An Ancient Echoes to New Age of Earth by Ash Ra Tempel
It’s an Ancient Echo when we go back to the 1976 album, New Age of Earth by Ash Ra Tempel. I always thought of Manuel Göttsching, who records under his own name and more famously as Ashra and Ash Ra Tempel, as the most soulful of the Berlin Trinity which was Klaus Schulze/Tangerine Dream/Ash Ra Tempel. His compositions had a warmth the others lacked and his guitar leads flitted between dangerous micro-second precision on Inventions for Electric Guitar and sensual trips to ecstasy on New Age of Earth and Blackouts. Today, I’m going to feature one of those two, New Age of Earth. It was released in 1976 and Ash Ra Tempel, which had been an ensemble, was now just Manuel Göttsching. The album that preceded it, Inventions for Electric Guitar, was a minimalist inspired journey of delayed and layered guitar orchestrations. It was an energized release, but New Age of Earth is a much more subdued work, almost meditative. It had nothing to do with the new age movement or music, preceding that by several years. Unlike Inventions, it featured mostly synthesizer in free-floating ambiences. It’s subsequently been reissued under the names Ashra and Manuel Göttsching. We’ll hear three tracks from it today including the 22-minute excursion, “Nightdust.”