South Korea is known today for its flashy modernity and even flashier pop scene, but it was a very different country in 1988. Although it’s the democratic half of a split peninsula, it wasn’t so long before that the country bore more resemblance to the North. Military strongmen had long been in control of the nation, and the country’s first free elections had only taken place one year prior to the Olympics. The Seoul that welcomed visitors may have looked fresh out of the box, but it was a progression that resulted from a hard-line push on old neighbourhoods and the poor, the sort of crackdown that had extended for years on arts and culture with heavy censorship. Korea then was a nation proud to put on a show to the world, but perhaps one too weary to take care of the afterparty.

Enter the efforts of another country with divided borders, West Germany. In 1986, organisers of the Olympics approached the Goethe-Institut, Germany’s premier cultural association, looking for a project specially designed for young people. Answering the call was Jürgen Drews, head of the Music Department at the Goethe headquarters in Munich. He proposed the KunstDisco, or “art disco” in English, an exchange that would export liberal German youth culture through a mixture of art and music. The then-burgeoning German club scene would be represented by nightly DJ sets, whilst other genres from West Germany’s alternative scene would be introduced through evening concerts. A unique hybrid of gig and rave, the Kunstdisco Seoul would take place in one custom-built venue, with a program lasting the entire duration of the Olympics.

To help him with the lineup, Drews called upon Ernst and Hans P. Ströer, two brothers who’d made waves on the alternative scene with the Nomaden LP, a freewheeling collaboration that set Ernst’s jazz percussion and Hans’s new wave keyboards against the offbeat proclamations of American poet Howard Fine. Toeing the line between hyper jazz-funk and desolate mood music, the album’s general flexibility was matched with a live show that had its fair share of theatrical flair.