So I went to Ashra’s website, and I started to poke around--it’s a neat little old-school HTML site with plenty of sound samples--but then I left, because I wanted to keep my experience with Join Inn a discreet thing. I abandoned my research in mid-swing. Why mess with success? Once in December of 1972 there were four German people in a studio who figured out what outer space would sound like if 1) you could freeze it and 2) it were possible to create sound in a vacuum. I may buy some more Ash Ra Tempel records, and I may not. What I am here to tell you this week is that there’s this one called Join Inn, and it’s a doozy, and if you just let it do its thing real quiet-like, it will reward you with a couple of real fine shivers. I don’t have to know everything about it, right now or ever, and in some way that is the message in the music, if it has one. Sometimes there is just the music and everything beside or around it is merely incidental. Can any music, however high-minded, deliver any deeper message? Maybe. I’ll leave that to you. For me there’s Klaus Schulze and his hyperorganic analog synths embracing his partner Manuel Gottching’s constantly reverberating guitar, the whole concoction flowing icily out through the speakers of a cheap boombox in the kitchen of an Iowa children’s treatment center near the beginning of winter: and that’s plenty. It is better than plenty. It is enough. |
