Credits:

Ashra

This title is more prophetic than most — though thankfully, New Age of Earth isn’t quite as bathetic as any number of releases on Windham Hill; by this point, Gottsching was well into his electronic phase, the jam freakouts of the earliest albums replaced by a clean, crisp electronic bed. Unlike the rigorous pulse of fellow Krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk, though, Gottsching generally favored a more consciously playful and simply beautiful approach, aiming to create pleasant music to just enjoy and relax with. If not as serious and avant-garde as other artists, Gottsching was still coming up with the goods, so quite why his later albums have been generally ignored in comparison remains a mystery. Opening track “Sunrain” sounds like it could be a soundtrack for a non-narrative documentary on just that, or at least some sequence of nature photography; bright and sparkling, the synths and drum machines blend together nicely. “O