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Switzerland

Swiss, but Neue Deutsche Welle

Grauzone

Grauzone formed in Bern in 1979 around Martin Eicher, Marco Repetto and Christian Trüssel, soon joined by Martin's brother Stephan. They lasted barely two years, long enough for a handful of singles, one album and around ten live shows, and then split up. That short run still made them one of the defining acts of the early-1980s Neue Deutsche Welle movement, even though they were Swiss rather than German, and they reached number six on the Austrian charts. Since then their music has been covered by acts from Nouvelle Vague to the Dresden Dolls, turned into a house hit in the 1990s, and used in the 2016 stop-motion film My Life as a Courgette. Quite an afterlife for a band that barely existed long enough to tour.

Lausanne, then near silence

Do Piano

Do Piano was the recording name of Daphné Hendrickx, a singer from Lausanne who wrote her material with her brother. Her deep contralto drew comparisons to Q Lazzarus and Propaganda when she briefly reached the French charts in 1985. The next release didn't repeat the success, and after that she mostly drops out of the historical record. Like countless new-wave one-off acts, she left a documented career that fits on a single 45.

A painter scores his own tarot deck

Walter Wegmüller

Walter Wegmüller, born in Bern in 1937 to a Romani family, was a painter first, and his 1973 album Tarot grew straight out of that work. The record came packaged with a set of illustrated cards, one for each track, and every track took its title from one of his own tarot cards. To make it he brought in the loose collective of German musicians known as the Cosmic Jokers (Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching, Harald Grosskopf and others) for a long, improvised session. The result became a key record of the German "kosmische" scene, though Wegmüller himself was Swiss.

The Collection