Embryo: Opal [BONFIRE]

Why you'll love it

This Bonfire Records edition comes in a gatefold jacket with etched runouts. Opal first came out on the pioneering Berlin label Ohr and introduced a band one critic called "the most eclectic of the krautrock bands."

This edition

• Gatefold jacket

About the album

Some bands have a line-up; Embryo has a guest book. Vibraphonist and drummer Christian Burchard and saxophonist Edgar Hofmann founded the Munich group in 1969, and more than 400 musicians have played with the collective since, among them Charlie Mariano and Mal Waldron.

Opal is where it all starts, a progressive jazz-rock record with free passages and a late-1960s psychedelic haze hanging over it. The title track sets the mood, "You Don't Know What's Happening" and "Revolution" stretch out with heavy grooves, and "Glockenspiel" brings the mallets forward. Side two runs from the urgent "Got No Time" and "Call" through "End Of Soul" to the cosmic "People From Out The Space."

In 1976 they helped found Schneeball, Germany's first independent label, with Ton Steine Scherben, and in 1979 they toured India by bus and played festivals from Reading to Port Harcourt, picking up new sounds on every trip. Mariano once called them "crazy creative musicians playing really weird stuff," which, from a jazz saxophonist, is the warmest compliment going.

Also at Kops: more Embryo on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Bonfire Records (cat# BONF029), a reissue of the 1970 album.