Musicland Studios: Machine-Made Music from Munich

Like Berlin, Munich is the cosmopolitan capital of a more parochial hinterland, but, unlike Berlin, postwar Munich seemed oblivious to the Iron Curtain—less than 100 miles (60 km) away. The city’s concerns were commercial and artistic. The centre for German pop music television, it was also home to Musicland, the only major recording studio in the 1970s between Paris and Tokyo, used by such stars as the Rolling Stones and Elton John. Like all major cosmopolitan cities, Munich drew talent from around the world. Enabled by the development of the synthesizer, electro-disco was dreamed up at Musicland in the mid-1970s by producer Giorgio Moroder (an Italian synthesizer player), his partner Peter Bellotte (an Italian guitarist and lyricist), and Donna Summer (an American vocalist).

While other German musicians such as Kraftwerk and Can experimented with the avant-garde and ironic possibilities of machine-made music, the Musicland crew fused the synthesizer’s precise, unearthly rhythms with the blatant eroticism inspired by “Je t’aime moi non plus” (1969)—the groundbreaking hit for Paris-based Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” (1975) was the first international hit made in Munich—nearly 17 minutes of simulated orgasm that both musically and conceptually prefigured the next two decades of dance music. By the end of the 1970s, the Moroder-Bellotte-Summer partnership was based in Los Angeles, where Summer became the “Queen of Disco,” and the production duo brought their aseptic sound to records by Blondie and a series of movie soundtracks—American Gigolo (1980), Flashdance (1983), and Top Gun (1986)—that helped define a style of hyperprofessional, emotionally detached ’80s pop.