Limited edition, numbered. 1000 copies. 20-page booklet in LP size. Few records carry this kind of weight. Two hundred copies pressed in the summer of 1978, quietly distributed from a small Nuremberg label, and then - silence. It took decades for the world to catch up.
Carol of Harvest were five teenagers from the Middle Franconian town of Fürth, Bavaria. Axel Schmierer composed everything - all the songs, all the English lyrics - and the band coalesced around him with the precision of people who had something urgent to say and no expectation of being heard. Beate Krause, recruited at sixteen, sang with a poise that defied her age entirely. Their name came from Walt Whitman's 1867 poem. Their sole LP appeared on the private Brutkasten label in 1978, at precisely the moment when the European psych-folk wave had spent itself - Hoelderlin had moved on, Ougenweide was dispersing, the window was closing. And yet here they were, making a record that belonged less to 1978 than to some timeless interior weather of their own.
The album opens with "Put On Your Nightcap," sixteen minutes that begin as undistorted guitar weaving through something close to wind or water, Krause's voice arriving with the unhurried confidence of Sandy Denny (Fairport Convention) or Jacqui MacShee (Pentangle) - British in inflection, autumnal, entirely her own. The track shifts through several distinct territories, accelerating and retreating, with Schmierer's acid guitar solo arriving in the tenth minute like a sudden shaft of light before the piece settles back into arpeggiated calm. Jürgen Kolb's Moog moves through the arrangements not as ornament but as weather - spacious, slightly cold, adding depth without crowding. "Somewhere at the End of Our Rainbow" extends the palette further into hypnotic psych-folk of the first order: a song that genuinely hypnotizes, with melodic logic that circles back on itself like a river in flat country. The two shorter pieces - "You and Me" and "Treary Eyes" - show the band equally comfortable in stripped-down, almost elemental folk song, closer to Pentangle than to prog. The original side two closes with "Try a Little Bit," ten minutes during which Krause sounds more confident with every pass through the refrain, as if the act of singing were gradually becoming something closer to insistence.
The word "timeless" gets thrown around too easily. Here it applies in a more literal sense: the record felt dated in 1978 and feels essential now, which suggests it was simply operating on a different clock from the beginning. Original pressings trade between two and three thousand euros in mint condition. This Garden of Delights edition - limited to 1000 numbered copies, with a 20-page booklet in LP size containing photographs and full band history - is as close as most collectors will ever get to the thing itself. Don't miss it.
