Erwachen im Licht

The complete collection of Achim Reichel’s innovative avant-garde project in the early 1970s. The lavishly designed 10 CD box-set includes all five studio albums and almost five hours of rare and unreleased music, a new remix-album – Virtual Journey – as well as a hardcover book with the artist’s own liner notes. A lucky accident was the catalyst. In Hamburg in the early 70s, while playing with his new Akai X330D tape machine, Achim Reichel discovered he could build soundscapes of guitar echoes and add even more simultaneously. He spent hours in his room with headphones on, growing his orchestra of guitars. A.R. & Machines recorded five studio albums. Their debut, “Die grüne Reise”, – The Green Journey – was released in 1971 on tape cassette and vinyl, and was met with complete confusion, even from the music press, who had no genre-drawer to stick it into, and is a lasting Krautrock monument captured on tape.

DG's 20-bit transfer reveals more tape hiss than before, while the orchestral image is better focused, with more definition at the bottom end. Some have likened Herbert von Karajan's "chamber-music approach" to Wagner's Ring cycle in terms of his scaling down or deconstructing the heroic roles. This approach has less to do with dynamics per se than it does with von Karajan's masterful balancing of voices and instruments. He achieves revelations of horizontal clarity, allowing no contrapuntal strand to emerge with an unwanted accent or a miscalibrated dynamic…

Richard Wagner was one of the most revolutionary figures in the history of music, a composer who made pivotal contributions to the development of harmony and musical drama that reverberate even today. Indeed, though Wagner occasionally produced successful music written on a relatively modest scale, opera – the bigger, the better – was clearly his milieu, and his aesthetic is perhaps the most grandiose that Western music has ever known. Early in his career, Wagner learned both the elements and the practical, political realities of his craft by writing a handful of operas which were unenthusiastically, even angrily, received. © Rovi Staff /TiVo