City Scenes is the feature where we examine the music scene of a different city each week. As we go along we’re moving through the alphabet from A to Z and this week we’re on the letter F and today we’re in Frankfurt Germany.
Frankfurt is a city of 750, 000 people that sits on the banks of the river Main in central Germany. It is a global financial hub with the european central bank and Deutsche bank as well as many other financial institutions holding their headquarters in the city. It’s also one of the biggest transport hubs in the world, Frankfurt airport is the primary hub of the lufthansa airline and is in fact the airport with the most direct flight routes in the world.
but as we will see, the city also has a wealthy cultural and musical history. It’s the city where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the famous German writer was born. It’s also the birth city of Wolgang Flur, an original member of Kraftwerk but as Kraftwerk’s music was all made in Dusseldorf we’re not going to be hearing any of that today.
Instead we start with some Eurodisco, a genre that seems to be a bit of a thing in Frankfurt. In the late 1970s, a multiinstrumentalist called Kurt Hauenstein, founded a group called Supermax. Supermax went on to produce some massive hits in the genre of eurodisco that saw the group touring the world.
The next group we listen to could probably be summed up as Frankfurt’s answer to ABBA. Arabesque emerged in Hamburg in 1975 and went on to get huge success around the world.
Chilly was another eurodisco act that were active in Hamburg in the late 1970s They produced the mega hit called ‘For Your Love’ which took off in discos around the world and has since been reinterpreted and remixed by DJs and producers countless times.
Like in Chicago and in Detroit, the legacy of that eurodsicoinformed what came after it in Frankfurt. Like Detroit in particular, Frankfurt became a huge center for the newly developing sound of German Techno in the 1990s. Frankfurt these days is synonymous with electronic music.
One act that blew up in the 1990s with their own type of eurodance, trance leaning techno pop is a duo called Jam and Spoon.
So Frankfurt is a city known for its contributions to eurodisco and electronic music and one of Frankfurts biggest contemporary electronic producers is Isolee. We end this episode of City Scenes with a track of his called Allowance.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s city scenes, next week we’ll be back for G and we’re going to be jumping up to Glasgow in Scotland.