Cosmic Jokers - Galactic Supermarket (1974)

w/ Timothy Leary in the studio.

Kosmiche rock was an off-shoot of all the insane krautrock coming from Germany in the early 70s. I dig the shit out of space rock, and I think this represents the subgenre at its purest. I've dropped out to track 2 several times lately - really coaxed me into some great sleep. This was an unofficial, reluctant supergroup all flung way out on psychotropic substances tinkering in a studio for weeks at a time. It sounds exactly like that. This is my favorite record out of the batch. It features one of the great ambient artists, Klaus Schulze, who eventually sued over his likeness and name being used without permission. I'm posting the story behind the making of their albums because it's hilarious. I wonder if the guy that wrote the bio below couldn't help but place the word 'furor' in there.

"Over several months in early 1973, producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser organized several wild acid parties at Dieter Dierks’ sound studio, where the musicians played in exchange for a small fee and all the hallucinogens they could ingest. These musicians included Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze of Ash Ra Tempel, Jurgen Dollase and Harald Grösskopf of Wallenstein, and Dierks himself. They had all been part of the Cosmic Couriers, a loose group that had musically backed Kaiser-produced records by Swiss artist/poet Sergius Golowin, gypsy Tarot-reader Walter Wegmüller, and even acid guru Timothy Leary the year before. From these 1973 sessions, the Cosmic Jokers were born, as Kaiser and Dierks edited and mixed the material and slapped it out on vinyl on Kaiser’s Kosmische Musik label without the other musicians knowing anything about it until the records appeared in stores, even as their pictures were posted prominently on the covers.

It caused a furor in Germany at the time, and it remains an early case of music fraud -long before the hip-hop era- since the music was “borrowed” without the musicians consent(apart from many magic mushrooms probably used to get them in there in the first place). 

The first to find out was guitarist Manuel Göttsching when he entered a Berlin record store in 1974 and found out the music being played on the stereo was from those sessions. He thought the guitarist sounded familiar, but he was shocked to find it was himself. 

The other musicians have mostly deemed these recordings as trash. Klaus Schulz has been particularly harsh in his criticism referring to these CDs as “cosmic crap”. It’s true that these albums caused lawsuits against Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser (head of Kosmische Musik, formerly Ohr) It ruined his career and effectively drove him out of Germany.

However, for fans of German experimental music, these releases are classics and they remain important to this day." - Last.FM

Cosmic Jokers - Galactic Supermarket (1974)

1. Kinder des Alles pt 1

2. Kinder des Alles pt 2

3. Kinder des Alles pt 3

4. Galactic Supermarket pt 1

5. Galactic Supermarket pt 2

6. Galactic Supermarket pt 3

Download.