German musician and composer Manuel Göttsching passed away in Berlin on December 4, 2022. He was 70 years old.
Manuel Göttsching was a highly influential multi-instrumentalist who pioneered a new electronic music genre known as cosmic music or Berlin School. He was one of the founders of seminal band Ash Ra Tempel.
The self-titled Ash Ra Tempel debut album (1971) featured Hartmut Enke on bass; Manuel Göttsching on guitar; and Klaus Schulze on drums. They combined rock and blues with a radical new sound. After that, Ash Ra Tempel released a series of albums that have become classics in the progressive electronic music field: Schwingungen (1972), Seven Up (1973), Join Inn (1973), Starring Rosi (1973) and Inventions For Electric Guitar (1975).
In 1976, the band shortened its name to Ashra. They released New Age Of Earth (1976), Blackouts (1977), Correlations (1979), and Belle Alliance (1980).
Manuel Göttsching’s first solo album was “E2-E4.” It included one minimalistic hour-long progressive music track with improvised keyboards and guitar over synthesizer structures and metallic percussion. “E2-E4” attracted a lot of attention at the end of the 1980s in the house, techno and dance-floor electronic music scenes and was remixed and sampled by numerous bands and DJs, and remains highly influential currently.
In 2017, Barbican Hall in London presented a Manuel Göttsching double-program, as part of Convergence. One segment featured The Ash Ra Tempel Experience with Ariel Pink (vocals, bass), Shags Chamberlain (keys, synthesizer), Oren Ambarchi (drums) and Manuel Göttsching (guitar), performing original pieces from the Ash Ra Tempel albums Schwingungen and Seven Up (both from 1972). The Ash Ra Tempel Experience with this line-up first performed in Melbourne in 2015. The other part of the show was a Manuel Göttsching performance of “E2-E4.”
Read more at www.ashra.com