LORD KRISHNA VON GOLOKA

I'm not surprised at how often the word 'esoteric' turns up when describing the first (and only) album by counterculture author / occult folklorist Sergius Golowin. The LP was fairly unique even within the limitless boundaries of classic Krautrock, and nearly forty years later still carries a lingering echo of the same, psychedelic headrush.

Keep in mind the artist's credit was strictly nominal. The album was actually another pet project of German music maven R.U. Kaiser, the second in a series of Kosmische Musik collaborations after the hot mess of ASH RA TEMPEL's erratic "Seven Up" trip, alongside Timothy Leary. None of the music here was composed in a traditional sense. Instead, the album offers several long, more or less free-form instrumental meditations, improvised by the usual Cosmic Rock superstars (KLAUS SCHULZE; the WITTHÜSER & WESTRUPP duo; Jürgen Dollase and Jerry Berkers of WALLENSTEIN, so forth), with the 43-year old Golowin hired to orate a series of devotional soliloquies over the results.

The album opener "Der Reigen" has an odd, unfocussed charm, and features Golowin intoning what sounds like a Hindu prayer above a drifting nimbus of piano, mellotron and percussive allsorts. The track goes nowhere in particular over sixteen-plus minutes, but the reverberating double-tracked urgency of Golowin's narration (typically bathed in a shimmering studio echo) conjures the perfect mood of Teutonic hippie mysticism.

The much briefer "Die Weisse Alm" (The White Pasture) shows a little more structure, almost resembling a legitimate (and in this case very lovely) melody. Golowin isn't really singing here, but his dreamlike incantation was coaxed into a more natural cadence fitting the gentle Cosmic Folk music of Walter Westrupp's acoustic guitar chords.

And then there's the side-long "Die Hoch Zeit" (rough translation: High Times, and I don't think it's a reference to the Swiss alpine location of the cover photo). The journey begins with an ecstatic cacophony of holy noise, before taking another long, meandering detour into Golowin's radiant consciousness, in a whisper at first but later declaiming his poetic mythos with almost Homeric intensity ("Speak, O Muse, of an age of guitar heroes...")

Here and elsewhere the musicians sound as if they were trying (and often failing) to locate a suitable groove, but never mind. If a little bit of bliss goes a long way, imagine where a nearly 20-minute mantra will take you: to the edge of the known universe, and beyond.

Modern ears might hear the album only as a tarnished artifact from another age (which it is, no doubt). But as the artwork makes abundantly clear it also offers an invaluable (acid) flashback to a rare moment of high musical spiritualism. And until the release of WALTER WEGMÜLLER's epic two-disc "Tarot" set (recorded more or less in tandem with this one) it would briefly mark the purest and (yes!) most esoteric expression of R.U. Kaiser's kosmische utopia...before his fever dreams were derailed by rampant drug abuse and ethical stumbles. But that's another story (see: THE COSMIC JOKERS).