Ash Ra Tempel – Starring Rosi

MG.ART, Manuel Göttsching’s label has been doing an excellent run of reissues of the Ash Ra Tempel catalog and I’ve enjoyed them immensely. There aren’t too many spots in the catalog that aren’t already cemented classics, but this is definitely the one I’ve been waiting for. The band’s fifth album is an outlier in their catalog. There aren’t too many German Progressive LPs that start out with songs that could be mistaken for The Allman Brothers, but the band kicks in with the light summer choogle of “Laughter Loving,” and from there on out this is a very different vision of the Tempel. The album is more accessible, still shrouded in echoing textures, early electronic pulses, and Göttsching’s high aura guitar work, but it also comes as close to any of the band’s albums to hooks. There’s a lightness to the record, a feeling that the assembled players weren’t just creating lasting works of psychedelic fusion, but that they were having fun while doing so.

The other major difference in the album comes right there in the title. The record features a few usual heads in the studio, including producer Dieter Diercks and drummer Harald Grosskopf, but Starring Rosi, also centers around the ethereal vocals and poetry of Rosemarie “Rosi” Müller. There seems to be division among fans of the band and Göttsching’s works. Purists are always going to cry foul when they decide an element has diluted ‘their idea’ of a band, double so if the new influences turn out to be female, but Starring Rosi is an excellent part of the Ash Ra Tempel catalog, and one that hints towards some of the more funk-stung works that would turn up later in Göttsching’s career as the band pivoted to become Ashra. Here, paired with Rosi’s vocals, the songs stand among the best of the German progressive set, a dream smudged with steam and set aloft on waxy tangles of guitar. The new reissue packs in some aesthetic extras too, with a poster that mirrors the CD editions showing Rosi and Manuel improvising during studio sessions. Also included are prints of previously unreleased original “The Fairy Dance” and “Schizo” composition sheets, handwritten by Manuel.