#kosmische

[phonographica]

Cybotron - Sunday Night At The Total Theatre (1976)

[burlveneer-music]

Dean McPhee - Astral Gold - kosmische guitar

All tracks written by Dean McPhee and recorded live with no overdubs

[saramencken]

[caligul-a]

Music of the Spheres

Und thus it fills the cosmos…

[iamlisteningto]

Ruth Mascelli’s The Institute For Astral Health

[thesobsister]

Cluster, "Sowieso"

A krautrock master work. Treat yourself.

[fuckyeahmotorik]

#1746

Donovan - I Am The Shaman

2023, Produced and directed by David Lynch

[kunstmull]

Ash-ra

So I've annoyed all of my friends by going on and on about this band to the point where no one is answering my emails any more. So I'm just going to be spamming this tag until all of Tumblr blocks me (no, really - if I irritate you, I'd much rather you just block me and go on with your online life!) Buckle up, I'm going in.

When I first found started exploring Buck-Tick, this was one of the first songs I clicked on, just based on the title alone. It's called Ash-ra*, off an album literally entitled COSMOS - do you think there's a chance there might be some Kosmische Krautrock going on here?

*I've since seen some blogs express confusion as to why the title uses this spelling, rather than the Japanese Asura or Ashura. ASH-RA TEMPEL. Lords of Berlin-School Kosmische (Kosmische - "Cosmic" - is what many of the actual German groups of the time called the music that we British jokingly called "Krautrock") led by chess-board pattern loving Meister of electronic guitar manipulation, Manuel Göttsching.

I hit play.

::drums start up::

YES OH GOD YES - Toll immediately goes in for the most Lange-Gerade MOTORIK. This isn't even Dinger-beat, this is the full Jaki Liebezeit, like Mother Sky on speed.

12 seconds in, and there's strange slithering static noises, like the glitchy tape experiments on the B-side of NEU! 2 - yes YES! The tiger is OUT!

And then the guitar starts

Effortless, weightless, just hanging above the driving rhythm section like a seagull riding a glider. This is pure Michael Rother, that endless tone that seems to stretch off into the horizon, a descending scale that dissipates into feathery clouds of... feedback? tremolo arm abuse? theremin? processed guitar? (In the live video, it looks like some kind of harmonics-modulation pedal)

Words cannot even express how much I love the way Imai Hisashi abuses his guitar. This man is a sound pervert - I've since read translated interviews where he expresses contempt that a guitarist should act like a guitar-player - he treats the instrument purely as a tone-generator for him to transform with electronic treatments and manipulations (my favourite musicians have always treated their instruments this way - from what Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk did with his flute, to what drone-rockers like Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3 and Kevin Shields of MBV did with guitars). But the cosmic space-noises here are so otherworldly I genuinely cannot tell where guitar feedback ends and theremin begins, it's a haze of swooping electronic bliss.

Vocals - to be really true to the Kosmische form, Imai should have had the courage to just spout surreal English-Japanese-German word salad a la Damo Suzuki, but yes, there are lyrics, I'm sure someone else has written about them. But in my fan-fiction headcanon version of events, Imai just scribbled "Ash-ra" on the demo tape to indicate this was his Krautrock song, and Atsushi, not knowing the first thing about Krautrock, took this as an instruction to write a song about the actual Japanese Demons.

1:50 minutes in. BASS SOLO. At some point, I'm going to write another essay about how Yutaka is the most underrated musician of this band. He's the one who holds together the floating psychedelic guitar haze and the speed-punk drums, and yet somehow makes it all insanely danceable. He absolutely nails the sinewy funk of Holger Czukay, both melodic and booty-shaking.

And then at 2:04 the BEST BIT of the WHOLE SONG

PNEUMATIC DRILL SOLO!!!

Unfortunately, it seems they don't do this bit live. COWARDS!

REAL German Experimental bands play their drills live!

But it's the attention to detail that makes this band so intoxicating to listen to - layers and layers of sonic references layered on top of one another, the pneumatic drill, the squiggles of electronic sound, and then at the end, the coda...

A short drifting suite of classical piano, because it's the moments of peace that make the psychedelic noise-storms so intense, and vice-versa.

[the-birth-of-art]

Can vocalist Damo Suzuki (1950-2024) has transcended this plane. Fare thee well.

[kneipe]

lyon 2023

[bluetapes]

Beautiful objects and strange sounds from

[burlveneer-music]

Prairiewolf s/t LP - not that I've been looking, but this is the first album I've heard that I feel is the American equivalent of the very British electro-pastoralia purveyed by Clay Pipe Music 

Recorded 8,000 feet above sea level in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, Prairiewolf’s first long-player offers listeners a fresh and free-flowing slice of cosmic/organic Americana — spiritual instrumentals driven by Fender Rhodes, lap steel, Mellotron, guitar, synth, bass and an assortment of vintage drum machines. Sandy Bull communing with Alice Coltrane, Tangerine Dream finding common ground with Don Cherry, sweet kosmische jams rising out of the Continental Divide. Together since early 2022, Prairiewolf consists of Stefan Beck (who has made recent waves in the underground as Golden Brown) on guitar and lap steel, Jeremy Erwin (the man behind the acclaimed Electric Miles blog The Heat Warps) on keys and Tyler Wilcox (a music writer with bylines in Aquarium Drunkard, Pitchfork and Maggot Brain) on bass. Drawn from sessions taped in the fall and winter of 2022, Prairiewolf’s self-titled debut is an eclectic-but-cohesive collection — 10 original compositions that drift beautifully from zone to zone, sometimes lush and lovely (“Lunar Deluxe,” “Technicolor Dream Hearse”), sometimes weird and woozy ("Cogs," "Labwerk"). Sometimes it’s all of those things at once. Mastered by Andrew Weathers and released on vinyl and compact disc by Nashville’s Centripetal Force, Prairiewolf is a welcome trip into higher sonic elevations. RIYL: Sandy Bull, Alice Coltrane, Bitchin Bajas, Don Cherry  Prairiewolf is Stefan Beck, Tyler Wilcox, and Jeremy Erwin Artwork by Stefan Beck

[apocalypticboredom]

60 Best Albums of 2023

Like every year, 2023 was full of incredible music, a mountain of new releases so high that I could never climb it, a weekly firehose of albums, singles, soundcloud, bandcamp, trips to the record shop and adventures in discogs. I can’t keep up, but I try. There will never be enough time in my life to listen to all the brilliant music made in any given year, and that’s kind of amazing to consider.…

[frankbrodauf]

[Zuckerzeit] [Cluster] [1974] [CD] An icon of german Krautrock as well as German electronic music and so quite pleasant music by the way! . . . . . #ClusterBand #Zuckerzeit #DieterMoebius #Roedelius #Moebius #HansjoachimRoedelius #MichaelRother #BrianEno #ConnyPlank #NeuBand #HarmoniaBand #GermanElectronicMusic #ElectronicPop #AvantPop #Kosmische #CosmicMusic #KosmischeMusik #Krautrock #Ambient #AmbientMusic #Electronica #BrainRecords https://www.instagram.com/p/CpanAgOIGoO/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[iamlisteningto]

Ruth Mascelli’s Non Stop Healing Frequency

[spaceintruderdetector]

Ash Ra Tempel - Amboss