Klaus Schulze – { feuilleton }

Music beyond time: Jenzeits

Where Monday’s post was about the cosmic music of the 1970s, this one concerns something in the same zone that’s more contemporary. Chad Davis is an American musician who likes to compartmentalise his activities as separate projects with different names. Jenzeits is Davis in kosmische mode, drawing heavily on the Berlin School of electronica and similar music of the 1970s, with a name that collides Jenseits, a title from Join Inn, the fourth album by Ash Ra Tempel, with Zeit, the third album by Tangerine Dream. (“Jenseits” is the German word for beyond, while “zeit” means time, so “Jenzeits” might be taken as a pun meaning “beyond time”. German speakers, however, may see this less as a pun than simply poor use of their language.)

There’s been a lot of Berlin-School pastiching going on over the past few years, the mid-70s albums by Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze being very popular among the period imitators. I’m always referring to Redshift and Node as my favourite exponents in this idiom. Chad Davis is obviously inspired by the same albums but my attention was caught on a first hearing by his homages to the music that Manuel Göttsching was making under the Ash Ra Tempel/Ashra name during the same period, especially Le Berceau De Cristal, New Age Of Earth, and (to a lesser extent) Blackouts. Göttsching was always primarily a guitar player, but by the mid-70s he was combining his guitar work with sequencers and synthesizers to create instrumental electronic music with a different texture to his keyboard-based contemporaries. New Age Of Earth has a hippyish title that might be off-putting to curious listeners but it’s long been one of my favourite electronic albums, with a unique atmosphere that I wish Göttsching had pursued a little further. (The title in German on the back of the original French release is Neuzeit der Erde, literally “New Time of Earth”. Zeit again.) The album’s unique qualities are a product of its blend of processed guitar, keyboards and electronic rhythms, the latter being created by the EKO Computerhythm, an early programmable drum machine which could also be used to trigger other instruments to create sequencer patterns.

New Age Of Earth (1976). Design by Peter Butschkow.

I can’t say for certain whether Davis had this music or instrumentation in mind when recording his third Jenzeits album, Jenzeits Cosmic Orbits, but the similarities were enough to make me want to hear more. One of the frustrations of electronic music historically has been the way the evolution of technology has dictated its form. Tangerine Dream’s music changed according to the instrumentation they had available at any given time; new equipment meant new sounds and musical possibilities very different to the ones the group had been exploring a couple of years before. This doesn’t happen to the same degree with other musicians, especially guitarists who are often happy to play the same battered instrument for years on end. For a listener, the technical evolution of electronic music has often left behind abandoned areas or unexplored avenues. In this respect, the music of Jenzeits is less a series of pastiches than an attempt to further some of these explorations.

There are 12 Jenzeits releases to date, all of which are available on Bandcamp. Some of the earlier ones have also appeared on vinyl and cassette. If a CD box of the entire Jenzeits catalogue appeared I’d buy it in a second but I doubt this will happen any time soon. For the curious, Jenzeits Volume 1 is a good place to start. The last Jenzeits release was in 2020 which suggests we’ve seen the end of this particular project. For those who’d like more (and I still do), an earlier Chad Davis project, Romannis Mötte, ventured into similar territory.

Jenzeits Cosmic Universe (2017).

Jenzeits Cosmic Lifeforms (2017).

Jenzeits Cosmic Orbits (2017).

Jenzeits Volume 1 (2018).

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Cosmic jokes and a cosmic conundrum

Tangerine Dream in 1973.

Here’s an item of news that will be of little interest to many readers but I’ve not seen it reported widely so it’s worth noting. (This place is nothing if not a cornucopia of deeply excavated niches, so you can take this as further niche excavation.) The news concerns recordings that Tangerine Dream made with Timothy Leary in 1973…or Leary recordings which were added to Tangerine Dream music in the same year. One problem with writing about all of this is that documentation remains elusive. Bearing this in mind, the details are as follows:

• Tangerine Dream were signed to Ohr Records from 1970 to 1973, a label for whom they recorded their first four albums plus one seven-inch single. During this time they were also featured along with label-mates Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh and Klaus Schulze on an Ohr compilation, Kosmische Musik.

• “Kosmische” is the key word here. Ohr boss Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser liked the word enough to create an Ohr offshoot, Die Kosmischen Kuriere (The Cosmic Couriers), which later became the short-lived Kosmische Musik label.

• Also in the early 1970s, Timothy Leary, on the run from the US authorities, arrived in Switzerland where he and his allies (including Brian Barritt and Leary’s future wife, Joanna Harcourt-Smith) began hanging around with various members of the Swiss psychedelic avant-garde. Among the latter were writer Sergius Golowin, and a pair of artists, Walter Wegmüller and HR Giger.

• Ohr/Kosmische Kuriere/Kosmische Musik was based in Berlin, but at some point after Leary’s arrival in Switzerland R-U Kaiser and a handful of his recording artists met up with the Swiss psychonauts, an encounter that led to a series of musical collaborations: Seven Up, the third Ash Ra Tempel album which featured vocal intrusions from Leary and friends; Lord Krishna Von Goloka by Sergius Golowin, an album of Golowin readings with music by Klaus Schulze and others; and Tarot, an ambitious double-disc concept album narrated by (and credited to) Walter Wegmüller which included contributions from many of the major Ohr/Kosmische Kuriere artists. No Tangerine Dream, however.

Spalax CD reissues from the mid-1990s. Cover designs by Peter Geitner.

• Here’s where things get complicated. At some point while the above were being recorded, R-U Kaiser decided to release a series of “kosmische” jams by Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze and others which were credited to an imaginary group, The Cosmic Jokers. There are various reports about these sessions, with claims and counter-claims about whether or not permission was granted by the musicians. I can’t comment on the legal history (which led eventually to the collapse of Kaiser’s company) but Kaiser and his wife, Gille Letteman, appear to have been gripped by a kind of cosmic megalomania in 1974. The Cosmic Jokers album was quickly followed by four more releases in the same year: Galactic Supermarket (yet more jams by the same musicians but credited to Galactic Supermarket); Gilles Zeitschiff by Sternenmädchen (in which Gille Letteman and friends recount Timothy Leary’s flight to Switzerland and the meetings with the Cosmic Couriers); Planeten Sit-In (a quadrophonic sampler album created as a promotion for the Kosmische Musik label in conjunction with Germany’s Hobby magazine); and Sci Fi Party, an uneven compilation album which blends various Kosmische Musik recordings into a cosmic slop presided over by the label bosses who dominate the front cover.

Continue reading “Cosmic jokes and a cosmic conundrum”

Early Water

Good to have this rare album reissued at last. A surprise too, as I only spotted it by chance at Bleep.com. I still haven’t seen it mentioned as a news item in any of the expected places.

Early Water is a one-off collaboration between Michael Hoenig and the late Manuel Göttsching, a recording of an improvised rehearsal session from 1976 which was shelved until the pair decided to release a CD in 1995. The album has been out of print since 1997 so the reissue is very welcome, especially when secondhand discs had become stupidly expensive. It’s also being released for the first time on vinyl although doing this requires splitting its one long track into two parts.

This is one of those albums that might be better known if it hadn’t been so hard to find. Musically, it’s a like a heavier forerunner of Göttsching’s E2-E4: 45 minutes of Hoenig’s keyboards and undulating sequencer rhythms over which Göttsching’s guitar weaves its patterns. The sequencers and synthesizers are of the type familiar from Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon and many Klaus Schulze albums from the same decade; the “Berlin School”, in other words, although it’s also the school of “Let’s switch on the machines and see what happens”. Göttsching’s guitar had already imitated synthesizers and sequencers on Inventions For Electric Guitar, while a later release, New Age Of Earth (which was mixed by Michael Hoenig) blends guitar and keyboards to create as good an electronic album as anything else being produced in the mid-70s. The guitar on Early Water is treated in a similar manner to complement the keyboards, and for the most part stays low in the mix. There’s a lot of soloing here but no histrionics. This isn’t a rock album.

E2-E4 brought Göttsching’s music to a wider audience but Michael Hoenig remains known mostly to soundtrack collectors, synth-heads or German music obsessives. Prior to going solo in 1977 he was keyboard player in the excellent Agitation Free, a group I always recommend to anyone getting deeper into the German music of the 1970s. He was also a member of Tangerine Dream for a few weeks in 1975, filling in for Peter Baumann after the latter abruptly left the group during an international tour. It’s tempting to wonder how Tangerine Dream might have evolved if Hoenig had been a permanent member for the rest of the decade. We would have been spared the mis-steps of the Cyclone album for a start. What we got instead was Hoenig’s own incursion into Tangerine Dream territory with his first solo album, Departure From The Northern Wasteland, in 1977. Early Water doesn’t warrant the journalistic cliché of “lost classic” but that term might well be applied to Hoenig’s little-known debut, one of the few albums that bears favourable comparison to Tangerine Dream’s output in the mid-1970s. It’s also an album that’s long overdue a reissue. How about it, Bureau B?

Note: I bought my CD from the Juno Records store on eBay. Bleep and a few other places have the CD and vinyl both listed as double-disc releases with no further information supplied. I’m fairly sure this is an error.

• Further reading: Synapse magazine, Vol. 2, No. 5 [PDF], features a lengthy interview with Michael Hoenig in which he discusses his time in Agitation Free, his work with Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, and the composition of Departure From The Northern Wasteland. His reference to “the Berlin school of electronic music” during the interview may be the first appearance in print of that label.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Manuel Göttsching, 1952–2022
• Cosmic music and cosmic horror

A.R.T. art

Some Manuel Göttsching-related graphic ephemera. This 1971 flyer for Ash Ra Tempel seems to be a rare item, the only place I’ve seen it being inside one of the inserts for The Private Tapes, a series of six CDs limited to 1000 copies each that Manuel Göttsching released in 1996. I was lucky to buy these when they were first released. A double-disc selection from the series followed two years later but neither this nor the rest of the set have been reissued since, despite containing a wealth of previously unreleased recordings from Göttsching’s archives, including many live concert recordings of Ash Ra Tempel. The flyer was the work of Bernhard Bendig who also drew the sleeve art for the group’s first two albums.

Not as scarce, but not very visible either, is this painting of another somewhat wonky temple by P. Praquin for a 1975 reissue of two Ash Ra Tempel albums: Inventions For Electric Guitar (which isn’t really ART), and Seven Up, the ramshackle studio jam which is mostly spoiled by the bellowings of Timothy Leary and friends. Discover Cosmic was a short-lived series of double-disc reissues of albums originally released on Cosmic Music, an imprint of Barclay Records that repackaged releases from Ohr and Kosmische Musik for the French market. There were three volumes of Discover Cosmic, the other two showcasing Popol Vuh and “The Klaus Schulze Sessions”, this being the first Cosmic Jokers album plus Join Inn by Ash Ra Tempel. The mysterious P. Praquin was responsible for all three cover paintings of which this is the best, wonky or not, a variation on the church-as-spaceship idea that may have been borrowed from the Roger Dean cover for Space Hymns by Ramases. This is one of those graphic contrivances that I usually expect to find repeated elsewhere, although to date the only other example I’ve seen was a Viennese museum poster. But there are more than enough churches that resemble spaceships to give people ideas, especially recent constructions like the Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. If you know of any other steeples blasting off then please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Manuel Göttsching, 1952–2022
• The kosmische design of Peter Geitner
• Raising the roof

Weekend links 639

Japanese poster for Alphaville (1965).

Peter Bogdanovich: I think we’d better have your thoughts on Godard.

Orson Welles: Well, since you’re so very firm about it. He’s the definitive influence if not really the first film artist of this last decade, and his gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker—and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin. But what’s so admirable about him is his marvellous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves—a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium—which, when he’s at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting.

• RIP JLG. I was watching Alphaville again just two weeks ago after a DVD turned up in the local charity shop. Still the only Godard film I like 100% but “liking” seems beside the point. His influence today is everywhere, so fully absorbed into the language of cinema that people barely notice it.

• “The things that cause my gaze to linger are usually the portraits or landscapes that spark a feeling of unease, disquiet and discomfort. A shadow amongst the summer trees, a lurking silhouette reflected in a perfect blue iris, a vibrant flower in the early stages of decay.” S. Elizabeth talking to Beautiful Bizarre about her new book, The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre.

• Allow John Waters (again) to dictate your film viewing with a Letterboxd list of his favourite films, based on comments in his writings and interviews. On the subject of Godard, Waters’ Crackpot book contains a whole chapter about Hail Mary.

• Astor’s Electrical Future: Iwan Rhys Morus explores a vision of the year 2000 recounted in A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), a “scientific romance” by John Jacob Astor IV, with illustrations by Daniel Carter Beard.

• Strange Attractor has announced a Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of an Austin Osman Spare Tarot deck.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Parrot, the Unicorn and the Golden Dragon: Some 17th Century Booksellers’ Signs.

• At Bandcamp: Andy Thomas on Chris Watson‘s post-Cabaret Voltaire career in nature recordings.

• A new outlet for cinematic obscurities: Radiance Films.

• Alphaville (1978) by Klaus Schulze | Alphaville (1979) by The Monochrome Set | Alphaville (1999) by Scanner