“When someone goes on a long journey, he has a lot to tell afterwards†— so says the popular German saying. What can a musician [Achim Reichel] do when he is fed up with his role as a beat strumming teen idol? — In our case, he searched for ‘sounds beyond the 4/4-beat’, starting off with a few vague ideas. Then somehow fate took over. Call it kismet or not, fate showed itself in the form of the tape machine. Reichel states, ‘I was just trying something out with my guitar, when out of the blue the Akai X-3300 began to repeat endless cascades of guitar echoes. My guitar suddenly sounded like ten – I enjoyed the pleasant psychedelic touch. The results suited me fine and I was convinced that I was going in the right direction’. It was the beginning of A. R. & Machines and The Green Journey. [For 36 years] the album lived a life as an underground jewel. Something A.R. was not aware of until one day his bright young daughter came home and told him that her classmates were raving about an album called The Green Voyage which had become a rare cult item. A.R.’s wife suggested he should check the Internet under A.R. & Machines. Well, he was pretty astonished. ‘I found so many entries on me and the project and I thought, they seem to know more about me than I do myself. How this now vintage musical project that was put on tape in only two days more that 30 years ago could create a wave that rolled from London to Sydney and from Los Angeles to Tokyo was absolutely beyond me’. Apart from the numerous krautrock-, trance- and goa-enthusiasts…Julian Cope called the album, ‘the final result of a kind of higher awareness…’, and his counterpart Brian Eno of Roxy Music fame admitted that The Green Voyage had been the main source of inspiration for his own album Another Green World. Achim Reichel seems to keep it quite cool regarding all the fuss that had been made in recent years about The Green Journey. ‘Fate has given me something that I intend to handle with utmost care’, he says, ‘and to have some success without all the media hustle is a unique and happy experience’.” – Jörg Gülden
Achim Reichel & Machines
Die Grüne Reise (The Green Journey)
MediaFire Download Link
Tracklist:
01. Station 1: Globus
02. In The Same Boat
03. Station 2: Beautiful Babylon
04. I’ll Be Your Singer, You’ll Be My Song
05. Station 3: Body
06. A Book’s Blues
07. Station 4: As If I Had Seen All This Before
08. Cosmic Vibration (An Afternoon Concert)
09. Come On, People
10. Truth And Probability (A Lexicon For Self-Knowledge)
