Album Notes

“Let’s take summer 1968 at the Zodiak underground music club …
in West Berlin’s Kreizberg Quarter.

It was here that Human Being’s uncompromisingly loud debut
rattled the foundations of the Wirshaftswunder,
West Germany’s post-war economic miracle, as if willing it to collapse.”

So begin the liner notes to Human Being: Live at the Zodiak – the only known recording from the year-long underground music scene in the city that was one of the era’s hottest flashpoints of countercultural revolution — Berlin 1968.
Within the confines of the Zodiak flew some of the freest musical spirits of the age —

founders Conrad Schnitzler and Boris Schaak, the legendary Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and a host of other performers who, as the various incarnations of Human Being, relentlessly forced outward the boundaries of what was then considered music.