Ash Ra Tempel
Schwingungen

“Schwingungen”, the album by Manuel Gottsching's group in the vein of krautrock, is a twilight album. The adjective doesn't refer to the literary current and doesn't refer to a fundamental uncertainty or vagueness, but it is linked to the subject from which it derives, the twilight. The music of the sunset. The music evokes apocalyptic scenarios; the end is imminent, and minute after minute, there is a need for divine salvation at a profane level. A Messiah is needed to educate (from the verb “edurre”) the population, the human being contaminated by the daily machines of corruption and mind control. The search for an idyll, for a locus amoenus on Earth develops through the praise and criticism of nature in relation to man.

In the first track, the singer expresses the joy of looking out the window and knowing that everything outside is his. Furthermore, he states that he and his she are one being both guided by the power of love when the sun rises. The contrast between light and darkness prevails in the album: the two tracks that make up side A are titled “Light: Look at your Sun” and “Darkness: All Flowers Must Die,” respectively. In the first, as already mentioned, the author praises the nature that presents itself outside the window, and the garden where he stops with his she is represented according to an idyllic ideal, indeed. “You can see me, you can hear me”: sight and hearing are complementary, they blend, and love triumphs thanks to the dawn of a new day. Light… and shadow.

The second track is particularly evocative and eerie both from the musical and textual point of view. The mournful voice, initially faint, ignites and explodes in harrowing screams of despair and desolation; the words, so rich in poetry, strike the listener like a machete, hitting directly to the head and stomach. The latter then feels a mix of disgust towards the world and a kind of sadness because he manages to understand the melancholy taken to extremes by the author. “Flowers must die, and I feel like I'm dying too along with a dusty flower, I feel like a sick child from the universe, a god lost in the city's dust.” The sense of estrangement from the reality he lives and yet, at the same time, the solidarity towards a decaying world brings man to the awareness of slowly dying, decaying, like a dusty flower. He feels weak like a sick child incapable of being independent, needing love, and yet, as he already said in the first song, he feels like a god, a god who was once on cloud nine and felt at the peak of his strength but then folds upon himself, and dust settles on him.

The psychedelic sounds obtained from the vibraphone, from the guitar effects and the drums' timpani culminate in a triumph of bongos, percussion, and sax above which the muezzin-like voice of John L. stands out as he engages in vocalizations. This mystical and paranormal masterpiece concludes with one of the most poetic phrases in krautrock and music as a whole: “Flowers must die, children who have lost their color, the diamonds of my journey, and when they're gone, I want to be stone, that does not live, that does not think, a thing without warm blood in the city.” A sort of denunciation of urbanization. Flowers like children who have lost their color, like diamonds resulting from a lysergic vision. Since flowers must die in favor of a heartless city, the author prefers to be turned into stone, prefers to be assimilated to the same city, as he is sure that by becoming it, he will no longer think and no longer live: he becomes like them but without emotional involvement, he joins their “party” but as a passive obedient being, not out of conviction. One of the most sincere and authentic statements set to music, a masterpiece of rock music.

To crown this marvelous album, side B is occupied by a single long instrumental suite “Schwingungen: Suche & Liebe.” A sound work of art, an emblem of cosmic music, perhaps a bit self-referential but a spontaneous dedication to a genre of a mostly national character. Germany can boast of having counted among the big names of kosmik music a band like Ash Ra Tempel, immersed in it to the bone. “Schwingungen”: vibrations, oscillations! Well, there is no more fitting title. The listener feels as if oscillating, as if floating, enchanted and terrified by the sounds. Indispensable, essential, inimitable, alien, estranging, and purifying.

10/10