Men and Machines

men & machines manuel gottsching special

We'll be doing a 2 hour special tonight on Manuel Gottsching, we we have playing at Stereo on Dec 11th. We'll be taking a look at his music over the last 4 decades, the various artists he's inspired, and we'll have a competition to win a couple of tickets to the gig as well...

Here's a preview/interview with Manuel from The List:

This is a coup and then some for the team behind Glasgow’s Men & Machines club night. Not only has Manuel Göttsching never played Scotland before, but he only plays about two or three gigs around the world every year. ‘I’m usually too busy with other projects or working in my studio,’ he says on the line from his home in Berlin, ‘but they asked me, I thought it sounded interesting, I’ve never been there before.’

For fans of vintage krautrock, the Kosmische sound of space rock and pioneering electronic music and minimalist composition in general, Göttsching is something of a minor deity. As a member of pioneering trio Ash Ra Tempel in the early ‘70s alongside Klaus Schulze and Hartmut Enke and then his own splinter version of that group, named Ashra, he was instrumental in a strong catalogue of spaced-out and ahead of their time psychedelic albums. These include 1972’s Timothy Leary-assisted Seven Up and 1973’s Starring Rosi, while his own 1984 album E2-E4 was a heavily influential piece of early, Eno-esque electronica.

Now he recalls those early days with a laugh, when Ash Ra played on equipment bought by Schulze in London from Pink Floyd’s technicians because they couldn’t afford to buy gear in West Berlin: a city where ‘the clubs had no closing times, and all the young people came because there was no call up for national service in the city.’ Here he promises a mixed solo programme of guitars and electronics, featuring ‘part of my (2005) composition Die Mulde, which has only been performed once before, and some of my older titles from the 1970s.’ It promises to be unmissable.

Posted at 12:15, 2nd December 2010