#Gulââb

[mywifeleftme]

307: Gulââb // Ritt durch den Hades: Musikalische Dokumentation einer phantastichen Reise

Ritt durch den Hades Gulââb 1979, House Producion (Bandcamp)

Gulââb’s rare 1979 cassette Ritt durch den Hades: Musikalische Dokumentation einer phantastichen Reise (Rode Through Hades: Musical Documentation of a Fantastic Journey) seems primed for rediscovery by the weirdo prog/Krautrock set: Mononymous, pseudonymous German guitar virtuoso debarks for the mountains of Nepal in the early 1970s, where he devotes himself to exploring the spirit realm and honing his gifts for “one thousand and one nights.” (Though a less mystically-inclined biographer might summarize this period as “spent three years bumming around until he got a job playing music in a luxury restaurant.”) Upon his return to Germany, Gulââb records a blistering mostly instrumental solo album that lands somewhere between early music, Baroque classical, and Krautrock. The album has a suitably berserk storyline, following a soul through life (condensed, hilariously, into a single movement called Karrierestress, or Career Stress), death, and then a pastiche of the afterlife that includes multiple Olympian gods and Sufism before achieving reincarnation. Unable to find (or indifferent to finding) an interested label, Gulââb releases Ritt durch den Hades himself on cassette, to little apparent response. He continues his low-key music career composing for small theatre companies and collaborating with a children’s book author, and self-releasing a bunch of tapes and CDs in the ‘90s before going mostly silent in the decades that followed.

That resume alone would perk the ears of most collectors, and the contents of Ritt durch den Hades more than hold up their end. Gothic, psychedelic, and impossible to precisely categorize, it’s also fairly diverse within its narrow guitar-only remit: he dabbles in Nordic folk but also in Mediterranean flamenco and rebetiko sounds, using a few pedals and production tricks to imitate the sounds of sitars and lutes. It’s like a tour of Europe’s raddest graveyards, from a pyre on the moor to a brooding cathedral to a Spaghetti western desert full of bleached wooden crosses. It’s difficult to imagine a fan of Comus or chill Krautrock or ‘70s horror soundtracks or the Pagan neo-folk records black metal bands started putting out in the ‘90s not getting off on this.

The original cassette insert.

That may have been the thinking over at Merlins Nose Records, the first (and so far only label) to track Gulââb down and put together a vinyl and CD reissue of Hades. Rather than simply adapting the stylishly minimal black backdrop/white Art Nouveau-looking typeface Gulââb chose for the original cassette insert, we get something that looks like an off-brand Children of Bodom cover. While my girlfriend insists it looks cool, she is terminally poisoned by Zoomer ‘90s cringe reappropriation aesthetics and should be ignored in this matter. I’m here to tell you the cover sucks, and probably made at least a few grim aesthetes write the thing off at the shop. But that would be a mistake! If you have any skeleton tattoos (I have three) you should own this.

307/365