Ash Ra Tempel
Schwingungen

Vibrations.

Vibrations of a pen on a sheet drawing two women on a cover looking at their sun. Look At Your Sun.
Vibrations of musical instruments and crazed vocal cords.
Schwingungen has no words. A foundational text of rock, whatever genre you consider, Schwingungen has very few rivals.
A shroud of mystery around, a sound black hole within.
It's a sick, visionary, cosmic album like all those of the Kosmische Kuriere; it wouldn't be anything new. But here the discourse is different: the vision is seen, everything is very concrete, too much indeed. It's the cosmic that's in rock. It's the origins of rock, jazz, blues, but perhaps not belonging to this planet.

Once you enter the sun of Schwingungen, you won't come out the same. And pray to enter it.

The matter divides into two: "Light and Darkness", which in turn is divided into two parts, and "Suche & Liebe".


The Light: Look at Your Sun.

A desert, both sonic and geographical, envelops you, you even start to feel the heat, you're at the limit of your strength under a scorching sun that gives you no respite. No, it is not suggestion given by the cover image. It's all true. It's an essential blues at the start, as elegant as it is raw in its whiny singing. We are all one the voice of John L keeps repeating, while Manuel's guitar, bare, delicate, suddenly ignites, with a mystical fire caused by a vision. A magnificent solo that closely recalls Hendrix makes us completely lose reason and control over our circulatory system. The delirium begins.

The Darkness: Flowers Must Die.

By now we're lost, the senses are obscured by fear, madness is at the doorstep. We are alone in the desert, nothing can save us. Moments (or minutes, hours, I couldn't tell you) of indecision open Flowers Must Die, until the percussion starts to beat on the arid land, striking it and creating irreparable fractures. And my god, what happens I can't describe. John L seems like Lyndon, he doesn't sing but screams at the entire cosmos words of extraordinary beauty.

"I see when I return
From my psychedelic daydream
Stopped in the middle
Of the forest of glass and neon
By the unhappy name: city.
Flowers must Die...
I want to be a stone, that doesn't live and doesn't think
A thing without warm blood, in the city.
Flowers must Die"

It's a tribal ritual, an aboriginal dance for rain. John L has gone mad. A delirium of guitars, percussion, bass, and sax never seen before in music. Flowers Must Die, an underground poetry. Echo effects seem to suck the music into nothingness at the end, but punctually it breaks free, like a rebellious slave, it is untamable and unlike anything else. And in the end, everything is assimilated by the context, as if nullified. And there’s John’s voice trying to break free while the sound is being sucked in.

They were light and darkness. The first part of Schwingungen ends, the more earthly part.

"Suche & Liebe" begins.

"Suche & Liebe"

Suche & Liebe is eternal, infinite. It lasts nearly twenty minutes, but I couldn't really tell you how time passes (or if it does). You remain for apparent hours, attached to a note, an effect, something that distinguishes itself from the absolute silence. And meanwhile time passes, you don't sense any forms of life, only echoes of sounds and noises coming from galaxies more or less far away. Your head spins all around the angle of view above your nose, and it orientates as if in the direction it thinks it heard something. Disorientation. Echoes of vibraphone unsettle, you almost start wondering where all that talk of light and darkness went. That is the planet Earth, this is the Cosmos. You reach the middle of the movement without strength or hopes, and suddenly, from the usual Nothing, here some toms echo from the deepest abysses all the way to the ground where we place our feet. It’s something magnificent, an indescribable and elusive rhythm begins to mark Time. You think they are taking you away, down into the deepest cosmos, but no. Little time passes and then a guitar appears, Manuel Gottsching's Guitar. Away with all the noises, the toms disappear, in the time of a sudden move and in an instant the world around you completely changes: like a drawing that is suddenly torn and restarted from scratch, but totally different, so you find yourself bewildered, with your nose up high, while angelic choirs, marked by an essential and elegant wah guitar, explain what you are admiring. One of the highest moments of all rock music, gives you chills. We almost regret it when the drums enter this symphony. We have risen from our planet, strong, raging, and self-assured, only to lose ourselves like beginners in the most complex of cosmoses, among asteroid storms and space-time tears. Now we have arrived, the drums testify to it. We are climbing to heaven, or at least to a vision that in its magniloquence replaces heaven itself.

The journey seems to have come to its end. That Light and Darkness seem light-years away: now before you everything has fused into a single vision. And now you look at the album cover. The two naked girls seem to have their gaze straight at the sun. But maybe their eyes are closed, they don't really look at that sun, with their minds filled with those angelic choirs, in search of their Vibration.