Kozmonaut

Hans Schiller (real name: Michael Gutierrez) moved from a small providence in Canada to San Francisco in the late 70’s. He was fascinated with Kraftwerk and German Culture in general (hence his artist’s name). He purchased synthesizers and other music equipment to convert his small garage into a recording studio to produce Electronic music. All his early material was recorded in 1985 and 1986 and made it on his debut album. Musically, Hans was very versatile. It’s an excellent album that’s a cross of a wide range of styles from early Industrial (paving the way for his later sounds), Synth-Pop, Experimental Electronics, and Dark Wave. He uses the vocoder very effectively and in one of the songs, he recorded the Golden Gate Bridge fog horn to use as a sample.
Hans ended up getting language cassettes to improve his German for his second album. He used those language tapes extensively as samples for his second cassette-only release called “Hyko”. This release was never distributed either and has not surfaced to this day.
“Kozmonaut - Flieg“ was his first vinyl release. It’s a DIY with a silkscreened sleeve. He pressed up a 1,000 copies of this record but they never got distributed or sold. He was a perfectionist and must have realized that his record was full of spelling mistakes the most striking one being “Seite ‘Swei’ instead of ‘Zwei’”.
The ONLY KNOWN COPY (!) of his ‘Flieg’ LP from 1986 was found in the Bay Area of California at a time when you couldn’t Google any info on it.
There was a name given on the record that pretended to be a German one – Hans Schiller. Faulty German lyrics and writing, a Bundesadler (German herald eagle) and the town of Hamburg should mislead the afterworld masquerading as a German band.
It took a few “record detectives” to track down Peter Ziegelmeier (Hans’ Kode IV partner/The Real Camouflage) via a copyright database of his “Hyko” cassette and by his background info despite the missing copyright info and any type of credits on the LP hinting at its origin. The “Kozmonaut” mystery was finally solved when the original finder of the LP presented it to Peter in his store (Ceiba Records/San Francisco). Peter recognized this album right away. While recording early Kode IV material with Hans, Peter did notice untouched boxes full of records and cassettes. It took over two more decades before this only known copy finally ended up in Peter’s hands.
In 1989, Peter Ziegelmeier (Berlin / Germany) met Hans after an introduction by Carlos Peron ( former Yello member) and together they formed Kode IV. After a couple of months of working together, they got signed by KK Records /Belgium and subsequently released 4 seminal LP’s and several 12". Kode IV's work can be found on dozens of EBM and Industrial Compilations.