The converted farmhouse near Cologne where Conny Plank produced and engineered most of the krautrock canon and a great deal of early German new wave · a producer-anchored studio that sits upstream of the genre this archive covers rather than inside it.
Conny's Studio was the recording studio of the German producer and engineer Conny Plank (Konrad Plank, 1940–1987), set up in the summer of 1974 in a converted farmhouse at Wolperath, about 35 kilometres south-east of Cologne, and run with his partner Christa Fast. It is the clearest example in the archive of a producer-anchored studio: a room whose importance is inseparable from the way of working of the person who ran it, rather than from a single resident band. The farmhouse setting, remote and rural, was part of the method; Plank worked away from the city, on his own terms, with whoever he judged worth the time.
Plank's reputation rests on the krautrock canon. From the studio at Wolperath, and from the Cologne sessions that preceded it, he produced or engineered Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel, Guru Guru, La Düsseldorf and a long list of the German experimental groups of the 1970s. His approach to the new electronic instruments is the part most relevant here: he liked synthesisers when they sounded like synthesisers and not like natural instruments, and he had no time for a drum machine that pretended to be a drummer. That insistence on letting machines be machines is one of the lines that runs from krautrock into the genre this archive covers.
From the late 1970s Plank carried the German method into new wave, producing DAF, Eurythmics, Ultravox, Killing Joke, Devo and others. The DAF work is the closest point to the archive's territory: DAF's stripped electronic-body method bears Plank's mark and sits adjacent to the industrial tradition the archive documents. His influence on the Manchester producer Martin Hannett is a further line, since Hannett's production of the post-punk-and-industrial-adjacent Factory roster owes something to Plank's example.
The Bureau files Conny's Studio as an upstream influence rather than as a core industrial room. The archive's house position treats the German electronic tradition Plank served · krautrock and the synthpop-adjacent strand · as adjacent to the industrial stratosphere rather than inside it. The studio is filed for the same reason the Düsseldorf scene is documented: because the genre this archive covers grew partly on top of the German electronic method, and Plank's farmhouse is where a great deal of that method was actually committed to tape.
What makes the studio worth a file beyond its roster is the producer-anchored model itself. Where Western Works and 50 Beck Road are band-owned rooms (the band is the studio and the studio is the band), Conny's Studio is the opposite case: a single ear and a single method applied across dozens of different groups, so that the records share a sensibility despite sharing no personnel. That model · the studio as the signature of a producer rather than a band · is a different way for a room to matter, and the file documents it as such.
The studio did not continue in the same form after Plank's death in December 1987. The custom mixing desk was later sold and kept in use elsewhere (a console from his rooms ended up in London, still working), and the equipment dispersed, but the farmhouse's period as a centre of German experimental production had closed with the man who ran it. The Bureau notes the producer-anchored studio's dependence on its producer: unlike a band-owned room, it does not outlast the ear that defined it.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Bronze Age · last revised c. the late Victorian period