THE COSMIC JOKERS

What a cosmic joke did the Fates of Music bring to all prog rock lovers around the world when the (arguably) best krautrock ensemble ever never happened to be a proper band but a congregation of accomplished musicians who out of friendship and pleasure managed to do some excellent jam sessions in a recording studio. This is what The Cosmic Jokers were all about, and the second release "Galactic Supermarket" happens to be my personal favorite of the whole bunch released by Mr. Dierks. The reasons why this sophomore release by this (non-) krautrock project appeals to be as the apex are: 1) the sonic pallet is wider, hence allowing the musicians to expand more effectively on the magic that was occurring at the time; 2) the ensemble's sound in itself feels tighter and more focused, without losing that sort of free-form edge that usually makes the best of the special atmospheres we appreciate as typical of hard edged krautrock. The guitar leads happen to enjoy a more focused protagonist role, as the soaring moods and spacey displays provided by the dual keyboard inputs get conveniently enhanced in the mix. Regarding the latter point, the way in which the electric and grand pianos and the mellotron enter in places to state specific orchestrations and ornaments is just lovely. Grosskopf's drum kit also happens to be enhanced in the mix, in this way generating a strengthened role for the rhythmic pulsations evolving throughout the jams. Like I said, this ensemble sounds more powerful than in their already great debut release. 'Kinder des Alls' fills the album's first half, bearing a solid presence of jazz-rock cadences fueled by Grottsching's stylish phrases (somewhere between McLaughlin and Hendrix). The second section slows down into a set of cosmic languidness, featuring synthesizer and mellotron, building up a dreamy ambience closely related to pre-"Phaedra" TD. With the arrival of the third section, the lead guitar returns to the front, only this time sharing the spotlight with the pairing of Dollase's organ and Schulze's synthesizer, in a sort of refurbishment of the framework that had been elaborated in the first section. IMHO, this is the album's peak, but I won't dismiss the other sidelong track at all. Not at all. 'Galactic Supermarket' is constructed in the psychedelic prog rock parameters, with Schulze and Dollase emerging many times as the dual leaders of the musical journey. The third and last section happens to be more oriented toward the free-form logic, with all musicians gathered in a somewhat challenging chaos, yet still revealing how well each musician is paying attention to the others. For instance, we've got synthesized machine gun effects that punctuate some funky guitar strumming, while, in some other passage, Dollase's playful piano chords counteract against the rhythm duo's delivery. We've got also some spoken female vocals that seem to work as priestess' evocations. It is a pity that the fade-out should get in so soon. Anyway, I thank these guys for the music, which I regard as indispensable for all true lovers of Ash Ra Tempel, first-era Guru Guru and Agitation Free. A krautrock masterpiece, this is, indeed.

An all-star lineup here with Dierks,Schulze,Gottsching,Grosskopf and Dollase playing the instruments while Gilli and Rosie offer up some spoken vocals.Apparently this album and their debut were recorded while on a break from doing the "Tarot" album with Walter Wegmuller,a great record by the way.Anyway none of the band knew this was being recorded and when these LPs were released they received no royalties.Needless to say the man responsible was taken to court and punished but the damage was done.The good news is we get two really amazing Krautrock albums.I do like the debut better, mostly because of Gottsching's guitar work on the first track.There's not much to choose between the two though in my opinion.One thing "Galactic Supermarket" has that the debut doesn't is mellotron.There's more spoken female vocals too which are very psychedelc. "Kinder Des Alls" is divided into three parts but they all blend together.Same with the other song on here.Drums,guitar and keyboards lead the way early.Gottsching sounds amazing as usual.Check out the mellotron to end (part a) and to start (part b) it's so majestic and beautiful.Keyboards come in and other sounds as mellotron continues until after 3 1/2 minutes.Organ takes over.The final part has those female spoken words,drums and lots of Klaus Schulze.Great section. "Galactic Supermarket" is very spacey to open and it's building as guitar and drums join in.It settles as whispered words come in then guitar.It turns spacey with organ and drums come in.Very experimental to end this first part.The second part is calm to begin with as percussion and a beat starts.Sounds like flute too.The guitar is making some noise.Synths before 4 minutes as drums pound.Organ late.The last part opens with Klause and Female vocals that echo.Very psychedelic.Drums are joined by the guitar which starts to lead with spacey synths joining in as well.Crazy out of control stuff here as spoken words are heard.A wall of sound after 7 minutes to the end. Every Krautrock fan needs to hear THE COSMIC JOKERS first two albums.Classic.

This masterpiece caused a deep satisfaction to me, which should not be a surprise as I'm a fan of the early TANGERINE DREAM and ASH RA TEMPEL, and the members of those groups are essential part of this project group.

A-side introduces the elements which please me so much; Beautiful calm melodies and ethereal, open echo treatments creating aesthetically perfect vintage cosmic music. There are also mantra like progressions slighlty reminding the record of YATHA SIDHRA. The drums enter after 4 minutes to dance gently to the back ground. Music envolves slowly and logically, directing to both outer and inner space, driving to a more deeper level after an invitating beginning, seducing to listen to the music intensively. Calm, with slightly oriental tones lead to stong passage, sounding TANGERINE DREAM with drums, creating a perfect synthesis from these elements.

B-side opens with beautiful quiet reverb prayer, starting another journey, resembling strongly the styles of the main groups of the musicians, being beatutiful, calm psychedelic voyage to the realms of light and shadows, later hovering trough abstract musical entities which some of them sound like borne from innovation of PINK FLOYD's late 60's sounds, expanded to full capacity when the restraints of pioneers and commercial pressures are conquered in music like this.

In my opinion this album contains really serious and interesting music, and I would recommend it to anybody interested of this music genre!

This album along with the group's self titled record are in my opinion the most pleasing of this interesting project band.

A-side opens straight with drums to an intense acid rock improvisation, which evolves pleasantly and following the logic of the dreams, leading to a beautiful religious cosmic revelation in assured KLAUS SCHULZE way. Some jazzy tryout's lead to more open and free musical playground.

B-side presents synthesizer layers which lead to a warming up for the avantgardistic trip, going more deeper than the first side of the album. Later the jam starts to get stable rhythm and groove from the guitar and drums. Interesting contrast between accessible and elitist. Also cosmic ladies Gille and Rosie visit the album for some speakings over the shamanstic sequences. Sadly the music fades out as there sounded something interesting to start with the keyboards. Maybe this sense frustration is the cause for my general dislike to fadeout solutions. If they do not affect the listening experience but support it, then there's no problems with it.

Anyway, thisi is in my opinion a very good comsic krautrock album, but maybe not as good as their self- titled masterpiece!

This album has some quite experimental elements, but the tracks build up quite logically and evolve as an nice cosmic journey for the listener accepting the invitation. The listener is wakened up with strong drones, opening up a voyage trough the hallway of mirroring illusions, leading to a calm, large musical void. Heavy experimental zones follow up, leading to an acid rock jam building over pulsing synths and introducing a nice piano riff. Calm sequences resembling TANGERINE DREAM's "Rubycon" are presented, before the music fades to a romantic piano playing. Hovering cosmic corridors lead to more longer progressions in abstract electronic space, and a free form architecture of sounds is revealed. The long closing track has quite much similar elements than PINK FLOYD's "Saucerful of Secrets", which influence to the sound of these musicians is evident.

I think this album is a compromise of the long logical space jams of the self title master piece, and the less coherent "Gilles Zeitschiff" recording, being more pleasant than the later but not as great as the first one. Quite interesting record still!

In the start Ms. Gille Letman introduces the group over a cosmic soundscape and tells some wonderous stories for some time, after the concept album of short tracks emerge. The styles of the tracks vary from cosmic blues, short mellow scenes, acid rock and experimental drongings to celestial cosmic visions. But there are some factors here which reduce the listening pleasure quite much for me; The tracks building up the album sides are very short (unlike in the previous records), and the ideas do not evolve to the full potential but create a chaotic mix of emotional excerpts jumping from mood to another displeasingly. They work more like a background to the voices which are constantly narrating the album in Germany, and as I am not very good in German I do not understand much of it. There are some beautiful moments in the record, but the listener is in my opinion constantly disrupted and prevented from enjoying them. When compared to the other albums of this group which I have heard, this album was a disappointment, sounding little like a really stoned mix-up of ASH RA TEMPEL's track's with Rosi's narration and their "Seven Up" album done with Timothy Leary.

The Cosmic Jokers present here an essential bite of their tonic art that happens to backfires completely and in an ugly way, since this is their worst album and also an incoherent kind of leftover into the subtle and narcotic genre of kraut rock; it's really the bad seed of a foolish and fever-struck music, since, from the cover art, who has taken up a drug and looks dizzy, to the music itself, which is between an impure experimentalism and a deaf-played meld of forces and sound exhaustions, all things don't sound regular, nor impressive. The character wouldn't actually sound that bad, with music having a little of the technical value, infusion madness or perpetual exploration of sense, but those are missing or are superficially abused, in a more than complete way.

The thing is The Cosmic Jokers made such an elementary splendid session of music, of asceticism and of inner exploration, that along what they released a factor of strange, un-shaped or splintered music was also discovered or, more realistically, unleashed (even more realistically: carelessly released). The entire nature of these compositions, however fantastic, durable, wild, unique and sapient they were during the year of late 1973 and the entire year of 1974 (Cosmic Jokers remains a cult and a kraut moment that hits you hard and even leaves you dependent or kraut-o-phobic), reached a moment of seizure and started having dry subjects: the sheer epic, monumental, abstract and psycho-babbled interplay of forces and chaotic composures went on contemplating a bit the pseudo-psychic side lyricalness and sound systematizers (in a second phase known best as the "intergalactic sound exploration" or the "rock and masked joy of kraut anathemas"), till everything became a tired, repeated (as in darkening the same dark spots) or even hippie-funny dilettante music - the kind Gilles Zeitscheiff "excels" at.

The band of Cosmic Jokers isn't the same as usual...it is in fact the strongest formation ever joining in to play all of music's contractions; what misses is fruit drug and those essential and unrepeated signs of style and snideness. The reciter and vocalist of this amalgamative album is not Rosi, but Gille Lettman, obviously "Gilles" - without saying she alone can't bear the hypnotism of cosmic vocals, her lip sink is a bit too laughable: words about the members and the great kraut bands, snoozing off in their trip of mind, words about "Tim" [Timothy Leary] and "Tangerine Dream" (who have nothing to do with this album), words and sensual licking vocals about the endless rehearse of the kraut trance and of the rock monumental zeitgeist - and so, in a build up concept that only doesn't share enough power. The instrumentalists aren't doing a fine job themselves: Sergius Golowin, a fantastic poet of kraut rock and psychedelic emotions, is invited and what he achieves is simply to jumble with some lines and etherisms, with some mimed expressions and powerless text/meditation incisions. Out of the original quintet, I can't feel Klaus Schulze's sensational synthesizing or Grosskopf's berserk drum-douches, but Gottsching suffers almost the most, having to do very conventional and spontaneous hazes. Hermut Enke, Schulze's and Gottsching's great colleague from Ash Ra, joins the crowd, but hasn't got even the slightest shadow on the accent of the band. Maybe all of this is extreme, but the music of a embarrassing act can't be made by artists that were right-minded.

The memphistophelic arrangement of music, digression, beat-bleaches and experimental hallucination builds up its own concept, but it is the worst shaped of all, plus it has many signs of implosions and abandoned art, rather than explosions and defied orientations: a general characteristic in Gilles Zeitschiff is that it contrasts all the magnitude and insanity of the previous sound trips and acid stylizations, coming with pure minimalism and an almost art-pop-like collage of different tunes, fuzzes and distortions - it isn't sweet, it's sardonic and, at such a slow pace, depraved. The kraut dimensions are also made out of popular, hilarious, much too rarely preserved or hysterical cold motions, however ambitious the kind of sound-synthesizing and cosmic-morphing are. The style is that of Sci-Fi Party and Planeten Sit-In (given lots of pieces and different themes), but it's a weaker as production. With vibrant and full songs (rather than cheeky small excerpts), it is really deadpanning that Gilles Zeitschiff isn't valorous, nor a fascinating act.

There are times this numbly fragile Cosmic Joke sounds that bad it makes me think of a hard one-star rate. I'll nevertheless resume to mildly two stars and sum up the essential: it is the worst art moment and kraut shackle from the band and their overly exquisite sessions, spiking up a lot of acid and feverish music for no exact or extreme purpose or style. For short and minimal kraut albums, it's fine to check the short and silhouetted explorations Ash Ra Tempel have made, more conveniently and nonabrasive. For the Cosmic Jokers' grand scenario, it's imperious that this is your last album on the list.

This is the fourth authentic and chronologically produced album by the terrific ensemble of Cosmic Jokers, getting released within the same full year of composition and captivation, 1974, only with the difference that it actually combines new and adjacent music with excerpts and twitches from diverse such sessions, sort of like being a brand new release in a compiled inspiration and thematic. The ensemble is, as usual, Dieter Dierks as mastermind and joy-ride artist, Jurgen Dollase with impressive characters of keyboards but also a lush taste of noise and sound, coming incidentally or rather coincidentally on all krautrock levels, Manuel Gottsching as an impervious guitarist of rock, acid, psych and a bit of blues, mostly fancying a relaxed but never too far from hypnotic interpretation, Harald Grosskopf plays percussions and different rhythm emulations, just like the entire ensemble experiments instrumentality beyond the material and realistic sound, and Klaus Schulze helps a lot with the synthesizers and the mega-woof of an electronic emphasis having cosmic, abstract and void torrentiality. Much to a closed circle of music and impression, Sci-Fi Party invites Rosie to do some shadow-hollow recitations, just like a lot from Galactic Supermarket's sorrow and LSD-siac moments were blossomed under her voice.

As expected, this fourth album treats the singular, particular and vast to explore style the band has patented within all the rest of the albums , mostly pointing referentiality towards the ambitious kraut rock envisages, the electronic residues of experimentality, the well-imagined and roughly produced sound-hassle and noise-rock, plus towards an exploration of senses, difficult music and attractive shock-mind this ensemble, more than anyone else (though we can't call it quite supreme, in the end) permanently desired to explored. Madness music, confusion rock, tantra meditation and psycho-navigation can be qualities of both what is great and rotten, fascinating and elementary in Cosmic Jokers' strong affection for music and concept. A lot of the "intergalactic trip" ideal can impress on how the album is both an uncharacteristic moment of music and style refutation and also shrieks towards cosmic and side-flipping bursts of imagination, once music actually becomes the leitmotif of sounds and harmonies and affects you on the scale of a mental drive and a psychic drift. The rest falls in other soundscapes and rock-deliciousnesses.

This entire pivotal style mostly had a great and ravishing style precision within the prime albums (the self-titled, plus a bit of Galactic Supermarket), leaving open a few more sessions of independent music, abstract kraut, cosmic lubricate shouts and more rock emphasis and glamor, not to mention that a low point was eventually reached as well, by weak and indifferent examples of music experiment (Planeten Sit-In fulfilling a dream of kraut-osmosis, but being too slow and bitter-tonal; Gilles Zeitschiff being a disaster). Sci-Fi Party has a pleasantly achieved craft, voluminousness and regular quality, something that can point it out as the best, most concrete and most indiscreet to listen album out of the entire second (more easy, more short and more vital sounding) phase. A lot of the usual vibrations and polymerizations, not at all artistic but very powerful, will create a long-reaching effort within this album, which sounds good and heavy plus is made out of cold emotions and a rough interpretation.

There is, furthermore, a split of personality within Sci-Fi's marauding composition, eight pieces creating a solid and hysterical point of kraut and sound-rock view, but also dividing a lot of themes, concepts and cosmic-flairs into different impressions. Most impressive are those experimental and woof-frantic moments when the kraut rock kicks in relentlessly, the sad and fragile visions do a lot of hazy tricks, plus everything is concealed under hypnotic and flaming sensations - it is mostly the craft of electronic harsh soundscapes and genuine acid mumbles. Thanks to the concept, the narration impresses an independent story, one both humorous and painfully dripping. The rock accents lead to full blows by Gottsching or Grosskopf, in a way this music is psychotic, but also heavy and dynamic (pieces like "South Philly Willy" being more easy, whilst Im Reich Der Magier, for example, is hard and roguish). A lot of impressions remind of kraut rock, cosmic sound music and trauma sensibility, all of them having a general spontaneity and brave concept, much by Sci-Fi Party being both a torrid and recalcitrant hippy-hazy trip and an artistic moment of diverse and fine "interplay of forces".

Sci-Fi Party is the best Cosmic Jokers you can recommend after (and along with) the two epic classics, by a mixture of rock and tough kraut and by a synthy-sensual trip and a fix of emotions which sound robust, well-conceptual and illuminate a vision that's sustained by powerful music. In shorter words, it is a pleasing strong session (or compiled session) by the Jokers, instead of a second-hand experiment.

Planeten Sit-In becomes the third accounted full album out of a huge, really huge, session of music and fun-cracker year that was 1974 for the Cosmic Jokers ensemble, respectively for Jurgen Dollase, Dieter Dierks (the founder and, in much way, the artist behind the scene and the smokes), Klaus Schulze, Harald Grosskopf and Manuel Gottsching (all five with already a huge role in the same genre, whether on experimental electronic transitions, kraut rock scene affiliation, noise and sound special excitement etc.). Usually there are other guests invited (such as the dark diva Rose), but this particular album happens to be a creation based on only the wonderful quintet and its power of collaboration and dissociation.

After Cosmic Jokers and Galactic Supermarket, two huge main and best projects, containing all the major asperities of such a vision, rather then letting loose a free-joy chemical affair, Planeten Sit-In flips on changes and on a different casual harass from the wicked and perhaps sound-overdosed ensemble. It still represents the funk and freak art of this specific moment (Cosmic Jokers after all can't be called original, but can be called massively independent in kraut exhibition), just like four total albums out of five will be artistically challenging, but it moods very differently, under specially changed (or lofty resulted) different emotions and impressions. Nothing relates so visibly as to the change of piece dynamics. Planeten Sit-In splits into 13 fragments of conceptual and experimental music; down deep, the split of a brain-splat of even more fragments and fractals of sound, kraut emotions, virile insatiable effects or palpitating special grooves. The sound, however, is the most entitled to define this album's passive-aggressive flinch, since, after, as I've said, epic amounts of kraut rock and electronic essential wobbling and energy-burning (under heavy, drastic, hurtful, or rather psychic and simplistic means, from one composition to another), this one comes very abstract in all its terms: whether on unfocused powers of sound, different colors of melody and acid rock, distinctive qualities of an artist in his special zone of forces or whether on the safe side on feeling good, trans-moved, emphased and colossally navigated through this creation's cosmic or abyssal, hippie or new-evolved, sound-lambasted or form-deranged, augmented or cold-chopped points of view.

The time is very short, the thirteen pieces even seem to shrink time itself, since about thirteen is the number of different transitions and curios (or hazardous and inconsiderate) effect-palliations as well. A few pieces, under one minute, involve either a precious form of liquid, organic or apoplectic sound movement, the way nothing can be compared with it, but neither the piece shares a great stun. Bigger emotions, eventually, lead to something of conceptual movement. But it's only a cosmic or colloidal imagination, leading to the same chantry or inspiration, while the music rotates and succumbs underneath it all. The main styles are between pure hard electronic and kraut mellowed rock implosions, between a feeling of ugly transcendence and effect-voluminousness, between the raw stuff that (surprisingly) aren't of a bicker level here and the keen artistic development (mostly technical and electro-dynamical) that doesn't sound like the best characterized language at all. The feeling is very strange, all the way up to abstract derisions and loss of intelligent affections, simple rhythms and psychedelic juices of cerebral flashlight, rock-nude small drips and relatively nocive smokes of inspired music and galactic-drift, space-melodies and micro-tonic phobic notions, and it is a feeling only reluctant on being healthy or well-achieved. Mostly instrumental (some voice-visions included, along the way), this is not a fabricated and purely technical album, but it seeks out a similar mind-feed through which the quintet evolved such massive and monstrous kraut totem experiences; without getting very far, instead sticking to basic shapes that explode in the most possible strong effects and revolutionizing avant-ticks.

To a definite sense, this album is part of the Cosmic Jokers trend that doesn't equal its best efforts. Of the same caliber, one single album (Sci Fi Party) will have some generally astounding moves and only that. Planeten Sit-In is a dark experiment, left in a gravity of small art and kraut meanings. Two stars, perhaps better for those with awesome tastes into this.

The second and the last bright album of the complex and viscous collective of Cosmic Jokers (the rest of their full year session brings a lot of passionate explorations of any colloidal meditation movements, chanting rains or effect mind-blows, but the quality downfalls step by step, into oblivion), Galactic Supermarket impress at about the same level that the first and tough-accommodating album reached its potential, its mirroring excess or its perspective of unique or heard, but rarely exploited that massively krautrock and electronic instrumentality. The concept comes of the same fiber, the plentifulness of the essence combines the typical aggressiveness, total distraction, experimentalism and shrewd of notions - most likely as to understand a better way through character, but to act out of the same lukewarm engrossment.

With two new guests honoring the session, out of which Rosie definitely shines as the kraut vocal queen (though, just like in Ash Ra, she isn't keen on dominating or - more in these albums - to act much - stereotypical vocal grunts, nevertheless, have a precise effect of overdose and technical sound impression - or of voices from the dark plains). In rest, the work still comprises, by its invited geniuses the idea of cosmic exploration and, sometimes, the persiflage of the "deepness", the abstract or absurd psychedelism, drawn into unnatural powers, the abundant and abscond influence of kraut rock mania and difficult sound-caching, plus the early stages and stales of electronic (and hollow noise) evolution - in a tumultuous, sometimes impossible, sometimes made more popular and more accessible, constrain of music, meditation and infusion. To add the details of LSD-ism and consumable hard music that biographical points insist on, The Cosmic Jokers remains beyond a junkie's session and a hippie or dominant character and comprises, for yet one more album, the essence of every artistic impact already mentioned.

Galactic Supermarket (an example of the cosmic homage brought, more or less evidently, by the session's chemistry and irony art) starts with Kinder Des Alls, a perfect example of what comes in rest with the common Cosmic Jokers' trend and what satisfies a second style and point of view - the beginning is furious and ambulatory, mainly out of rock rhythm gestures, but deep into boneless sound as well: synth-splash and electronic chaos and dynamic, drums fantasizing ambition, flute cordial gestures, free-moves on a strict influence and impression; a piece of sound-swarm, much until a popular leitmotif interferes, one of cosmic and ambient seizure, taking an orbital and abstract surround or petrifying the mood into heavy atmosphere. The exit from the tension brings organs, drones and draining-power synths, a bit of leftover from the dandy previous beat rhythm, a lot of sticky and upsetting mind-meditation, impression of various anaerobic sounds and powerful creations of a glut-cosmic experience. The finale "wounds" and exploratory sensations of this experiment lose into insatiability, explosiveness and, like I've said, total distraction.

Galactic Supermarket, the second monolith composition, brings forth ambient complexity and abstract jam, in a more typical flash and dimension of cosmic rock, sound collision and drastic numbness. Reality stays ripped apart yet again, but the vision bleaches out towards instrumentality arrangements and voidal or ethereal dimensions and spaces. A piece of, even a bit, classic progressive rock and referential psychedelic tacts. Ash Ra Tempel, with Gottsching as guitar-meister, had a couple of such experiments right at hand, during their gastric and hard-push period of experiments.

A second and last best expression from the Cosmic Jokers. More sympathetic to rock-jam ideas, synth-profoundness and a proverbial point of pleasure and excision, this album reaches the massive art of the band more easily and more solvently. Much to this kind of "Cosmic Joking", the other albums, however bad or drained of energy, will shape themselves.