Intuitive Music

Ash Ra Tempel

Ashra is one of the most relevant German acts in the krautrock and kosmiche rock scenes during the 70’s. Ash Ra Tempel picked the 60’s psychedelic culture and drove it into the 70’s space rock and space electronic music, pioneering the experimental German scene.

The origins of Ash Ra Tempel are in the Steeple Chase Bluesband, formed in June 1969 Manuel Göttsching (guitar), Hartmut Enke (bass) and Wulf Arp (drums). A few months later Volker Zibell (harmonica) joined and Wulf Arp was replaced by Wolfgang Müller. At the time the band used to play repertory from John Mayall and other blues bands.

Ash Ra Tempel was originally formed in Berlin in 1970 when Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke met Klaus Schulze, who had just quit the band Tangerine Dream after the release of their first album “Electronic Meditation”. Before this, Klaus Schulze was part of the avant-garde free-rock trio Psy Free, in 1968.

Born in Berlin on September 9th,1952, Manuel Göttsching, was a classical trained guitarist who had studies in improvisation and was in touch with the Swiss avant-garde composer Thomas Kessler. At this stage, the three of them were involved in the project Eruption of Tangerine Dream’s member Conrad Schnitzler. Ash Ra Tempel started rehearsals in August 1970 and became notorious in Berlin’s scene for their long improvisations. That same year they headed to Hamburg to record their first album under the production of the legendary German producer Conny Plank. They released their debut album “Ash Ra Tempel” in 1971 on Rolf-Urich Kaiser’s Ohr label, which was a pioneering work of space rock.

In 1971, Klaus Schulze said to Manuel “You keep the name, I’m going to do other things” and he left Ash Ra Tempel to pursue a solo career. This way the band would remain in the future as Manuel Göttsching’s project, gaining a number of different eventual guests musicians through the years.

The next Ash Ra Tempel album “Schwingungen” (Vibrations) was released a year later and it featured Göttsching and Enke, plus several guest musicians such as the drummer Wolfgang Müller who got back and LSD induced singer John L. The album was an unexpected comeback to blues with a strong orientation to acid rock. That same year, Ash Ra Tempel expanded it’s horizon with the collaboration of Steve Schroeder (organ, electronics), the English writer Brian Barritt (vocals) and Rosi (vocals) Muller, who was Manuel Göttsching’s girlfriend, and other guests.

The next step for the band was to get introduced into the lysergic world of Timothy Leary into the team. Dr. Timothy Leary was an American psychologist and writer whose ideas about the spiritual benefits of the LSD shocked the universities and put him in the eye of the storm of the late sixties American countercultural movement. He was very popular for having coined the classic hippy phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and for appearing at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in in New York singing “Give Peace A Chance”. Leary was an important influence to other rock artists such as the Moody Blues and the Who and he was beforehand in touch with Brian Barritt, with whom he had experimented with heroin claiming that they could communicate telepathically. Timothy Leary started having problems with the law in 1965 when he declared himself responsible of an accusation on her daughter for crossing from Mexico into the United States with marijuana. Consequently, he was convicted of possession under the marijuana tax act and sentenced to 30 years in jail. In 1969, the marijuana tax act was declared unconstitutional, and Leary’s conviction was put down, but later in 1970, he was again convicted for the same charges and sentenced to jail, being assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison.

While in prison, Leary created a psychological profile to make the authorities believe he was incapable to represent any risk by faking the psychological tests that he had wrote himself many years ago. In the night of September 12th 1970, Leary scaped from prison supported by a militant Yippie group called The Weatherman, an he was described by Richard Nixon as “the most dangerous man in the world”. Leary exiled to Algeria leaving the country with a fake passport in the name of McNellis and disguised with a bald head. He and his wife later moved to Switzerland, the birthplace of LSD, where he got in touch with the cosmic music scene after Rolf-Urich Kaiser, from the Ohr label, would fly there to meet the man.

Cosmic Jokers featuring Timothy Leary

In fact, Rolf-Urich Kaiser had been trying to contact for a while the beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg in order to get him involved in his projects but he had no luck. Later, Ash Ra Tempel’s Hartmut Enke did the same trip to meet Leary with the idea of working out a concept based on a map of the stages of conscience of the mind, which Leary and Barritt had traced under the name of “the seven steps to a better karma of consciousness”. This was the inspiration for Ash Ra Tempel’s album “Seven Up”. Eventually, the rest of the band moved to Switzerland to record the new album with Leary at Sinus Studios in Munstergasse, Bern. The story tells how, just the same as a Beatles’ friend did in their tea, Timothy Leary’s son-in-law, Dennis Martino, dropped some LSD on a bottle of 7 Up drink and passed to the band without telling so. Leary also contributed in the album with some vocals, they said he could sing better than anybody else in the band. During their stay in Switzerland the whole crew moved to a farm in the mountains near Bern, where they spent a several days tripping on acid and allegedly improvising some sort of sex orgies, though there are no records of the members of Ash Ra Tempel involved in. Bryan Barritt did so as he later recalled: “I remember that there was a lot of legs! Ten people or something like that, all fucking at random, moving on to one another, all out of our skulls. I got the blame for that.” (Mojo magazine, April 2003). Timothy Leary was also later involved in other projects for Ohr records’ chairman Rolf-Urich Kaiser, like the later Cosmic Jokers albums. In 1974, Timothy Leary was detained by Interpol agents at an airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and he was extradited to the United States, where he was imprisoned again and later released in 1976. He died on 31 May 1996 of prostate cancer.

The next album “Join Inn” (1972) also featured practically the same line up than the former album, but this time including the extra guest appearance of Klaus Schulze. The album in fact was the result of an improvised jam session at the studio when they were waiting for the rest of the musicians to show up for the recordings of Walter Wegmülle’s “Tarot” album. In the track “Jeinseits” Rosi mumbles from the far confines of a deep trip about the experience of taking acid with Timothy Leary. The “Tarot” album, by the artist Walter Wegmüller, was a double conceptual gipsy folk album based upon the tarot cards which was released on a special box package containing the album and a nice set of cards painted by the artist.

Due to the proximity of Göttsching with Rolf-Urich Kaiser’s Ohr label, he also got involved in his next project called Cosmic Couriers, for which a collective of artists called recorded a series of improvisations at the Dieter Kirk’s studio. These improvisations where later released a series of four albums in the new Kosmiche Musik label under the name of Cosmic Jokers, including the albums “The Cosmic Jokers”, “Planeten Sit In”, “Galactic Supermarket”, “Sci Fi Party” and “Gilles Zeitschiff”, all of them released in 1974.

In 1973, Ash Ra Tempel offered a legendary concert in Weishaus in Cologne in which the bass player Hartmut Enke stop playing in the middle of the concert and stood in contemplation with a big grin in his face, similar thing that Syd Barret did with Pink Floyd a few years before. Manuel Göttsching recalls: “Hartmut stopped playing bass in the middle of the concert and just sat down on the stage. Klaus and me we looked at each other, and we continued to play, thinking maybe he wanted a break. And after the concert we asked him, ‘Hartmut, what happened?’ and then he said, ‘yeah, the music that you played was just so beautiful I didn’t know what to play. I preferred to listen to it”. (Mojo magazine, April 2003). This was the last time he was ever involved in the music business. The Weishaus concert was released in 1996 by Manikin Records under the title of “Dédié à Hartmut” and later reissued as a CD as “The Private Tapes Vol. 4″. After Enke’s departure the band released their fifth album “Starring Rosi”, which featured a picture of the singer on the cover sleeve. For this album the band featured Dieter Dirks (bass) and Harald Grosskopf (drums) and the result was the most progressive rock oriented work from the band.

Manuel Göttsching started a solo career parallel to the band in 1974, recording the pioneering space rock and ambient album “Inventions for Electric Guitar”, influenced by minimal composers such as Phillip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. For this album, Göttsching used a similar system of looping and delays of guitar arpeggios than the guitarist Steve Hillage from Gong was also using under the name of “glissando guitar” and other passages were not very far from the ambient passages of Fripp and Eno’s first album. During this period, Ash Ra Tempel toured Europe consisting only in Manuel Göttsching and the vocalist/keyboardist Lutz Ulbrich (ex-Agitation Free), who left eventually to work with the Velvet Underground’s vocalist Nico.

Manuel Göttsching and Lutz Ulbrich, 1977

Manuel Göttsching was also invited by the German fashion designer Claudia Skoda to play a session for one of her fashion shows, being the first of numerous works for her in the forthcoming years. In 1977, with the release of the “New Age earth” album, the name of the band got shortened to Ashra, which has remained until the present days. This was followed by the solo album from Manuel “Blackout” which was released under the name of Ashra but in fact it featured only himself playing guitar, keyboards and sequencer.

In 1979, Manuel Göttsching had the opportunity for the first time to work in the production of a foreign project when the famous Berlin based performance artists Salome & Luciano Castelli asked him to do their first record under the title and their band’s name Geile Tiere. That same year was also released the tenth Ashra album “Belle Alliance” featuring Lutz Ulbrich (guitar, keyboardss, voice, bass) and Harald Grosskopf (drums, percussion, synythesizer, voice).

In 1984, Manuel Göttsching released the celebrated album “E2-E4″, which was recorded in just one take featuring just Manuel on guitars and electronics. “E2-E4″ is one of this beautiful examples of how the things develop in a natural way to give birth to new music styles. The story starts when Klaus Schulze listened to Manuel’s tapes and pushed him to released them on his Inteam label, so the album was finally released three years after it’s recording and didn’t have any commercial success. But the time had something better reserved for the album since a few months later a group of italian DJs started using samples of this German ambient and synth pop music for a series of house productions. Soon, the album became an essential piece for numerous techno and house remixes and it became a cult classic in the early trance scene and gave Manuel Göttsching the nickname of “godfather of trance”. “E2-E4″ was performed later in the 2000 by the Berlin based international avant-garde chamber orchestra Zeitkratzer at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

In 1988, Manuel Göttsching worked in collaboration with Lutz Ulbrich in the music for an event at the Berlin Planetarium. The four main themes of the work were released ia year later in the album “Walkin’ The Desert”. Also, Göttsching starting producing the album “Tropical Heat” that didn’t see the light until 1991. This year Ashra performed at an important concert for thousands of people in front of the cathedral of Cologne for the Rhein’s Cultural Days in cooperation with German Radio and TV station, featuring also Klaus Schulze’s solo performance.

In 1995, Manuel Göttsching worked on a collaborative ambient album “Early Water” with the keyboardist Michael Hoenig. A year later the first volume of a long series of Manuel Göttsching, Ash Ra Tempel and Ashra unreleased recordings was released under the title of “The Private Tapes”. Göttsching also worked again with Klaus Schulze in the 2000 on the album “Friendship” marking 30 years since the first encounter between both musicians. That same year the album “Gin Rosé at the Royal Festival Hall”, signed by Ash Ra Tempel, was released containing a live performance of Göttsching and Schulze recorded in September 2000.