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Walter Wegmüller wasn't actually a musician, but rather a mystic, artist, and eccentric. Some of the cream of cosmic Krautrock backed him up on his one album,
Tarot, which is generally considered a masterpiece. This Swiss Gypsy was well-known in the late '60s, where he hung out with
Sergius Golowin and visual artist H.R. Giger, and in the early '70s, with
Timothy Leary, on the run from the American authorities. At this time, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, rock journalist and head of Ohr Records, decided to start a new label, Kosmische Musik, to release more cosmic sounds, with the idea of having various visionaries on vocals, which soon lead him to Switzerland. After recording the first of these albums, Seven Up, which paired
Ash Ra Tempel with
Leary in the autumn of 1972, work began on the second and third records, by
Golowin and
Wegmüller. By then, Kaiser had gathered a stable of musicians, which included
Ash Ra Tempel and
Wallenstein, to work on these various projects as the
Cosmic Couriers.
As
Wegmüller had been working on a set of handmade Tarot cards for several years since 1968, he decided to do an album based on the Tarot deck at the suggestion of
Leary. The project started in Switzerland in late 1972, again with
Ash Ra Tempel as backing musicians, when
Wegmüller suddenly decided there should be a track for each of the 22 cards of the major arcana. Kaiser, becoming more impressed with the project, flew
Wegmüller and
Ash Ra Tempel to Germany, to add more musicians into the stew. The band
Wallenstein, with keyboardist
Klaus Schulze, had just finished the
Golowin project, so they joined
Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke of
Ash Ra Tempel, as well as
Walter Westrupp from the duo
Witthüser-Wëstrupp, for the
Tarot lineup to create a cosmic Krautrock supergroup.
The
Tarot sessions were recorded in December of 1972 in
Dieter Dierks' studios in Stommeln, near Cologne. During one of the sessions,
Göttsching, Enke, and
Schulze were waiting for the other musicians to arrive, and decided to record an album.
Schulze had left
Ash Ra Tempel in early 1971, after their first album, so the record, Join Inn, found that band with their original lineup, with the addition of some spoken vocals from
Göttsching's girlfriend, Rosi Muller, who also provided backup vocals on
Tarot. As for
Tarot itself, it was released in early 1973, a double album in an elaborate box that included the tarot deck
Wegmüller had painted. As on the similar album by
Golowin,
Wegmüller talks rather than sings on
Tarot, and there are many lengthy instrumental sections as well, though on a much grander scale.
Wegmüller went back to Switzerland and Kaiser soon embroiled most of the musicians from
Tarot in a new group called
the Cosmic Jokers, but that's an entirely different story.
Wegmüller, meanwhile, eventually wrote a book, Neu-Zeit Tarot (New Age Tarot) that was published in 1982 by AGM Agmuller Press. ~ Rolf Semprebon