Dossier is a Berlin label that is hard to pin to a single sound, which is precisely its interest. Founded in 1985 and run by Manfred Schiek, it worked at the meeting point of two German lineages: the older krautrock-descended electronics of the West Berlin scene, and the harder electro-industrial that was arriving from elsewhere by the late 1980s. The catalogue holds both, and a good deal in between, from musique concrète and synth abstraction to song-based electronic work.
The roster is the argument for filing it here. Dossier issued records by Conrad Schnitzler, the Zodiak Free Arts Lab co-founder and early Tangerine Dream and Kluster member whose tireless solo electronics are a foundation of the German experimental tradition. It released work by Asmus Tietchens, the Hamburg composer of musique-concrète-rooted electronics filed elsewhere in this archive. And it put out early records by Front Line Assembly during the group's Berlin period, including the Total Terror material and the 1988 album State of Mind, placing a founding electro-industrial act on the same imprint as the older avant-garde.
That range is the point. A label that can hold Schnitzler at one end and Front Line Assembly at the other is documenting a real continuity, the line from the West Berlin experimental underground of the 1970s into the industrial electronics of the 1980s, rather than a single genre. The 1992 house compilation Dossiers, produced by Schiek, gathered the electro and industrial side of the catalogue and is a fair snapshot of where the label had arrived.
The Bureau files Dossier as a connective imprint: not a scene-defining institution like the larger industrial labels, but a Berlin operation whose catalogue threads several of the traditions this archive tracks through a single address.