TAROT

Schulze, Westrupp and Göttshing : seams to be three good reasons to purchase this album. (The LP version was coming with real Tarot cards... isn't it strange ?). Strange I said ; we have here some sophisticated experimentations, but it sounds nearly like Faust or Ash Ra Tempel. Music is good, but vocals are not, quite annoying. Julian Cope said great things about this album in his Krautrock Sampler, but I was still disappointed. I though it was the next "Ege Bamyasi" of something... I found a real average one. For collectors.

Basically this is another Cosmic Joker/Couriers album, as the album is credited to the Swiss artist Walter Wegmuller, but Berkers, Dollasse, Grosskopf (all three from Walenstein), Schulze (after his TD and ART days but not yet into his solo career proper), Henke & Gotsching (both from Ash Ra Tempel) and Westrupp (of W&W) are all present on this double album (and double Cd as well). Please read my friend Phillipe Blache's excellent intro on the Kosmische Muziek on the Wegmuller entry-page for more on the ramifications of this German movement that was one of the specificity of the Krautrock movement.

In either case, this lengthy double concept album (you guessed it about Tarot) is one of the most expensive album around in its full original form: indeed the vinyl came out with a full deck of cards drawn buy Wegmuller himself from 68 to 74 partly in association with Sergius Golowin, another driving spike of the Cosmic Joker/Courrier thing. While Wegmuller takes on vocal duties (more often reciting duties really), the music is really up to the all star line-up ion the album, recording in the well know Dieter Dierks studios and released on the legendary Ohr label. The music is just as suitably spacey as you could ever wish it to be, and while not fascinating, it is often enthralling, even if the concept is rather hard to follow (unless you grasp German good enough), but who cares, anyway? Tarots are not one of my passions, anyway. But there is a storyline explained in two languages, but I never paid attention to it as the album can be enjoyed without that side of the oeuvre. As you can easily guess, there are imperfections and lengths, but nothing to scare anyone, even the most demanding progheads.

While there are more essential Cosmic Couriers projects, this one is also much worthy of your investigation, but forget looking after the original vinyl, though. The Spalax reissue (in digipack) is an excellent bet. Hard not to give its fourth star.

Walter Wegmuller was a Swiss painter who was an expert on the subject of tarot cards. He is not a musician, but is on this double album to offer up his thoughts on each tarot card with his spoken and whispered words. He has an all-star cast playing the music here including Manuel Gottsching and Hartmut Enke both from ASH RA TEMPEL, Jurgen Dollase, Harald Grosskopf and Jerry Berkers from WALLENSTEIN and Walter Westrupp from W&W and Klaus Schulze. These guys were also known as THE COSMIC COURIERS and THE COSMIC JOKERS. Dieter Dierks and Rosi are also listed as guests. For more background info and the subject matter of this recording I would highly recommend you read the bio here at ProgArchives and Sean Trane's review. The spoken words are all in German which suits me fine as it is all about the amazing music. Speaking of which this is such a great example of what Krautrock was all about. "Tarot" is a cosmic trip with mellotron, synths and electronics creating a spacey base, while the guitar, bass, drums and percussion create a variety of sounds and styles to make your trip both an exciting and relaxing one. I'd like to touch on some of my favourite tracks.

Disc One opens with the only English on the recording as the band is introduced one by one as an uptempo melody is played. Nice."Die Hohepriesterin" features slowly spoken words as waves of mellotron and sound drift along. Great sound. "Der Herrscher" has some fantastic guitar playing front and center from Manuel as spoken words come in. This is one of the few tracks that isn't spacey. Love the guitar that goes on and on. "Der Hohepriester" has this beautiful piano melody with intricate guitar as whispered vocals and flute come in. Simply an emotional, uplifting song that has to be heard. "Der Wagen" opens quietly but the sound is building. Very cool. Spoken words before 2 minutes. Some prominant drumming on this one as spacey sounds are shooting around. A wall of sound before 3 minutes. Spacey winds are blowing before 5 minutes. "Die Gerechtigkeit" is dark and serious with haunting spoken words. It's like impending doom is near. While the next song "Der Weise" is light with piano, mellotron and fragile spoken words. Gorgeous song. "Die Kraft" features tribal-like drumming as Gottsching lights it up with his guitar.

On Disc Two "Die Massigkeit" opens with spoken words as the guitar rips it up big time. Eerie sounds 2 minutes in as guitar is still on fire. Organ replaces guitar late. "Der Teufel" features dual guitar melodies, whispered vocals and flute. "Die Zerstorung" opens with piano as softly spoken vocals come in then waves of mellotron. Explosive sounds before 3 minutes as drums go crazy. "Die Sterne" builds slowly as guitar and spoken vocals come in. Drums 2 minutes in before synths and mellotron washes arrive before 3 minutes. Spacey, cosmic winds 5 1/2 minutes in. "Das Gericht" features beautiful, heavenly sounds(mellotron etc.) as spoken words come in. Heaven must sound like this. The final track is "Die Welt" and it ends this double album in fine style. Marching-like drums early as guitar makes some noise. A great rhythm comes out of this with psychedelic guitar playing over top. Awesome sound. Spoken words and spacey waves with mellotron come in. Percussion 3 minutes in. It gets so intense 5 minutes in as Manuel is absolutely on fire ! Drums continue to pound. A wall of spacey sounds can't contain the blistering guitar. In the end though the spacey sounds win out as the song and album drift away.

Essential for Krautrock fans in my opinion. This is the stuff that legends are made of. 4.5 stars.

Right from the off you know you're in for something a bit different with 'Tarot'. I had a smile on my face as soon as I heard the superb opening line 'Stamp your feets'. It might not mean that much to non English speakers, but to me it was hilarious. This is without doubt, one of the best Krautrock albums I've heard. The mighty Klaus Schulze plays a part in proceedings here but he is somewhat in the background. Wee Walter is now 74 years of age (b.25.02.37) which means he was already 35 when this was recorded! God, I feel old...

If ever the word 'Cosmic' was relevant, it's here. I can just imagine Walter Wegmüller singing with his mad freaky marble like eyes staring wildly as all life deteriorates in front of his face.

But even better- we've got 'Walter Westrupp' giving you what you'd expect from the other half of a smashed up lunatic who's had far too many mushrooms. The whole album has a completely wonky feel about it. It comes in waves, from what sounds like a definite plan of action, that rapidly declines into a crazy whacked out jam.

Manuel Göttsching helps out too later on in the album with some very 'Ashra Tempel' guitars which are very suited to the music. Cor Blimey. We've got Jerry Berkers on bass as well! Now this is what I call a Supergroup...

At the top of the tree is Walter himself, sounding a bit like David Koresh from Waco, sermonising about, this, that, and God knows what. Baah!, Könen sie Deutch Sprechen anyone?. This is a lengthy album that stretches out to 2 CD's. It doesn't let up in it's smacked up oddness. Personally, I love it. Cosmic Jokers fans will love this... guaranteed

My apologies in advance for what promises to be a more than usually long-winded review, but this almost mythical twin-disc set presents a daunting challenge. How can anyone truly evaluate such an immense musical journey, especially when the itinerary changes with quicksilver indifference every next minute?

And does it really deserve five-star recognition? On one hand the album was strictly a blue moon novelty project: a kitchen-sink Krautrock stew of haphazard detours, digressions and dead ends. Ringleader Walter Wegmüller has been described by more than one source as a "Swiss gypsy", which sounds a bit like an oxymoron. But it was the same gypsy vagabond instinct that made the album a bona-fide cross-section of counterculture Germany in the early 1970s, cutting a mile-wide swath across one of the most fertile musical landscapes in modern history.

More than that, the album finally realized all of producer R.U. Kaiser's kosmische fever dreams. Over its four sides of vinyl it managed to blend the fuzzy mysticism of "Lord Krishna von Goloka" and the psy-fi rock 'n' roll train wreck of "Seven Up" into a single messy but holistic vision, performed by an all-star cast of Krautrock superstars bringing some of their best stuff to the sessions. If you were wondering what an embryonic ambient guru like KLAUS SCHULZE might sound like playing lead synthesizers in a rock band, here's your answer: more Eno than Emerson, unsurprisingly.

Heck, the project even spawned an entirely separate album: ASH RA TEMPEL's "Join Inn", created spontaneously during a lull in rehearsals.

The extra focus was in the concept: a musical illumination of the Tarot, with each track representing another card in the Major Arcana (no wonder the album stretched to a second disc, otherwise each selection would have been around 90-seconds long, tops). The idea may have been narrowly defined, but the finished album was an embarrassment of riches. How's this for variety:

- The dumb fun of "Der Narr" (The Fool)

- The uninhibited Krautrock cacophony of "Der Magier" (The Magician)

- The holy drones of "Die Hohepriesterin" (The High Priestess)

- The cosmic folk dance and testosterone guitar thrash of "Die Herrscherin" and "Der Herrscherr" (The Empress, and The Emperor)

...and that's only Side One of the first LP. Elsewhere the album spans a latitude of style from the charming, childlike lullaby of "Der Weise" (The Hermit, spoken and sung by Klaus Schulze) to the almost Post-Punk "Die Prüfung" (The Hanged Man). The latter opens Disc Two with an unexpected barrage of cheesy rhythm machines, odd processed vocals, and broken guitar shards straight off the streets of Manchester circa 1980 (think Joy Division, or at least Crispy Ambulance).

I'm not sure how closely each excerpt interprets its own card: "Der Tod" (Death) is merely a single, ascending synthesizer note, rising into the ether for 80-seconds. But anyone who thinks the Kosmische Kurieres were all just a bunch of stoners with no sense of humor needs to hear the Master of Ceremonies intro to the album (illustrating The Fool, of course). The mock cabaret presentation of each player, in fractured English vaudeville style, recalls something better fitting a GROBSCHNITT gig.

Wonderful stuff, to be sure. But it's all only a warm-up to the encore of Side Four: 23- minutes of arguably the most miraculous Space Rock ever created. Words fail me here, much to your obvious relief, I'm sure. It's enough to speculate that while the tapes were rolling, and the jam was nearing it's final crescendo, riding a tidal wave of Teutonic funk, cascading mellotrons, and Manuel Göttsching's searing guitar licks, at that moment the Cosmic Egg was well and truly fried under the empyrean light of R.U. Kaiser's Kingdome Come, with a side of hash browns added free of charge.

Lacking a proper frame of reference you could argue that the music works even better without Wegmüller himself, that his intermittent orations, declamations, chanting, and occasional pre-verbal groan (see: "Die Prüfung") interrupt some truly stellar psychedelia. But the album really needs to be heard alongside the other releases on the Kosmische Musik label. Unlike Sergius Golowin or Timothy Leary, Walter Wegmüller was far more in tune with the actual musicians under his direction, and vice versa.

STEVE HACKETT would later borrow the same album concept for his own solo debut ("Voyage of the Acolyte", 1975). But no way could an English gentleman-progger from Pimlico embrace the dark necromantic core of the Tarot like a 1971 Krautrocker. Wegmüller would never make another record, and the singularity of this effort (early editions included reproductions of the artist's own hand-painted oracle cards) is only one part of its enduring legend.

The other is of course the fact that it led directly to the infamous COSMIC JOKERS (qv): a misguided attempt by Kaiser to continue the same musical trip. His ploy almost worked too, but given the alarming aftermath of that scandal I'll take a messy classic like "Tarot" over the classic mess of the Cosmic Jokers any day.

Essentially the first version of the Cosmic Jokers series of albums that flooded the burgeoning Krautrock rock scene in 1974, WALTER WEGMÜLLER's mysterious sole album TAROT emerged in the year 1973 and has remained a favorite of the underground kosmische scene ever since. The story of WEGMÜLLER and the making of TAROT is every bit as strange as the koschmische sounds that Germany's Krautrock scene were bringing to fruition in the wild and unabated early 1970s.

WEGMÜLLER was the sone of Romani gypsy travelers, born in Bern, Switzerland. He travelled extensively throughout Europe and India making paintings and jewelry. Best known as a visual artist, it was WEGMÜLLER's personal design of 22 tarot cards which caught the attention of Timothy Leary who introduced him to Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser of Ohr Records. The label coaxed WEGMÜLLER into recording an entire album based on the themes of the tarot cards, a discipline that WEGMÜLLER had become quite the expert in.

After rounding up the proper musicians to pull it off, the ambitious double album featured an all-star cast of Germany's best known musicians including Ash Ra Tempel members Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke on guitars and progressive electronic wizard Klaus Schulze jumping back into the drummer's seat. Other cast members included Walter Westrupp (of Witthüser & Westrupp on acoustic guitar), Jürgen Dollase (of Wallenstein on keyboards), Jerry Berkers (also of Wallenstein on bass) and another Berlin School stalwart Harald Großkopf also returning to the drums.

The ambitious original double album box set version which featured a complete collection of tarot cards has long been out of print and likewise a sought after collector's gem but this double album has luckily found a more modern reissue as a 2 CD digipak on the Spalax label released in 1994. This was a veritable super group effort with each musician contributing to the composiitons with WEGMÜLLER himself providing the visual artwork and lyrics. The album was further helped by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser & Gille in the producer's set with extra assistance from Dieter Dirks and Rosi.

TAROT is the ultimate classic acid trip Krautrock album in the vein of early Ash Ra Temple, the most tripped out moments of Can (think "Aumgn" from "Tago Mago") and Amon Düül II. This album featured 22 tracks with each representing the individual tarot cards such as "Der Narr" = "The Fool." "Der Magier" = "The Magician" and so forth. The album encompassed the most spaced out progressive electronic sounds as well as gentle free floating space rock, lush folk music, piano rock, funk and of course psychedelic rock. While many super group projects suffer from the watering down affect of too much of a good thing, TAROT is a brilliant display of top notch musicians putting their egos aside for the sake of a greater project.

One could think of this as the perfect marriage of Ash Ra Tempel's guitar-drenched heavy psych with Schulze's extraterrestrial electronic journeys, Wallenstein's tendencies for heavier riffs based rock and Westripp's cosmic folk. The album is well paced and despite a whopping 85 minutes of playtime, still maintains the perfect romp on the lysergic express of the early 1970s. TAROT is also notable for being one of the minority of Kraut albums that spilled over the border, in this case the German speaking regions of Switzerland. Perhaps the biggest drawback of TAROT is the fact that WEGMÜLLER wasn't either a musician or a singer and the album is limited to spoken word vocals and some that are half sung but overall it suits the kosmische detachment that the album was going for.

A unique anomaly of the Kraut world, TAROT could also be considered the epitome of what the scene was all about and the sessions were so successful that Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser invited the musicians involved to perform at various acid parties where they were recorded without their knowledge. This led to the controversial series of Cosmic Jokers albums that were released the following year in 1974 but at least we can say for certain that all performers on this album participated with their full consent and all the better for it since unlike some of the other looser jamming tendencies of many Kraut albums, this one seems like a masterwork of directed focus on the outcome. Short of masterpiece status due to the mopey and oft monotonous vocals, TAROT nevertheless is one of my favorite authentic examples of true tripper's paradise.