A.R. & Machines - Echo One of the first songs that really drew me to psych as a kid was Black Sabbath's "Planet Caravan". Something in the washed out vocals and phased guitar lines tapped a part of me that knew all music didn't have to stick to stomping
riffs and chugging beats. Achim Reichel's second album Echo shares space on the temporal plane with "Planet Caravan". It's awash, as the title would suggest, in echo and much of it seems to be happening in a glutinous wormhole somewhere in space. On an international scale Reichel's name may only be familiar to serious collectors but in his native Germany he was well known as being part of the Rattles (who has opened for the Beatles on their early tours there) and as a pretty boy solo artist. Echo may be an oft overlooked part of his canon but it's a welcome door to the Komische movement that swept through on the wings of Ash Ra Temple, Klaus Schulze and the like. What sets A.R. and Machines apart from those transcendental drones is Reichel works in a constant battle with groove and the nebulous effects of pedals available at the time. The album was envisioned to be a struggle between man and machine, hence the moniker. Reichel's work would never quite touch the experimentation of Echo before or after this album, making this a very essential album in the history of German psych. Download: [MP3] A.R. & Machines - The Echo of the Present Support the artist. Buy it: HERE (some creative googling should turn this up in digital form as well)