Bureau B Announces Release of A Piece Of The Action - Retrospective of Hamburg Duo Egoexpress

Hamburg, Germany, July 28, 2025 — Bureau B announces a long-overdue retrospective celebrating Hamburg-based duo Egoexpress, scheduled for release on whose rebellious blend of punk spirit and club energy defied genre conventions. The album, available on CD, double LP and digital, will be released on September 12, 2025.

Formed in 1995 and rooted in the radical spirit of Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, Egoexpress began as a friendly rebellion. Jimi and Mense, two East Frisians who’d known each other since adolescence, came to the city in 1990 as part of the broader wave surrounding the Hamburger Schule - but theirs was a brief cameo in that particular scene. While peers like Blumfeld mastered literate rock and existential dissection, Egoexpress turned instead toward the bass drum: blunt, immediate, and liberating. Their musical upbringing, punk, mod culture, Neue Deutsche Welle, and a love for the hypnotic intensity of Suicide and Bohannon, translated into a fierce commitment to DIY ethos and sonic play.

Originally tethered to indie imprint L’Age D’Or via their earlier band projects, the duo delivered the inaugural outing on Ladomat 2000, a sublabel designed for club cuts and electronic excursions. Their first release, “Bungalow”, smuggled house music into German indie culture with lopsided charm - German vocals and a disarming lack of polish. What followed was a body of work as defiant as it was danceable. Between 1995 and 2005, the pair developed their sound from minimalist, Atari-driven loops to sprawling, psychedelic club tracks that gestured at house, electro, and pop, without fully belonging to any of them.

Though an immediate sensation around Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club, their sound took longer to become established outside their city. Egoexpress played techno parties with a Fostex 8-track recorder and punk energy, and the club crew didn’t quite know what to make of them. They weren’t Detroit purists, nor Berlin minimalists, nor 80s revivalists, and they couldn’t care less. Influenced as much by Green Velvet as garage rock, they charted their own course, resisting the predictable forms of verse and chorus, choosing instead repetition, grit, and groove. A residency at the margins gave their music a lasting edge, a refusal to conform that now sounds oddly prescient.

By 1999, thanks in part to an invitation from Westbam to play Mayday, they were finally embraced into the wider electronic fold. But by then, their work had already crystalised its core ideas. The ‘00s wore on and electroclash exploded. With their punk background, brash saw-saves and towering beats, it would be easy to consider Egoexpress as forerunners, though in truth they bristled at the retro fixations of the scene. They didn’t want to return to the 80s and the boredom of East Frisian adolescence — they wanted to burn through the now.

This retrospective, compiled and curated by Mense, offers a long-overdue reintroduction to one of Germany’s most fearless electronic duos. Neither early enough to ride the house wave nor comfortable cashing in on the electroclash moment, Egoexpress fell between the cracks. What they left behind is timeless: a heartfelt, headstrong catalog that celebrates instinct over intellect, rhythm over rigidity, and emotional intensity over sonic orthodoxy.

A Piece Of The Action is a reminder that often the most vital music doesn’t fit the moment, it defines one of its own.

2-LP Tracklist

CD Tracklist

For more information on this and other Bureau B releases, please visit https://www.bureau-b.com/releases. ​

About Bureau B
​Bureau B is platform for exciting varieties of electronic, free-spirited music. The spectrum ranges from pop to avant-garde, and the label has amassed an impressive catalogue of reissues and new productions in recent years, including classics from the genre of electronic music in the 1970s and early 1980s popularly classified as Krautrock (Cluster, Roedelius, Moebius, Plank, Schnitzler), alongside new recordings by such formative artists as Faust, Kreidler, Roedelius, Tietchens, Moebius, to name just a few. Bureau B is based in Hamburg, Germany.

Jeff Touzeau

Public Relations, Hummingbird Media, Inc.

• jeff@hummingbirdmedia.com

• www.hummingbirdmedia.com