Abortive Gasp reissue 1989 Hamburg cassette album ‘Bullfrog’
Abortive Gasp, the Hamburg electro-industrial duo of Tim Paal and Harry Luehr, have reissued their 1989 cassette album “Bullfrog” digitally on 21 August 2026.
Abortive Gasp, the Hamburg electro-industrial and EBM duo of Tim Paal and Harry Luehr, reissued their third and last album “Bullfrog” digitally on 21 August 2026, credited on the release to Paal’s own Nothing New But Normal imprint. The album first appeared on cassette in 1989 through Alternate Media Tapes and runs to ten tracks. It caps a digitisation of the group’s catalogue that has been building on Bandcamp since 2020, and it arrives alongside “Haunted House (Remix 2026)”, issued on 1 April 2026.
The ten tracks on the reissued edition are “Media Overload”, “Humanity”, “Haunted House”, “Psychgod”, “Fearless”, “On The Floor”, “Manipulated”, “Creep Stomp”, “Product Control” and “Spilled Out”. Two of them, “Psychgod” and “Media Overload”, were re-recorded for the album after earlier versions picked up radio play in Belgium, the United States and Australia. The record was mixed at Hamburg’s DESY complex. The credits give the basic tracks to Luehr, vocals and lyrics to Paal, and the mix to the band, with the 2026 re-release marked to NNBN.
The Abortive Gasp catalogue on Bandcamp
The band’s Bandcamp page now carries more than fifty items, covering the studio cassettes, live recordings, remixes and compilations. The three earlier albums went up in 2020: “To Have The Second Crack” on 19 March, “A Fridge Fulla Bribes” on 4 July and “Raw Scent” on 28 August, followed by the “Best Of Gasp” compilation on 2 October. “Bullfrog” is also on Spotify and Apple Music, and several full albums and live tapes sit on the Internet Archive.
A documentary short about the group, “Nothing New But Abortive Gasp”, was directed and produced by Ludwig Kamberlein and shot in Hamburg and Berlin. It runs eight minutes and 48 seconds. Crew United dates the production to 2021 and IMDb lists it as a 2022 release. The film can be watched on Vimeo, where the band hosts English and German versions.
About Abortive Gasp
Abortive Gasp formed in Hamburg around 1987 and 1988 as a duo: Tim Paal on vocals, guitar and lyrics, and Harry Luehr, born Hartmut Lühr, on synthesizer and sequencer and responsible for the compositions. Guest musicians joined for individual sessions and mixes. Sources disagree on the founding year, with Discogs and the German Wikipedia entry giving 1988 while the documentary, IMDb and Crew United date the start to 1987.
They belonged to the group of Hamburg acts known as the bunker bands, together with Girls Under Glass and Cancer Barrack. The name came from the huge Flakbunker on the Heiligengeistfeld in St. Pauli, close to where the acts rehearsed and played. Among the city’s guitar-heavy independent scene of the eighties, Abortive Gasp stood apart for the degree of improvisation in their sets and for pulling dub techniques into an industrial format at an early stage. They took no political position and ignored the darkwave dress codes of the day, which made them contentious locally even as tracks such as “Church Is Empty” and “Psychgod” picked up radio play abroad.
Everything they released came out on cassette. “To Have The Second Crack” appeared in 1988 on Nothing New But Normal, Paal’s own imprint, followed in 1989 by “Raw Scent” on the same label, “Bullfrog” and “Spoiled Teeth” as C60s on Alternate Media Tapes, and “A Fridge Fulla Bribes” on the Memphis label Harsh Reality Music. Two live tapes came out the same year, “Abortive Gasp Live” on Remix Recordings and “Welcome To Autopsy Party!” on Force of Experimental Surviving, along with a “Compilation 1989” C60 on Nothing New But Normal. The band also turned up on compilations for IRRE Tapes, Tecdance, Cat Killer and Escape 3 Tapes between 1989 and 1993, and a promotional CD, “Media Overload”, followed on Amptown in 1994.
The group played its final show on 19 December 1989 at the Kir club in Hamburg-Altona, supporting Borghesia, and split up that month. Period coverage ran in Spex in August 1989, and Sonic Seducer returned to the band in August 2021. The digital reissue programme that started on Bandcamp in 2020 has now reached the last of the four albums.
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