Artist: Ash Ra Tempel
Album: New Age of Earth

Released: 1976
Label: Isadora

New Age of Earth Manual Gottsching
In 1976 Manuel Göttsching began investigating and then utilizing the keyboards, synthesizers and other new hardware of his day - which afforded him the opportunity of complete control over his music productions and expressions. Having moved on from the band setting (but retaining the name Ash Ra Tempel) he embraced the sonic possibilities and expressive capabilities of this amazing new technology - the strong creative connection intensified by the belief that Göttsching could now realize his ideas into complete works entirely on his own. The result was a significant solo journey into a new form of music informed by his rock roots, but which looked far further ahead than anyone in the mainstream ever thought to.

Quietly kept, his music carries through the potential of the synthesizer to create sounds never before heard or imagined. Bypassing conventional compositional structure, Göttsching's solo endeavor was completely intuitive - coming from some newly discovered region of his mind. A significant contribution to what came to be known as Kosmische Musik, New Age of Earth (47:55) assumes that the listener has the intelligence and literacy to seek this music's benefit. Far too mysterious and engaging to be considered Avant-Garde it was among the first albums of contemporary music to ask us to raise the level of our imaginations and encouraged a deeper kind of listening. Combining the human desire to invent and innovate with a highly personal notion of beauty musicians of this era produced works that were a contemplative counterweight to the truths of post-war Berlin. Composing for the future he hoped to live in, Göttsching's New Age of Earth awakened a multitude of latent beliefs that certainly would have lain dormant without it.

On Side A Göttsching warmly invites the listener to please, "Come along with me". Its three tracks are entrancing and enchanting, focussed and arranged around lush synthesizer leads and chords, a pulsating sequencer energy, and then the most loyal, dreamy electric guitar solo - luxuriating in the listening, the sonics, and the aural realm.

With our minds now fully engaged, Side B slowly builds its side long serenade for celestial synths. As sustaining string tones arise, breathe and thicken into somber chords, we move outward to the inner dark of Spacemusic. Our headspace journey aboard this harmonic assembly of sounds and notes reveals a luminous treatment of texture and shadow. Conjuring cosmic fictions in an unsettling remoteness the music gives rise to a rousing sense of propulsion. The minimalist cycling of motoring patterns moves at the speed of thought, gently pulling us ever onward, while solo synthesizer notes rise and fall in warm lead lines amidst the mechanistic intrigue. Nightdust concludes with a wandering electric guitar solo playing out into the middle distance - as we bid goodnight to those ghosts, and move on to our next dream.

For nearly 50 years New Age of Earth has excited the imagination of intrepid listeners, as well as the music of later generations - yet this work still seems to be emanating from some remote beautiful future just out of reach. Its essence is even now held in the mind of the maker and that of the listener. As you give this LP a spin, please be open to feeling Göttsching's new world - still waiting to be discovered... somewhere within the music and our selves.

- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END   22 May 2025

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