The restlessly innovative German guitarist went on to make records including the legendary E2-E4, a foundational source for techno and ambient house
Although it might help, there’s a fair chance you don’t need to be standing behind the counter of a record shop to know what “the album with the chess cover” refers to. Since its release in 1984, Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 – iconic chessboard sleeve and all – has been heralded as a Year Zero for electronic minimalism by crate-diggers and newcomers alike. Some have gone further, declaring it the first electronic dance album. In any case, for Göttsching, who died last week aged 70, it was just one of several giant leaps guided by a career-long reverence for the unrepeatable moment.
Born in 1952 in West Berlin, Göttsching spent his youth listening to opera at home and playing in blues bands with friends. It was with one of them, Hartmut Enke, that he later studied improvisation under Swiss avant-garde composer Thomas Kessler. Alongside fellow student Klaus Schulze, the outgoing drummer of Tangerine Dream, they swiftly broke free from the world of blues-rock to form Ash Ra Tempel in 1970. Described by one early critic “as the James Brown band on acid,” their searing freakouts, captured on early 70s albums Ash Ra Tempel and Schwingungen, redrew the map for free-form psychedelia. Albums such as Seven Up – an avant-garde collaboration with countercultural guru Timothy Leary – proved a legitimate alternative to the norm, even for many fans of innovators such as Neu! and Can.
From the first foreboding textures of Amboss, the sprawling opener from the band’s 1971 self-titled debut, Göttsching was a guitarist who seemed to intuitively grasp that spontaneity is often best harnessed within basic parameters. All it took was a cue or two – a couple of chords or some skeletal rhythmic motif – for mind-melting exploration to roam free. Released in 1975, his solo debut, Inventions for Electric Guitar (subtitled Ash Ra Tempel VI following the departure of Enke and Schulze) was a textbook example of his improvisational talent. Inspired by the cyclical electric organ of Terry Riley, its trance-inducing guitar mantras may have been the closest mid-70s rock came to mimicking the advent of digital audio sequencing. If Inventions for Electric Guitar proved anything it was that much like the vast careers of his peers, including Schulze and Neu! co-founder Michael Rother, Göttsching’s output was often most potent when it played with both chance and control.
by Brian Coney via Electronic music | The Guardian
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