D.A.F.’s highly influential debut album is being reissued.

Produkt Der Deutsche-Amerikanischen Freundschaft was originally released in 1979, and though there have been several subsequent CD reissues, including one on Mute’s Grey Area imprint, the vinyl has never been afforded the same treatment, at least not to our knowledge. Bureau B’s 2012 editions – CD, 180g vinyl and digital, packaged with liner notes, rare photos and memorabilia – feel pretty much definitive.

The album was made by the early four-strong D.A.F. line-up of Robert Görl, Wolfgang Spelmans, Kurt Dahlke and Michael Kemner, and it’s by far the most brutal offering of the band’s career. After a few sessions working on Produkt at Studio 56, the Dusseldorfers dispensed with the services of vocalist Gabi Delgado-Lopez, and decided instead to record at home, with a spartan set-up of tape machine and two microphones.

The resulting all-instrumental album, comprising 22 untitled tracks, is a very different beast to the proto-techno, EBM and electronic pop music made by the later, more famous Görl-Delgado-Lopez configuration of D.A.F.; rather it’s dissonant, improv-oriented post-punk, angular and aggressive, with Bureau B going so far as to describe it as “possibly the first noise-rock album the world had seen or heard”.

More information here.