GILLES ZEITSCHIFF

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser was the founder of Ohr Records and the Kosmische Musik label, and those two labels have released some legendary Krautrock albums during the seventies. Rolf with the help of Dieter Dierks brought in the who's who of the Krautrock sub-genre, and held jam sessions between February and May of 1973. The dark side of this is Klaus Schulze and the others, not knowing they were being recorded during these sessions, let alone being released to the public. Schulze filed legal action after finding out, as the musicians were not getting royalties. The albums were pulled until the the legal action solved that. Having said all of this, there are so many "wow" moments with the five albums worth of material that they released from these sessions, and all were released in 1974.

"Galactic Supermarket" is my favourite of those followed by the self-titled debut. Both of those feature two side long tracks while here on "Gilles Zeitschiff" we get the music broken down into fourteen songs. Kind of like the "Sci-Fi Party" release where we get eight tracks, and that one grew to a four star album in my world, and I feel it's better than this one. My issue with this record is that they chose to use the mellow, electronic based music from these sessions. Plus these songs have way too much of Rolf's girlfriend Gilles speaking over the music with that echo. Which is why this album has her name as the title of it, and she's on the cover, clearly as fried as the rest of them. It's interesting that she gets writing credits on ten of the fourteen tracks though. She is also given equal billing on two album covers as the name Sternenmadchen is her alias, meaning Starmaiden.

There are male vocals too by the way, as this is the most vocal heavy of the five releases. Sergius Golowin, Timothy Leary and Walter Wegmuller help with those. Lots of atmosphere on this one. For the krautrock fan, is this not like having one of those wonderful dreams? Having all of this incredible talent in the same room jamming away, blitzed on acid. Imagine if you were an RPI fan and something similar happened with the greats from those seventies bands hanging out making music back in the day. Of course you can apply this to your favourite sub-genre and imagine. This happened, worts and all, I'm so glad it did.

This is the only one of the five I've not given 4 stars to, but I also don't have "Planet Sit-In" which sounds similar to this one.