Walter Wegmüller

by Rolf SemprebonWegmuller wasn't actually a musician, but rather a mystic, artist and eccentric. Some of the cream of cosmic Krautrock backed him up on his one album, Tarot, which is generally considered a masterpiece.
This Swiss Gypsy was well known in the late '60s, where he hung out with Sergius Golowin and visual artist H.R. Giger, and in the early 1970s, Timothy Leary, on the run from the American authorities, hung out with them as well. At this time Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, rock journalist and head of Ohr Records, decided to start a new label, Kosmische Musik, to release more cosmic sounds, with the idea of having various visionaries on vocals, which soon lead him to Switzerland. After recording the first of these albums, Seven Up, which paired Ash Ra Tempel with Leary in autumn 1972, work began on the second and third records, by Golowin and Wegmuller. By now Kaiser had gathered a stable of musicians, which included Ash Ra Tempel and Wallenstein, to work on these various projects as the Cosmic Couriers.
As Wegmuller had been working on a set of handmade Tarot cards over several years since 1968, at the suggestion of Leary he decided to do an album based on the Tarot deck. The project started in Switzerland in late 1972, again with Ash Ra Tempel as backing musicians, when Wegmuller suddenly decided there should be a track for each of the 22 cards of the major arcana. Kaiser, becoming more impressed in the project, flew Wegmuller and Ash Ra Tempel to Germany, to add more musicians into the stew. The band Wallenstein and keyboardist Klaus Schulze had just finished the Golowin project, so they joined Manuel Gottsching and Hartmut Enke of Ash Ra Tempel, as well as Walter Westrupp from the duo Witthuser-Westrupp, on the Tarot lineup to create a cosmic Krautrock super-group.
The Tarot sessions were recorded in December of 1972 in Dieter Dierk's studios in Stommeln near Cologne. During one of the sessions, Gottsching, Enke, and Schulze, were waiting for the other musicians to arrive, and decided to record an album. Schulze had left Ash Ra Tempel in early 1971, after their first album, so the record, Join Inn, found that band with their original lineup, with the addition of some spoken vocals from Gottsching's girlfriend, Rosi Muller, who also provided backup vocals on Tarot. As for Tarot itself, it was released in early 1973, a double album in an elaborate box that included the tarot deck Wegmuller had painted. Like the similar album by Golowin, on Tarot Wegmuller talks rather than sings, and there are many lengthy instrumental sections as well, though in all ways on a much grander scale.
Wegmuller went back to Switzerland and Kaiser soon embroiled most of the musicians from Tarot in a new group called the Cosmic Jokers, but that's an entirely different story. Wegmuller, meanwhile, eventually wrote a book, Neu-Zeit Tarot (New Age Tarot) that was published in 1982 by AGM Agmuller Press.