Pitchfork
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Nominally, The Microcosm is a European sequel to I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America, 1950-1990, a heavyweight compilation of American new age music curated by Douglas Mcgowan of the California-based Yoga Records and released on Light in the Attic in 2013. But it’s not quite that simple. In ’70s America, cassettes by artists like Steve Halpern and Iasos became surprise best sellers, and new age became an industry, with a mail order network, its own chart—even, from 1987 onward, its own Grammy Award. But while this sort of music—mellow, instrumental, technologically savvy and concerned with matters of the spirit—certainly existed in Europe, it defied such easy categorization. In The Microcosm’s liner notes, McGowan explains how more than one artist featured refused to be involved if the project carried the “new age” tag. Instead, the collection is subtitled Visionary Music Of Continental Europe, and if that sounds vague, McGowan has set himself the task to prove otherwise, drawing lines between disparate musicians who share a belief in something greater, but are resolutely off on their own trip.
Whereas I Am the Center surveyed several generations, covering a 40-year window between 1950 and 1990, The Microcosm takes a tighter focus. The earliest of these 16 tracks dates from 1970—birth year of pioneering commercial synths like the ARP 2500 and Minimoog—and the latest from 1986, as analog instruments were being superseded by a new generation of digital music equipment. Some names here will be familiar to those even loosely acquainted with experimental European music of the period. The compilation begins with “Creation Du Monde,” a 1973 track by Vangelis, who would later find global fame scoring Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, but is featured here having just left the Greek prog rock group Aphrodite’s Child to explore more ambient realms. A serene soundscape made from a Hammond organ treated with tape echo, it found its way to soundtrack Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and thus to the ears of a generation of American youth open to enlightenment from above.
Also present are a number of names typically associated with krautrock—itself a term contested by its creators, but that’s another story. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, formerly of Kluster and Harmonia, is represented by “Wenn Der Südwind Weht,” which sends a blissfully centered melody pirouetting slowly through a soft cumulonimbus of synths. “Brüder Des Schattens—Söhne des Lichts” captures Popol Vuh some years after founder Florian Fricke had abandoned synthesizers as a route to transcendence; instead we hear them crafting a medieval-tinged devotional music with sitar, piano and church choir. Manuel Göttsching’s Ash Ra Tempel were, early on, one of the more fiery and eruptive kraut groups, but “Le Sourire Volé” is in line with the looping experiments of Göttsching’s solo work, guitar and Farfisa organ cast out in shimmering waves.
All great stuff, but even when pursuing spiritual ends, the krautrock groups veer towards studious art music, and the most intriguing material on The Microcosm comes from its more obscure, eccentric figures—a cast of mystics, shamans and oddballs who, in their friendly earnestness and paperback spirituality, feel somewhat closer to the American new age fraternity. Some, like Robert Julian Horky or Ariel Kalma, achieve rich soundscapes through homespun means: the former, a longhaired Austrian flautist, achieved his remarkable, pulsating “Dance for a Warrior” by running his instrument through an Eventide Harmonizer; the latter’s “Orguitar Soir” gently layers plucked guitar, droning Farfisa and the sound of birdsong captured in the Borneo rainforest. Others, like Ralph Lundsten or Gigi Masin, pare their music right back, leaving mere wisps of melody and warm tones that glow like embers.
Mcgowan’s liner notes are an essential accompaniment to this often abstract music, supplying valuable biographical context. Bernard Xolotl, a French-born synesthete and student of sacred geometry, explains his deeply trippy “Cometary Wailing (Night Plateau)” was recorded during a week of “musical transcendence rites” powered by MDMA. Enno Velthuys, whose “Morning Glory” is one of the compilation’s gentle highlights, is described as a “Dutch Syd Barrett,” a ’60s burnout who whiled away his dotage lost in a private world of psychedelic synth exploration. And there is the German-born musician Georg Deuter, whose “Spirales” is plucked from one of his 60 albums of reiki sound healing, made while resident of Rajneeshpuram, a commune in eastern Oregon founded by the Indian guru Osho. (In a dark twist of a very new-age kind, Rajneeshpuram entered the history books when Osho’s followers contaminated salad bars across Oregon with salmonella, poisoning at least 700 people—the largest biological terrorism attack in US history).
In short, good stories. But The Microcosm would stand up without them. New age might be a goldmine, but even a quick survey of the genre demonstrates you need to dig through plenty of fluff to find the good material, and it’s a testament to Mcgowan’s research that nothing here feels hokey or kitschy. If this feels like a slightly less coherent set than I Am the Center, blame the idea of visionary music itself, a category that—by its nature, perhaps—lacks clear boundaries. Still, none of that diminishes the power of the contents. As Robert Julian Horky puts it: “I do my work under any name or label. Time is a River, you know.”
Sat Nov 19 06:00:00 GMT 2016