Zeit: Four Sides With the Pulse Taken Out, 1972

On a score, largo means take it slowly. A largo in four movements means the slowness happens four times in a row. That is the subtitle of a record released in the summer of 1972, and there is almost nothing inside it counting time for you. Writing for the 2002 reissue, Paul Russell put the idea behind it in one line: time was in fact motionless and existed only in our own minds.

Where this record sits

The guide leaves this one out of its five, which is to say it is a hard place to start. The English Wikipedia calls it slower and more atmospheric than the albums before it, and notes that critics often point to it as one of the first examples of dark ambient, or perhaps the first. AllMusic called it the band's purest expression of space music, ebbing and flowing effortlessly from one tone cluster to the next, almost classical in construction, with one theme melting literally into the following one.

The band grew. Peter Baumann appears here for the first time, making three of them, and that line-up holds for the next several years. There are visitors too. Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh, from Munich, plays Moog. Where that big Moog went afterwards is in the Moondawn piece. Former member Steve Schroyder plays the organ outro on the first track, which is also where the four cellists are.

Track listing

The timings differ from edition to edition. These are the ones MusicBrainz carries for the 1972 Ohr pressing. Later CDs run anywhere from seconds to minutes apart, and one 1996 set opens the last piece with 45 seconds that appear nowhere else.

Through the four movements

• "Birth of Liquid Plejades." This is where the four cellos are. Strings come in first and the electronics settle on top. An organ closes it, played by somebody who had already left the band. Listen for the places where strings and electronics change hands.
• "Nebulous Dawn." The sound lies low and stays there. Do not hunt for a melody; put your breathing on the speed at which it grows and dies away.
• "Origin of Supernatural Probabilities." A whole side. The thickest stacking on the record happens somewhere inside it.
• "Zeit." The title piece, and the shortest. It is also the emptiest of the four sides.

How to listen

• Take the four sides without stopping. They run to roughly an hour and ten minutes.
• Keep it quiet and let it sit in the room. Loud, the rough edge of the electronics arrives first.
• On the second pass, listen only for the cellos. Knowing four players were there, you start to hear bows moving inside the drone.

What happened next

This is usually taken as the band at their most abstract and most austere. Julian Cope's Head Heritage, looking back, called it a monolithic and gloomy double album that wanders through droning passages of emptiness while the origins and formation of the universe are charted. Their most difficult album, that piece concludes.

The English musician Steven Wilson has named it his favourite album of all time and called it the birth of ambient music.

The 2011 edition adds a second CD: the Klangwald concert of 25 November 1972 at the WDR Sendesaal in Cologne, three months after the record came out.

One track to send a friend

Send "Birth of Liquid Plejades." 19 minutes 56 seconds. Add one line: the man playing the organ at the end of it had already left the band.

Where to get it

The 1972 Ohr first pressing is two LPs. For the November 1972 Cologne concert, take the 2011 edition. Turn the lights off and drop the needle on side one. The cellos arrive first, and after that nothing is in any hurry.

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