Manuel Göttsching

Even for those who aren't chess experts, it's common knowledge that this is a game in which strategy counts above all else, where every move must be planned with extreme caution, on pain of jeopardizing the entire match. A good opening is all the more essential if you don't want to risk throwing away any chance of victory. The start can be conventional or more unusual, but what matters is being able to develop from it a viable tactic with which to steer the whole game. In naming his first proper solo album after one of the most standard opening moves in chess (the king's pawn advanced two squares), one wonders what match Manuel Göttsching had in mind — whether he'd already weighed the chances of success and the likely outcomes of a challenge against an unknown, far from clearly defined opponent.

Perhaps he simply meant to announce the start of a new phase in his career, one to be faced alone, without the commitment of old monikers or past partners in crime. Whatever the reasoning behind the title, nothing could have predicted the fate awaiting a record born almost by chance, an evergreen future captured on tape for an entirely different purpose. A cornerstone for much of the electronic music to come, an unwitting precursor to a great deal of dance music, "E2-E4", across its hour-long duration, frames small glimpses of an exciting future still waiting to be built, casting one of the greatest interpreters of cosmic music and kraut-rock as the godfather of a revolution about to explode. But it's worth rewinding the tape and pinpointing the origins of a contemporary myth.

The backstory

It's December 12, 1981. The new decade has already gotten underway under entirely different sonic and aesthetic premises, and even West Germany has let itself be permeated by the long reach of new wave, through the most disparate forms and for the most varied purposes. It's a scene in full ferment, in short, teeming with names and trends, a bubbling cauldron, especially so in its rich underground. Indeed, this is precisely the environment that, in the previous decade, had pushed German music to reach absolute peaks of experimentation and research, both within and beyond rock idioms. Even amid the frenetic churn of new developments, someone like Manuel Göttsching is never caught unprepared. Having shelved the Ash Ra Tempel project indefinitely (with an album, "Inventions For Electric Guitar", that is essentially his first solo work), and having set aside psychedelia in favor of a focus on synthesizers and electronics, in many respects the Berlin musician had already grasped which direction his music needed to take, and which winds were blowing across Europe.

If, on a sonic level, Göttsching had already identified and helped spread the synthetic approaches that would define the entire decade (especially in the realm of "experimental" music), he also proved to be a genuine pioneer in another respect, perhaps even more crucial to the conception and development of "E2-E4". Well ahead of the various producers who would later start sharing the fruits of their home-made creativity, the Berlin musician had already, from the first half of the Seventies, begun acquiring the instruments and recording equipment needed to set up his own personal studio, Studio Roma, in pursuit of the utmost creative freedom.

It's a very long, costly process, one that takes years to reach a truly satisfying working environment, but which from the outset allows maximum room for experimentation, control over timing, and total command of the entire creative process. This is how the first Ashra albums take shape — synthetic ambient projects developed without any outside input — along with tons of self-penned material, not necessarily intended for any specific purpose or future release, but rather serving as a kind of study, a way of capturing a particular moment. But it will be precisely in one of these seemingly off-the-cuff sessions, in a moment far removed from any pressure to deliver a finished product, that the hour-long chess match of the German musician will originate.

A miraculous game

Much like many albums that have left an indelible mark on the course of rock and its vast surrounding territories, "E2-E4" is a work whose genesis and history carry primary importance, at times capable of even overshadowing the merits of the music itself. That's certainly not the case here, though it goes without saying that a myth is built also, and above all, through what surrounds and completes the creative process. The story here doesn't unfold through scandals, quarrels or other far more trivial matters; instead it points straight to wonder, to circumstances so unrepeatable that they can genuinely be considered miraculous. Because what led to the conception of this project bears all the hallmarks of a miracle.

One can almost picture Göttsching, guitar in his arms and his rich arsenal of synthesizers arranged in a circle around him, with an idea in his head, recorded with no particular thought of releasing it. After all, with all those means at his disposal, he had no trouble working on his new album while also unwinding, or even putting together something to listen to on a flight to meet his old partner in adventure, Klaus Schulze, ahead of a concert the following day. Everything very relaxed, no urgency or premeditation - just the record of a day in the studio, an hour spent improvising around two guitar chords with his battalion of synths. That was enough to give birth to a landmark that would make Derrick May and Larry Levan fall in love.

No interruptions, no imbalance in the levels of the various instruments, nothing that could disturb the flow: it hardly matters that Göttsching initially wasn't taken with the progression, or that he was on the verge of stopping the whole thing to possibly do something else. The scant sixty minutes that make up "E2-E4" are carried through to the end without anything corrupting its spell, ready to be transferred to tape. The result, perhaps precisely because of how it came about and the fortuitous absence of obstacles, has something disorienting about it. The musician would later describe it as a perfect flow of music, free of technical ambition, but it's a perfection that's hard to grasp at first, as you search for the error to fix, the flaw to correct. Instead, there was truly nothing that needed changing - everything is exactly where it should be.

What started out almost as a demonstration of savoir-faire in handling an improvised piece instead yields a work that calls into question the entire sonic premise, ferrying the electronic experiments of the Seventies toward a wholly different way of understanding their forms and purposes. All this without sacrificing its foundations or betraying its own rich artistic background. Indeed, Göttsching's krautrock roots have little trouble showing through. The bed of synthesizers that forms the backbone of the work carries the imprint of that same study of repetition already found in "Inventions For Electric Guitar", though understandably softened in light of more recent ambient explorations. Likewise, the obsessive basic pattern, sustained entirely by just two chords (E2 and E4, expressed precisely as E2-E4 in alphanumeric shorthand), holds within it that same potent minimalist allure that, in various forms, had permeated many figures of the krautrock era. And yet any possible influences, however significant, inevitably fade into the background before a work capable of throwing open doors no one had thought to imagine.

Conceived by its very nature as a project to be listened to in a single sitting (even though pressing it to vinyl necessarily split it into two halves), "E2-E4" still manages to present shifts along its course substantial enough to justify its division into several segments. The entry of the guitar, given over to a warm, enveloping solo roughly halfway through the piece, is the most obvious of these variations, but the dense work of the synthesizers knows how to build a convincing progression from the very start, layering and paring back where needed, all in service of a unified, all-encompassing vision. Above all, an exquisite balance is maintained between humanity and abstraction, between concreteness and a reach for ecstasy, in a dialogue between opposites that also shows up in the perfect marriage of synth and six strings (especially evident as the piece closes). It's precisely in this mutual exchange between machine and man (explored and distilled in parallel by Kraftwerk on the monumental "Die Mensch-Maschine" and "Computerwelt"), as well as in the way it draws variations on a theme and new melodic patterns from a basic template, that we find the lesson that the nascent techno and house scenes would soon make their own.

An extraordinary legacy

And to think how close it came to never being heard at all, the fruit of that fateful hour in the studio in late 1981! Having established that the track, however much he enjoyed picking it apart and examining it, was perfectly balanced in every single respect, Göttsching would nonetheless shelve it for three long years, given that at the time the sessions for his new album were heading in an entirely different direction. The waiting game resumed in 1984, when the musician, finally intent on giving that hour of recordings some kind of release, met Virgin Records founder Richard Branson on his houseboat and played him the tape. As the story goes, the label boss was at that moment rocking his daughter, who was falling asleep in his arms: his first impressions were highly enthusiastic, and he declared that this music could be worth a fortune. After all, these were years in which this kind of progressive electronic music, with its vague new-age potential, had managed to win over a considerable share of the market, between film scores, swarms of ambient records and a widespread infatuation with synthesizers, which kept being updated at breakneck speed. And yet this fortune would explode in the years to come, in a thoroughly indirect way.

Having eventually had second thoughts about the record's commercial potential through a Virgin distribution deal ("it had become too big, I was afraid the album would get lost among all those mainstream releases, so I took the tape back with me", the musician recently stated), Göttsching would ultimately release "E2-E4" through Inteam, the label run by his friend Klaus Schulze, in a limited edition of 1000 copies. While the critics' first impressions struggled to grasp the project's distinctive qualities, dismissing it as inconsequential muzak, some copies nevertheless travelled far, destined to leave a lasting impression. Entirely unbeknownst to its creator, Larry Levan got his hands on the vinyl and began playing it regularly during his famous dj sets at New York's Paradise Garage, sensing its rhythmic potential and the traits that would define house music to come, even in the total absence of any bassline or actual percussive beat.

A few years later it was the turn of two pioneers of Detroit techno, the "innovator" Derrick May and his colleague Carl Craig, both responsible for club-friendly remixes that cross the complex minimalism of the original with an equally intricate system of sonic patterns and compositional directions. Here in Italy, meanwhile, a quartet of Italian producers would spot the Latin qualities hidden within the folds of "E2-E4" and rework them into an outright classic of Italo-house, that "Sueño latino" which turns the shape of the original inside out, pairing it with a sensual vocal line and a substantial rhythmic and effects-laden backbone that reaches toward the emerging Balearic sound. One could go on listing the tributes, the reworkings and the openly declared inspirations at great length, but they would only serve to reaffirm the persuasive power of a landmark born by chance, one destined to change the shape of electronic music forever.

Almost forty years after its conception, "E2-E4" has passed the test of time like very few other albums in its field, still proving capable of speaking to the present through its peculiar creation story and the singularity of its content. In the unforgiving universe of electronic music, ageing with such grace is a privilege that is anything but insignificant.

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17/06/2018