Swan song album from a never-legendary long-forgotten virtual krautrock group

SCREWY BASTARDS RECORDS presents
WELTSCHMERZ by Karee Karau
Produced by The One Without The Bunny Suit
Composed by Klaus Himmelmuenster & Stefan Einszweidreivier except Teapot by George Harold Sanders & Clarence Z. Kelley
Recorded 2001-2019 Mixed 2005-2021
Released March 15th 2022
©2022 Screwy Bastards Records SB5

KLAUS HIMMELMUENSTER & STEFAN EINSZWEIDREIVIER vocals & programming

This EP grew unexpectedly out of the Hip Eponymous sessions, inspired by an as-yet-unreleased track that tells the story of a large family’s Christmas holiday gathering. One element of the story involves two young adult cousins who are fans of prog/krautrock and one group in particular called Karee Karau. We created a snippet of Karee Karau’s music to use on the track (which should appear on a forthcoming > Greater Than album), and out of that snippet of canned music grew the concept of this long-lived krautrock group at the end of their careers working through their last doomed attempt to make an album and only being able to cobble together a barely-inspired EP. A main conceit of the record is that when the group was hiring a producer for the album they didn’t have many good choices for their low budget and wound up having to choose between a guy wearing a bunny suit and a guy who wasn’t wearing a bunny suit. They chose the guy without the bunny suit (who wouldn’t?) but he winds up being a total loon. This causes one of the group members (Stefan) to flee to Zurich in the middle of the sessions and hide in a dark hotel room under the covers, leaving the record mostly unfinished. Karee Karau breifly decides to work on, and then quickly abandons, a children’s record, with the only artifact of the attempt being a bare-bones version of I’m a Little Teapot, which gets tacked onto the end of their last record as filler material.