SAND is:
Ludwig Papenberg: guitars, organ, electronic drums, chorus
Ulrich Papenberg: bassguitar, percussion, chorus
Johannes Vester: lead vocals, VCS3, chorus

GOLEM AND OTHERS ....................................P.O.T..........................SAND...............................................

When Gento and Yogi finally fled back to their homes in Bodenwerder, in Lower Saxony, they were looking for normality and safety. As members of the burgeoning Krautrock scene, they had loved their Cologne show supporting CAN, and believed that their band P.O.T. (Part Of Time) could only become bigger and better. But they were all from the fantastic land of Baron Münchhausen, a beautiful rural area whose biggest local town was the fairy-tale Hamelin, where once had come the famed and legendary Pied Piper. And though each was intrigued by these industrial cities in which they had been called upon to perform, they had all grown up playing in the woods and ancient quarries of the mysterious Weser Valley.

Yes, they wanted to play the new rock'n'roll, but all were still mistrustful of the druggles and weirdos which permeated their new lives - full of student demonstrations, anti-Cold-War attitude and communal living. And so, when the rest of P.O.T. deckled to move to Berlin, both Gento and Yogi freaked out and quit the band.

Of course, this left the Papenberg brothers in a real fix. Both Ludwig and Ulrich were excellent musicians, but how should they proceed? Their lead singer Johannes Vester was a visionary lyricist, but he was no musician. True, he contributed a mean short wave radio to the soup of their live sound, but it was hardly going to help now that the drummer and organist had both run back to the forest.

However, this was the experimental Krautrock scene of 1972, and anything was possible. CAN's manager, Manfred Schmidt, had been enormously impressed by P.O.T. performance in Cologne. He had sat up half the night listening to Johannes Vester's notions of where experimental rock'n roll should go next. And he had introduced Vester and the two Papenberg brothers to Klaus Schulze, who had in turn encouraged their plans to move to his own city Berlin, where anything was possible, and the weirder the better.

And so SAND was born - a cosmic and drummerless trio with a lead singer who played VCS3 synthesizer and sang mysterious and pedantic English lyrics in a voice like a Frisian Puritan reared on Melanie Kafka and David Bowie. Sample lyric? "He is an old loggerhead - actually long ago he is dead." Reviewer's comment: Nuff said.

On arrival in Berlin, these three longhairs beat a path to Klaus Schulze's front door and asked him to produce their first LP, to be entitled GOLEM. Why did they want to call it GOLEM? Well, Golem was a mysterious Jewish figure from the 16th century who had been fashioned out of the earth. The members of SAND used 'golem' as a verb to describe the transmutations which occured when they played together. In the words of Johannes Vester:

"To experience withe the unknown, to give life... that was our impulse... (those lyrics expressed) exactly what was in our mind when we golemned."

And so it happened that Klaus Schulze recorded five strange and extended ambient ballads by a trio of little people from Lower Saxony, who each knew precisely what sound they wished to achieve. Some of the songs hung around from their days as P.O.T., but these, now without drums or organ, were considerably extended in duration in order to conciously create "reduction, frugality, monotony, even mantric principles and elements", as Johannes Vester would later comment. And so long as the results sounded like nothing else ever heard before they would all be quite happy.

And quietly and seemingly quite easily, they achieved this goal. For GOLEM is a beautifully mystical and hauntingly empty record, inhabiting those same pre-industrial landscapes in which they had played as children. The songs were occasionally propelled by picked glassy acoustic guitars and pulsing monolithic bass, as though powered by the heartbeat of frost giants delicately picking their way through their ancient Lower Saxon township in outsize and ill-fitting seven league boots. But often-as-not the music was left to hang in mid air, as hauntingly weird translated lyrics, strangely sung in some undefined post-apocalyptic space-cockney sauntered and cooled out their bee-zarre message over washes of belt-driven synthesizers and a-rhythmic agricultural ur-folk music.

It must also be understood that this SAND LP was recorded at a time, when Klaus Schulze was actually being paid by Membran Records of Berlin to experiment with the famous Kunstkopf-Streophonie of Artificial Head Stereo Sound, in which a whole other world was placed in the headphones of these listeners who wanted to go beyond the Quadrophonic of the day. There was a plethora  of recording and mixing aids being used in the early-mid 1970s, many of which followed on naturally from the 1960s Hi-Fi Industry boom. But probably equal amounts were generated through the desires of sonic experimenters such as Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. This culminated in a situation wherin many different composers, utilising any number of variously-sized loudspeakers placed in different configurations around the audience, gradually allowed the technology itself to dominate their work rather than enhance it. Fortunately, though the Artificial Head technique did compromise the final mix of many of these LPs, the effects achieved when wearing headphones are still remarkable today. It really does do your head in. So when you listen to this SAND LP, get the cans on, babies - It's a stone groove of ambulent proportions. Unfortunately, though Membran's experimental record label Delta Acustic simultaneously released several other experimental 'rock' LPs, it is said that the SAND LP is by far the most achieving and entertaining.

Julian Cope's ALBUM OF THE MONTH December 2001

SAND 1974