Walter Wegmüller
Tarot

I feel deep admiration and awed respect for what has crudely gone down in history as krautrock.

Within it orbited huge planets and elusive satellites, each independent from the others but an organic and fundamental part of a coherent musical project with ambitions often transcending the mere musical realm. Perhaps the term "Kosmische Musik" is the most relevant, highlighting the transcendent and otherworldly elements behind much of the music produced in that brief period in Germany.

"Tarot" by Walter Wegmüller is a striking example, both for the disorienting music it contains and for being a colossal concept about the 22 major arcana. Walter Wegmüller, actually Swiss, spent a lot of time in southern France, Switzerland, and Germany gathering stories and traditions from European gypsies, either due to a wandering nature or family genealogy. The result was, first, a book written together with his traveling companion Sergius Golowin (another atypical figure in the Swiss-German scene of the time) about Tarot and their cosmic origins, followed by this double album.

R.U. Kaiser produced and published the work under the aegis of his label 'Ohr Music,' recruiting the best of the German scene: from Klaus Schulze on synthesizers to Manuel Gottsching of Ashra Tempel on guitars, to the ethno-folk guru Walter Westrupp. The result is still shocking, more than thirty years after its release.
Difficult, if not superfluous, to describe such a seething musical cauldron, full of sometimes dissonant ingredients: space keyboards arm in arm with Wegmüller's hieratic recitals (which he does for the entire duration of the album), wah-wah and electronic drums, gentle ballads with a forest aroma interrupted by cosmic gurgling, cabaret and congas, and much more.

This entire variety of styles, on one hand, makes the listening and assimilation of the work more arduous, but on the other hand reveals the general plan in Wegmüller's mind, namely the creation of music that is at once immanent and transcendent, chthonic and otherworldly, transient and eternal. A bit like the Tarot themselves, symbolically regulating our earthly life as direct emanations of the cosmos from which we come. An attempt, in itself monstrously presumptuous, but important as such, to render in music the long journey of life itself.