Al Gromer Khan
Mahogany Nights

"...at night you may still happen

to hear sounds of wheezing harmoniums

and old Kurds who for a thousand years

offer their chests to novenas...".

The eternal mystery of the East - that indefinable indescribable charm that for centuries has been part of the myth of the Exotic - is encapsulated in the works of Al Gromer Khan. And it is no mere coincidence if the East in its true identity is unleashed from the records of a man seemingly closer to the castles of Bavaria than to the Taj Mahal or Wat Phra Keo. Not so much for his childhood spent between India and Morocco following his diplomat father, his imagination captured by the Mahabharata and the poetry of Lord Byron. What matters most is that Alois Gromer, born a few kilometers from Lake Constance, was an apocryphal protagonist of that musical "cosmo-ethnic" Germany that in the early '70s anticipated world music - without it still being known by that definition; that through names like Popol Vuh, Embryo, Klaus Schulze, Agitation Free and others, opened new directions and charted new paths (just sketched in some cases, already perfectly aware and defined in others). Special guest on the sitar in "Tanz Der Lemminge" by Amon Duul II and studio musician for Popol Vuh, Gromer had been in the '60s a guest and private confidant of His Majesty Sisouk na Champassak, Prince of Laos, from whom he learned the secrets of tantric spirituality and the passion for the mystery cults of the Indochinese area. But the decisive encounter was with the guru Ustad Imrat Khan - and at that point, all the "secrets" of the sitar (his principal instrument) would no longer be so for him. An acquired member of the Khani Gharana, the "family" that gathers the greatest sitarists of India, the Bavarian develops, following the model of his compatriots (Klaus Wiese and Peter Michael Hamel of Between above all) a hybrid of electronic and ethnic sounds capable of breaking every known door of perception.

Not mere notions those I tell you because it is from these data that one better understands the role of Gromer Khan-performer/modeler of environments and atmospheres - nocturnal, by preference. The levels of all his works are very high: in certain cases an astral majesty is reached with few equals in the world, and vibrations akin to those experienced by a Steve Roach or a Michael Stearns are touched. In my opinion, "Mahogany Nights" (year 1990) is his supreme work, even superior to the much-celebrated "Kamasutra" of 1986 or the more recent "Attar", a study on the sensory correspondence sound-scent with its prologues in Brian Eno. Poetry, melody, sense: the three basic elements of Khan's aesthetics. What can be perceived on the nights of Karachi or New Delhi, Hanoi or Bangkok is the inspiration and content (in the same measure) of very long "mahogany nights", extended in intense and profound landscape paintings. So profound as to touch vertigo or, if preferred, the ecstasy of contemplation. The power of this ambient perspective is in the string of a sitar just plucked and/or reverberated, compelling the reflexes to rise with superhuman vigor; in the boundless and hypnotic electronics of multiple overlapping layers, to plunge into total trance; in the solemnity of choral arrangements grafted onto variously assorted percussive carpets. Above all, the almost 25 minutes of "Taj" (direct access route to the gates of the cosmos) and the elusive splendor of a "Ko-Hi-Noor" chiseled and retouched in every single distinct movement.

Absolute manifesto of TECHNO-SHAMANISM.