Back in the mid 90’s a little pocket-sized guidebook was never far from reach. Almost 3 decades later that very same battered copy of Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler still sits on my shelf. Dog eared, chewed, and clearly filed under well loved, my copy even has little pencil crosses next to the albums I’d sought out under its guidance.
Whilst the genre itself sits under a problematic and somewhat inaccurate name, krautrock was, and remains a significant area of interest. The other name – kosmische musik certainly feels more appropriate and befitting.
Whilst the headliners here – Neu!, Faust, Can, Ash Ra Tempel, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Amon Düül (I and II) all still sparkle, exploring lesser known acts has been an inconsistence if worthwhile adventure. Walter Wegmuller’s Tarot, Conrad Schnitzer’s vast discography, Lilential’s solo effort and several others, whilst perhaps slightly more overlooked, suggest a bottomless and sprawling network of good stuff. However, for every newly discovered underground classic that’s worthwhile, so is a host of awful symphonic proggy jazz rock that has none of the dynamics or edge of this sizable gang of true innovators.
In this complex web of leads, false starts, and music with the power to consume you for months on end, it can take time to get to the gems at outer fringes. I’d been looking for years in this area before even becoming aware of Edge of Time by DOM.
Cut adrift from most overviews, this Düsseldorf based group of Hungarian musicians – Gabor Baksay, Laszlo Baksay, Rainer Puzalowski and Hans-Georg Stopka – has long been one of my all-time favourites. Possibly suffering from stiff competition in crammed 1972 record shops, and subsequent reappraisals, DOM’s only ever album, complete with 4 immaculate 9-minute-long tracks, is in fact a third-eye popping masterpiece. Now freshly remastered and in a spotlight all of its own…
Built from that heady organ drift that so effectively permeated early phase Pink Floyd, dusted in acoustic guitar campfire grooves and peppered in off-kilter production and electronics – DOM is uniquely brilliant.
The opener, Introitus, is just that, a welcome into their potently realised world. A gathering throb of guitar, hand drums pivoting into metallic shimmers and biting electronics, before drowning initially in light filled, then melting church organ.
Silence is all heat hazed oily pools of more organ (which Tortoise sampled on Dear Grandma and Grandpa). Voices dip and dive as more toxic electronics rupture and spill over. The whole mood is like a ceremony where everyone has been spiked in preparation…
The title track is next, and where the album absolutely fireballs. Whilst much of what we’ve heard so far feels strangely familiar, the guitar groove and buzzing electronic pattering that slowly rises 4 minutes in is absolutely spine-tingling. Somehow, in all the times other music has explored these sorts of elements, it’s never been combined quite so devastatingly. It’s hard not to imagine lysergic bombers overhead as hippies blissfully jam in the grass, a microcosm of the entire genre.
Finally, the whole thing breaks, and intoned in stoned and angular German accented English, the statement from the cover is read out like a cosmic secret for anyone brave enough to have made it this far…
You will meet me there / At the edge of time / The fire-sea licking my feet / Gas and damp, wind and rain, Snow, heat, waters, ice and pain / Damned souls cry “Forgiveness!” / The past will be future and future will be past / Not one thing in our world that will ever last / Only you and me / Until eternity shall that spirit / One containing two / Wander through space and peace we knew
Eventually, flutes trace the spaces left by the words, drawn out in more strumming and distant drones. The effect is overwhelming, somehow brutally bleak, psychedelically gloomy but still magnetic and inescapable. The closer, Dream is just that, all ringing vibes, fragmented percussion and an odd but welcome sense of stasis. A low key but oddly fitting zero gravity finale.
Edge of Time is one of these releases that never quite makes sense. The arc of its 37-minute lifespan, feels like it’s drawing on little more than the fundamentals of existing – the doorway between breathing in and out, silence and sound, good and evil. Coloured with elements that could easily have fallen into meandering nonsense. Percussive campfire jams that were more fun to play than listen to, raw and heavy-handed electronics, religious bad trip inducing shadows…
But somehow, despite all these undeniable facts, these four tracks on their only ever release, refuse to ever be less than searingly effective and the highest quality psychedelic music.
DOM might have one of the slimmest discographies in the whole planet of kosmiche musik, but they also have one of the most devastating and powerful.
Edge of Time by DOM is out on Guerssen Records on 19 July.
Available vinyl, colour vinyl, CD and digitally.
obladada.com 