Cosmic Jokers

A band that was never a band

The Cosmic Jokers were never an ensemble in the usual sense. The name belonged to a run of records issued in 1974 on the Kosmische Musik label, put together by its owner, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, and his partner Gille Lettmann from long improvised sessions recorded in 1973 at Dieter Dierks's studio. Wikipedia calls the result a primary example of space rock, and the people on the tapes came from two of the best-known bands of the German underground: Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze of Ash Ra Tempel, and Jürgen Dollase and Harald Grosskopf of Wallenstein, with Dierks himself playing bass and mixing.

Kaiser had already run the Ohr and Pilz labels and then Cosmic Couriers, the home of Ash Ra Tempel and others, so the musicians were his own artists. The Cosmic Jokers records were made from his tapes, edited and mixed with Dierks, and sent out with the performers' pictures on the sleeve. Accounts differ on how much the musicians knew about the plan: Wikipedia and the notes of the reissue say the sessions were recorded without their informed consent, while a 2024 overview by the writer John Coulthart weighs the stories against each other. Göttsching has said he first heard the record in a Berlin shop.

Five records in a year

All five Cosmic Jokers titles date from 1974. The first, titled simply The Cosmic Jokers, was recorded between February and May 1973, runs 42:02 and has two long pieces, "Galactic Joke" (22:38) and "Cosmic Joy" (19:24); AllMusic gave it four and a half stars. Galactic Supermarket followed on the Kosmische label, then Planeten Sit-In, Sci Fi Party, which works as a label sampler, and Gilles Zeitschiff, on which Lettmann speaks over sounds from earlier releases from the label.

The records have been reissued in recent years through Breeze Music, the company run by Dierks. Coulthart notes that the reissued Gilles Zeitschiff, Planeten Sit-In and Sci Fi Party use different mixes from the 1990s Spalax CDs, and that the sound of the new editions of the first two albums has drawn questions he could not confirm. Prog Archives readers praise the first album and are harder on Planeten Sit-In, which they describe as a loose collection of fragments.

Afterwards

The project never played live: it existed only as tapes. Kaiser's own business ended in the following years, when German courts voided his contracts with bands and Cosmic Couriers closed; in the 1980s ZYX reissued many of the titles under direct contracts with the artists. For the musicians the sessions remain a footnote beside the records they made under their own names, though the albums are still a first stop for listeners who want to hear Göttsching's guitar and Schulze's synthesizer jam together.