noise-reduction system on a usual cassette. Only "Soft Explosion" and "Solar Modus" are shortened a little bit and the last number "Majestic End" was replaced by the final part of "Soft Explosion", because the original tape ended too early.

Written 1993 by Thomas Werner.

Published 1993 as insert of the second pressing of the Kalemegdan Disk LP KD 001 Igra Staklenih Perli: Soft Explosion Live / Tiha eksplozija u živo.