A great honour

It was a great honour to have the opportunity to say hello to both Manuel Gottsching and Ilona Ziok in London this week. After meeting them at the hotel I had a fascinating chat with Manuel over a coffee. A chinese buffet lunch and another coffee later and I was heading for the train back to Newcastle with the posters they had very kindly given me. The last five hours had disappeared in a flash!

Perhaps it was all of that strong coffee, more likely the events of an extraordinary day but I have very few recollections of the journey home other than listening to E2-E4 Live in Japan on my MP3 player. I would like to thank both Manuel and Ilona for allowing me to meet them, for their interesting conversation and for being very kind to this writer. It was a day that I certainly won't be forgetting any time soon!

Thank you, Stephan!

A big thank you to Stephan Kaske of Mythos. He's a very kind chap and took time out after a skate marathon in Berlin to provide some insightful answer to my questions about his experiences at Ohr Records. Good to see that Mythos are still going strong after all of these years!

Cosmic days

Well the last couple of weekends have found me writing about Walter Wegmuller's Tarot and the The Cosmic Jokers. It is a story as fascinating as any in the history of rock music, rich with it's myths and unusual twists and turns. What strikes me as I'm writing is that regardless of the eventual outcomes of this period (the collapse of the Ohr Records empire, many of the artists on the label moving on to bigger things and the disappearance of label head Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and partner Gille Lettmann) the music survives gloriously. Tarot and the Cosmic Jokers albums still sound utterly unique with no obvious parallel. Call it space rock, kosmiche musik or whatever you will but nobody, not Pink Floyd, not Hawkwind, no other act has visited planets as distant and strange and brought back evidence of what they saw.

Happy Birthday, Manuel Gottsching!

Happy Birthday Mr. Gottsching! Born: 9th September 1952

Now...where were we?

As I've been hived away writing during a lot of my spare time over the last 18 months or so I became increasingly aware that I owed quite a few of my old friends a visit. The last thing I wanted to do is to completely lose touch with my dear chums and what better time to see them than over summer, when you can sit in the garden with a few drinks? So: I've been busy zig-zagging around playing catching up but (perhaps surprisingly, when I think back) I've still been finding some time to write.

My progress now finds me at the point of the third Ash Ra Tempel album Seven Up. The section discussing Timothy Leary and his pre-A.R.T. background, leading up to the stage at which he met up with the band in Switzerland was rather painstaking to research first time around and I'm now polishing, editing and adding to my original draft. It's good to see the earlier research paying off as things start to take shape....

Well: I'm going to dash now. The clock is ticking away and I'm hoping to find a reasonable pocket of time today to make some more progress with things. Bye for now and speak soon!

Thank you, Luul!

A massive thank you to Lutz Ulbrich for taking part in a fascinating interview for my book. He's a gentleman, a genuinely nice chap and he's made some fantastic music too. What more could you ask for?

Sunrain

A strange magic pervades the New Age of Earth album and this is evident right from the first section of Sunrain, a distant futuristic relative of Steve Reich's Six Pianos. Built on a humming keyboard bass rumble and the percolating sounds of the EKO Computerhythm (an early drum machine) this track elicits the absolute maximum of emotion from the minimum of musical fuss. Described by Manuel himself as 'pattern-based music' much of this piece is like a sort of keyboard Morse code, a simple series of notes repeated in cycle. Thankfully all of the music here is glorious and worthy of repetition.

Sunrain is a most apt title for a track that is oddly tinged with melancholy, yet ultimately forges towards total transcendence: ominous clouds and the lightest drops of cold rain are welcome when beams of light cut through the darkness this brightly.

Many of the musical features of Sunrain, notably the hypnotic repetition and the blissed out climax would become common features of dance music over ten years later. This outstanding instrumental offers some early and compelling evidence that Manuel Gottsching is, more than any other musician, the link between the classical minimalist composers and the techno generation.