Ash Ra Tempel - A Lysergic Odyssey

An electronic explosion. We're in the early 1970s, in the Germany of one of the greatest experimenters and founding fathers of electronic music, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Many were the students who took lessons from him at the Kunstakademie in Remscheid, the Academy of Arts, including Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay of the Can nucleus, and Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the two founders of Kraftwerk. These and other "pioneers" decided to carry forward the electric mission begun twenty years earlier and fuse it with rock's most common formula, the classic guitar-bass-drums triad, forging a new conception of sound. From centuries-old instruments like the arca musarithmica and the telharmonium, through to the most advanced technologies of the time, such as the theremin, Moog synthesizers or the Synclavier, new acoustic waves were born and condensed into albums of tremendous innovation, steeped in extraordinary, cinematic atmospheres. It's music that's compelling and immersive, in which sound itself — and therefore the instrumental dimension — becomes the leading actor.

The etymology of the name Ash Ra Tempel is explained by the band's leader, Manuel Göttsching, in an interview: "Ash is ash, the remains, the end (?) Ra: the Egyptian sun god, energy, the source of our lives. Tempel: a place for rest and contemplation (written in the German idiom)." Within the electronic galaxy of the Seventies, the music of Ash Ra Tempel is probably the most "lysergic" of all: to the technical prowess of the group's members, expressed in the extremely long jam sessions that define their output, must be added the teachings of Timothy Leary, the psychedelic guru who had recently relocated to Switzerland (Germany having denied him a residence permit due to his turbulent Californian past), around whom a circle of poets, writers and musicians would form. His teachings on lysergic acid (LSD), and on the four states of human perception and knowledge, would prove fundamental to the formation of many of the so-called "cosmic couriers" (a name taken from the label of impresario Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, Kosmische Kuriere, founded in March '73, which would replace the equally legendary Ohr).

The band's genesis dates back to 1970, when Manuel Göttsching — already in contact between 1968 and 1969 with Swiss avant-garde composer Thomas Kessler — founded the original nucleus of Ash Ra Tempel in Berlin together with Klaus Schulze and Hartmut Enke. It would take another year before their debut album saw the light. Ash Ra Tempel, the eponymous album, is their 1971 debut. It's probably not the record for which they'll be most remembered, but it still marks an important milestone in the band's career. The album's structure, made up of two long jams, "Amboss" and "Traummaschine", would become a recurring feature throughout their discography. "Amboss" is a riot of psychedelia and space-rock, prompting critics to draw flattering comparisons with Pink Floyd and Hawkwind. It's exotic, improvised music, pure experimentation, maintaining a steady, repetitive momentum with evocative hypnotic effects. This is the central theme of the first session: the intro showcases keyboard effects that gradually build until, around the third minute, Schulze's percussion begins to march forward. A deeply pleasurable sense of awakening after a cataclysm, before plunging back into the orgiastic chaos dominated by Göttsching's guitar, which stretches on for fifteen minutes. We then return into the arms of Morpheus with the dream machine "Traummaschine" — in English, "Dream Machine" — which is the exact opposite of "Amboss": dark and mystical, dominated by the coldness of the synthesizer, which carves out metallic melodies within a surreal atmosphere, closer in spirit to ambient music than to psychedelia. The synthesizer thus becomes the leading instrument on this second side of the record, leaving a light, constant guitar riff in the background. The percussion remains indispensable too, stirring up the long dream in its central section before the journey home. Meditative atmospheres, and total detachment from the material world.

After this first release, Klaus Schulze left the group to pursue a prodigious solo career, and was replaced by Wolfgang Müller, with whom Ash Ra Tempel recorded their second album, again for Ohr, Schwingungen (1972). Substantially different from its predecessor, the album proves more mature and varied, offering an uninterrupted succession of styles, moving between progressive approaches, blues detours and sparkling psychedelic flashes. It opens with "Light And Darkness", split into two parts. "Light: Look At Your Sun" is a decent bluesy sketch harking back to the pioneers of electric blues, with John L. on vocals; "Darkness: Flowers Must Die" is the album's most eccentric section: John L. mimics Damo Suzuki's hysterical vocalizing over a "cosmic hard-rock" backing track marked by a steadily increasing tempo, layered beneath a jazz-tinged veil embroidered by Matthias Wehler's sax. Freed from Schulze's overbearing presence, Göttsching seems far more at ease, giving full expression to his assault-style guitar playing. Particularly notable is his duet with John L. on "Darkness: Flowers Must Die".

That closes the first side of the LP, while the second side instead presents the long jam session "Suche & Liebe". "Suche" combines Göttsching's spacey electronic effects with the barely perceptible, hushed sound of the vibraphone. "Liebe" is the second part: hazy, built around voice and guitar, it retraces the opening theme of a long odyssey through space that ends in glory. Probably closer to the typical sound of Tangerine Dream than to anything bearing the Ash Ra Tempel trademark.

The aforementioned LSD guru Timothy Leary collaborated directly — lending, among other things, his own voice — on Ash Ra Tempel's third album, Seven Up. The differences compared to previous works are considerable, partly due to the arrival of sound engineer, bassist, percussionist and synth player Dieter Dierks, which marked a turning point in the group's line-up, and partly due to their brief move to the newly founded Kosmische Kuriere label. Leary's deep, aggressive voice, alternating with the female vocals of Liz Elliot and Bettina Hohls, opens the first track, "Space", with a classic blues passage; by the second minute, an intricate web of sounds develops, before eventually giving way to Leary's voice alone: the interlude is scattered with chaotic voices and speech marking the entry into the psychedelic realm; in the background, Tangerine Dream-style electronic effects stretch on seemingly forever, while the sharper, more metallic sounds signal the departure from planet Earth toward alien destinations. The exaltation of the senses is total, perception pushed to its utmost limit. The second track, "Time", offers more acid, visionary music, the kind that only psychotropic substances can conjure. Curious is the suite's final movement, "She", which seems like a sort of revisiting of "Suche & Liebe".

"Drugs had little to do with our music (although legend has it that it was Leary himself who suggested the group compose under the influence of narcotics, ed.), but they were present in our lives regardless, because they were extremely widespread at the time," Göttsching would recall. "Marijuana and hashish, in particular, were very popular. Drugs were all around us and took up a great deal of my time, but there was another drug that made me fall in love: music."

The brief, intense experience with Leary would reach its end in 1973, when Klaus Schulze returned home, recreating the original line-up with Gottsching and Enke. That's the year of Join Inn, produced by the band's old label, Ohr. The album marks a clear return to the group's roots, to the sound of Ash Ra Tempel. "Freak 'N' Roll" closely echoes "Amboss" and is essentially one long jam built around guitar virtuosity. Overall, the record brings to full maturity that combination of electronics and psychedelic rock which is something of a leitmotif running through the band's output. While the first part of the album is clearly influenced by Californian psychedelia, the second side, "Jenseits", stands as one of the absolute high points of electronic music from the first half of the Seventies. The solo experience served Klaus Schulze enormously: alongside his usual drums, he's now also entrusted with keyboards, namely a Vcs-3 synthesizer and a Farfisa organ. The link between this track and Schulze's own debut album, "Irrlicht", from 1972, is obvious, the only difference being the presence of Gottsching's guitar: "I generated the music with a minimum of equipment. The resulting music resembled the sound of sequencers and synthesizers, but it had been composed with a single guitar. I recorded backwards, with the tape machines at double speed, half speed... I tuned the strings differently and fell in love with my dynamic pedals, which could 'cut and stitch', with the help of echo". "Jenseits" also marks the start of the collaboration with singer and poet Rosi Mueller (Gottsching's partner), who lends a feminine touch to the track, making it more dynamic and emotional. This collaboration would continue, extensively, throughout 1973, and above all with the release of the album Starring Rosi, which documents yet another departure by Schulze, this time replaced by Harald Grosskopf. In the meantime, Enke also leaves, handing the bass duties over to Dieter Dierks.

Starring Rosi is the closing chapter of the Ash Ra Tempel story. Less inspired and more tired-sounding than its predecessors, the album feels like a forced effort, willed into existence by Gottsching as a gift to his partner. On the first two tracks, "Laughter Loving" and "Day Dream", we're in the territory of minimal, nihilistic folk, with Rosi Mueller's languid voice duetting with Gottsching's guitar; with "Schizo", on the other hand, electronics come back into play and a few flashes of cosmic music resurface. There's little else worth noting, though "Fairy Dance" stands out, an acoustic pseudo-ballad complete with Mellotron. An opaque record, in short, one that bears witness to the decline of a group that had effectively already closed up shop some time before.

So begins a new era. Gottsching, after completing Inventions for Electric Guitar (1974), a space-rock album for guitar and a forerunner of the techno blueprint later known as E2-E4 (1984), teams up with his old friend Klaus Schulze for the Cosmic Jokers experience, one of the most controversial and contradictory outfits on the German electronic scene of the mid-Seventies. Conceived by producer Rolf Kaiser and sound engineers Dieter Dierks and Gille Lettmann, the "supergroup" features — besides the aforementioned Manuel Gottsching and Klaus Schulze — Jurgen Dollase and Harald Grosskopf, formerly of Wallenstein. The project translates into a handful of pure improvisation sessions, which the four musicians claim took place both together and separately. The use of psychotropic substances returns in a big way: it's said the two engineers would invite Schulze and Gottsching to hallucinogen-fuelled parties before each recording session began, a claim Schulze himself has repeatedly denied in heated interviews. This bizarre ensemble produced four significant works in a single year, 1974. The first in the series, Cosmic Jokers, is a brilliant essay in cosmic music, where the guitar-bass-drums triad blends perfectly with Schulze's synthesizer. Shortly afterwards came Galactic Supermarket, preceded by "Planeten Sit-In". The album wraps us in energetic, almost obsessively repetitive spatial soundscapes, highlighted by Rosi Muller's robotic, sensual voice repeating the short refrain ending with the words "Galactic Supermarket". The other two albums, Gilles Zeitschiff and Sci Fi Party, contain material drawn from the jam sessions of earlier recordings, plus a few song fragments from the Kosmische Musik label, but were presented to the public under new names and passed off as unreleased material. Despite this small "deception", both are good albums, even if inferior to their predecessors.

Also in 1974, Gottsching decided to relaunch the band under the name AshRa, bringing in Lutz Ulbrich and Harald Grosskopf. With them, he recorded two finely crafted albums, New Age Of Earth in 1976 and Blackouts in 1977. "A major influence on my style came in 1974 with my discovery of so-called minimal music by composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley. Reich, in particular, is a genuine innovator who knows how to combine elements of improvisation with structured compositions", Gottsching would later recall. Also worth remembering are Correlation (1979) and Belle Alliance (1980), decent albums that show the influence of punk's push at the time, alongside hints of ambient and progressive leanings. They failed, however, to achieve the desired success, as did Tropical Heat from 1991, a remix of recordings made between 1985 and 1987, which descends into utter banality and marks one of the lowest points of their career.

Gottsching, who in the meantime had released a series of albums under his own name (from Inventions For Electric Guitar in 1975 to Dream And Desire in 1991), would dust off the Ash Ra Tempel name for the soundtrack to the film Le Berceau de Cristal (1993) and for the two albums Sauce Hollandaise (1998) and Friendship (2000), neither of which would add anything new to the band's body of work.

In conclusion, Ash Ra Tempel's approach to music can comfortably be confined to the Seventies, the decade in which these German cosmic couriers best expressed their ideas, while the slow downward arc of the following two decades would reveal above all a kind of trend-chasing conceit on Gottsching's part, as he lost his capacity to influence others and often found himself trailing behind whatever groups were in vogue at the time. Worth mentioning, nonetheless, is the interesting The Private Tapes, a double album of rarities released in 1998 by Purple Pyramid.

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