Ash Ra Tempel – Ash Ra Tempel

It begins with quiet, noctyrnal drones from the guitar and the merest hint of cymbals, like a rustle of wind in a far off tree. The drones rise and fall in intensity and each peak gets more intense. It’s a cold, glacial sound that makes a permanent 3am of wherever it plays. After three minutes the rolling, crashing drums fade in and a new higher peak of intensity kicks in as the guitar drones begin to evolve into something bigger, more akin to the fieriest edges of Hendrix’s concert soloing.

The bassline is so natural, so inuitive to the music that you don’t even notice its there at first, even with bass heavy speakers. You feel it before you hear it. As rhythm sections go, its devastating and the perfect wild horse for MG’s exquisite, shamnaic guitar work. Is it just me or do you always forget how heavy this album is? It seems to surprise me every time. The Production is great, most of the time it sounds like you’re in the room with the trio except for the occasional phasing effect to the sound.

Side two makes an even sneakier fade in from total silence, a drifting choral keyboard sounds wafts in. The guitar lines are all elongated and wob-webby. It sounds to these ears as though the percussion has lots of reverb and when played so gently, it sounds like something else. It seemlessly errupts into a deep rumbling baseline and percussion rumbling away in the fore with MG’s guitar really low in the mix so it sounds like a ghost in a void.

Then we get a big section where everything slows down to a sheet of sound and we just hear faint, celestial guitar sounds and a deep bass occasionally humming like a far off black hole. A twinkle of guitar starts to faintly chime and the bass begins to pulse in and out. It’s extrodinary to hear such a tight hard rock trio take their sound into such deep, atmospheric ambient.

The evolution of this minimal section into a driving fuzz-rock number is simply a sonic miracle. The way it showed how spaced out hard rock could be opened a lot of doors the genre of heavy music that continue to be explored to this day. It’s extrodinary fold out packaging make a bold promise but its one that the music engraved within more than lives up to.

Thankfuly, not long before he left this world, MG arranged a new remastered vinyl edition on his own record label. This did not hit the shelves until after he passing and it served as a power reminder of what a great talent and visionary he was.