Alphaville

The Breathtaking Blue was a somewhat disappointing follow-up to Alphaville's early-1980s records Forever Young and Afternoons in Utopia. It lacked the shimmering standout quality of songs like "Big in Japan," "Forever Young" and "Afternoons in Utopia." The production, by Klaus Schulze and Alphaville, experiments with a somewhat richer instrumentation, adding strings, saxaphone, trumpet, double bass, electric and even acoustic guitars to Bernhard Lloyd's synthesizers…

Alphaville's 1984 debut, Forever Young, deserves to be viewed as a classic synth pop album. There's no doubting that Germans are behind the crystalline Teutonic textures and massive beats that permeate the album, but vocalist Marian Gold's impressive ability to handle a Bryan Ferry croon and many impassioned high passages meant the album would have worldwide appeal. Indeed both "Big in Japan" and the touching, sad change-of-pace "Forever Young" raced up the charts in multiple continents…

Alphaville is a German synth-pop band centered around vocalist Marian Gold (Hartwig Schierbaum), formed in 1982 in Münster. Started out as a trio with Gold backed by synth players Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens…

Alphaville is a German synth-pop band centered around vocalist Marian Gold (Hartwig Schierbaum), formed in 1982 in Münster. Started out as a trio with Gold backed by synth players Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens…

The 4 CD boxed-set has been released in a special format. It contains a full color booklet, super rare, previously unreleased Alphaville audio and all the websongs which were presented between 2000 and 2001 for the very first time at the Alphaville website. The album is strictly limited (2500)…

For the first time ever 'So8os presents Alphaville' brings together all original 12" mixes from the 80s plus their famous B-Sides. All songs are transferred from the Original Master Tapes and the band is actively involved in the whole project with Blank & Jones. This collection of 12" releases covers not only the A-sides but also the B-sides which Alphaville used as a field for experiments without any commercial commitments. The results represent more than just hidden treasures.

Alphaville’s greatest hits from 40 years of the band’s history, in completely new arrangements recorded with the German Film Orchestra of Babelsberg. Alphaville, Germany’s biggest synth-pop export and creator of the legendary 80s anthems “Big in Japan”, "Sounds like a Melody" and "Forever Young", has decided to go symphonic. The band is doing things on the grand scale and catapulting the band’s 40 years of greatest hits out of the orbit of synthesizers and rhythm machines into the world of the human sound machine, the symphony orchestra. "Eternally Yours" is more, much more, than a mere translation of the songs into the sound spectrum of a great orchestra. What it amounts to, rather, is a symbiosis of Marian Gold’s unique vocal capacities, the original Alphaville sound and the majestic power and rich timbres of the concert-hall-sized German Film Orchestra of Babelsberg.

First Harvest: The Best of Alphaville 1984-1992 collects 15 tracks from the Europop darlings, marking the first "real" Alphaville compilation to span the group's entire career (1988's barren Singles Collection featured only four tracks in various states of mixdown). Cut from the same cloth as Ultravox and early Depeche Mode, the band had better success in Germany than it did in the United States, but standout cuts such as "Big in Japan," "Forever Young," "Red Rose," and "Jerusalem" reside in the upper echelon of early-'80s synth pop.