Kosmische Slop – Ash Ra Tempel

Whilst trawling the internet I recently stumbled upon this, http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/feature/ash_ra_tempel an exemplary piece of Copey hype about krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel. It struck me as quite fantastic piece of rhetoric to draw a line between the nihilistic proto-punk squall of The Stooges and MC5 to Ash Ra Tempel’s cosmic hippie meanderings. What possible common ground could these bands share? “And those searching for the fulfilment of the Detroit promise need have looked no further than Ash Ra Tempel in 1971.” Well, quite. Having listened to Ash Ra’s first three albums some while ago, I’d dismissed them as formless spacey noodling and moved on. Now, I’m hardly one to get all nostalgic about the whole Detroit garage thing – I like The Stooges fine, but MC5 suck – the sheer bizarreness of the comparison made me dig up ART’s albums again, to see if I’d been missing anything. From Copey’s description, it was clear that one of us was talking bollocks. Seems that my original dismissal of the band went as far as getting rid of the CDRs involved, but, thanks to the internet, I soon found myself in possession of the first four ‘classic’ albums. And boy do I feel sheepish. Ash Ra Tempel are the best thing since sliced bread. You always thought the wanky bits of Pink Floyd was the interminable space jamming in the middle of the actual song bits, but Manuel Gottsching, Klaus Schultze and Hartmut Enke knew better. Whilst the Floyd and their prog-rock contempories pussy-footed around with quasi-classical suites, these boys cranked their amps up to 11, blew their minds on acid, dispensed with bothersome structures and set the controls for the heart of the sun with a vengeance. Thus they became pioneers of Krautrock, or, as Gottsching preferred to call it, kosmische music. Their self-titled first album, one of the all-time out-there classics, kicks of with ‘Amboss’. Gottsching’s guitar rises in a thunderous squall out of synthesizer dry ice, accompanied by Schultze’s manic, possessed drumming, crashing and collapsing in a raw, bleeding bloodied mess, all (barely) held together by Enke’s megalithic, throbbing bass. Gottsching is the great lost guitar hero, combining Hendrix’s space-jazz fluidity with a casual, devil-may-care sloppiness, descending mid-song into a mind-melting orgy of speaker-destroying unbridled feedback, only to rise phoenix like for the final climax. Needless to say, this glorious screaming mess consumes the whole of side one. Side two is taken up by the even longer, even more out-there Traummaschine. Our heroes’ space engine has burned out, and they’re left floating in deep space, with only shimmering synthesizers and swirling pools of guitar for company. I probably don’t have to tell you that it’s a proto-ambient masterpiece. This is more-or-less the format for all of Ash Ra Tempel’s classic albums – freeform freakout lunacy on side one, ambient chill-out on side two. Second album Schwingungen has a multi-parted song suite on side one, vaguely reminiscent of both Pink Floyd and Can, before erupting into bizarre screeching and phased guitar noise which takes it somewhere else entirely; Copey’s post-punk analogies begin to make sense. Side two is more ambient droning, with synthesizer and guitar echoplexed, twisted and distorted beyond recognition into something that starts off Eno before winding up Saucerful of Secrets-era Floyd. Whilst I still don’t care much for Seven Up, their somewhat restrained and confused third album recorded with acid-guru Timothy Leary, the fourth and final classic Ash Ra album, Join Inn, is another classic in the same mold, with ‘Freak ‘N’ Roll’ as intense and deranged as anything since ‘Amboss’ , and Gottsching’s girlfriend’s wordless vocal trills taking the ambient side to new levels of cosmic bliss. Sadly, it was the end. ART had always operated as a revolving collective, with whoever was available at the time joining in the chaos and fun, but the industrial quantities of acid everyone was doing meant that it was never going to last forever. At a 1973 gig, Enke finally did a Syd, freaking out onstage. Ash Ra’s following albums were Gottsching solo projects in all but name, still interesting but much less intense. Gottsching eventually pulled the plug on the band and went solo, becoming a pioneer of electronic music in the 80s with the legendary E2-E4 album. Though they remain largely unappreciated outside of specialist circles, Ash Ra Tempel’s early albums are the most cosmic of all Krautrock. To this day they represent a pinnacle of raw, spacey, freaked-out mess, formless and deranged space trash, cosmic slop of the highest order. I can’t recommend them highly enough.