Missus Beastly

The artist name and album title are swapped. The back cover states: "produced by Dr. Aftershave And The Mixed-Pickles" and "this record is dedicated to Missus Beastly." A label contractual dispute with Telefunken required that Missus Beastly not release music under their own name - so they released it under a pseudonym and dedicated it to themselves. The bureaucratic manoeuvre doubles as a small act of absurdist comedy, entirely in keeping with a record whose title track is named "Miles Along the Watchtower" and whose most exotic groove is credited to something called "Patscha Menga Underground."

This was also, more consequentially, catalog number 00001 on April Records - the inaugural release of the musicians' cooperative founded in 1976 by Missus Beastly, Ton Steine Scherben, Embryo, Sparifankal and Julius Schittenhelm, with the guiding principle of "music distributed by the musicians." The cooperative would soon be forced to rename itself Schneeball after CBS threatened legal action over the April name, but in this moment it represented something genuinely radical: a collective infrastructure for some of the most adventurous bands in Germany, built entirely outside the phonographic industry. That the record opening it is this warm, funky and at times outright beautiful is its own kind of statement.

Recorded in January 1976 at the Zuckerfabrik in Stuttgart - the former sugar refinery that had become one of the city's most important recording spaces - the album is built around the twin-flute axis of Friedemann Josch (later of Dissidenten) and Jürgen Benz, with Burkard Schmidl moving freely between Fender Rhodes, clavinet, Hammond and synthesizer, and Norbert Dömling anchoring everything from the bass. The guests are telling: Roman Bunka and Butze Fischer of Embryo appear throughout, as does vocalist Maria Archer - also of Embryo and the Real Ax Band - whose raspy, unhurried delivery over "High Life" is one of the record's most arresting moments.

The music is mostly instrumental, but never merely functional. "Miles Along the Watchtower" opens with a locked, loping groove that owes something to the electric Miles Davis of Bitches Brew without directly quoting it. "Morning Sun" has the lateral, patient logic of a krautrock jam that has absorbed its jazz lessons thoroughly. "Nothing Again" runs ten minutes across two movements - the first spare and Return to Forever-adjacent, the second a slow cosmic drift with Schmidl's synthesizer dissolving into space. "Patscha Menga Underground" is three minutes of Josch's flute threading a nearly-Oriental melody over bass and hand percussion, closer to the world-music experiments of Embryo's Reise than to anything happening in jazz at the time. The closing "For Evi" strips everything back to piano and bass alone, two lines intertwined with a lightness the rest of the record earns the right to end on.

An essential and historically singular document, reissued by Garden of Delights with full detail and care.