Ejwuusl Wessahyqqan

The name is the first clue. Clark Ashton Smith - poet, sculptor, and author of cosmic horror fiction, a peer of Lovecraft and one of the strangest imaginations ever committed to the pages of Weird Tales - populated his stories with invented worlds full of unpronounceable proper nouns. Ejwuusl Wessahqqan is one of them. So are the titles of every track on this record: "Die geborstenen Kuppeln von Yethlyreom," "Die orangefarbene Wüste südwestlich von Ignarh," "Hobbl-di-wobbl." A band that names itself and its music from a single author's private mythology is not making casual choices.

The trio formed in Munich in 1971 under the name Time of Waste, with a guitarist who left the following year and took the name with him. What remained was Michael Winzker on organ and piano, Jürgen Wollenburg on percussion, and René Filous on bass - and on the Filouphone, a seven-string instrument of his own construction, somewhere between a fretless bass and a sitar in timbre, named after its maker. No guitar. No vocals. The gap left by their absence is not filled so much as inhabited. The band rehearsed in the choir room of Munich's St. Wolfgang parish in exchange for playing Sunday mass - an arrangement that lasted, reportedly, thirty-five years - and the two idioms cross-pollinate in ways that are not always easy to trace.

Their neighbors and partial models were Amon Düül II, whose studio the band frequented and whose approach to collective improvisation they absorbed without replicating the sound. What emerges instead is something harder to place: the opener, "Die geborstenen Kuppeln von Yethlyreom," drives on a huge, distorted organ riff that recalls the heaviest edges of ELP or Jon Lord, Wollenburg's drums hitting with genuine physical force; then "Die orangefarbene Wüste südwestlich von Ignarh" pivots entirely, the Filouphone threading a droning, dissonant Eastern melody over near-static percussion - closer to the kosmische drift of early Tangerine Dream than anything rock-adjacent. "Hobbl-di-wobbl," at sixteen minutes, locks into a rhythmic hypnosis that has more in common with Can at their most meditative than with any of the heavier material on side one. Each track sounds like a different band. The connection is the space they all inhabit: patient, strange, slightly out of focus.

The original LP was self-released in 1975 on the band's own Diaton imprint in an edition of 300. No label would touch it. This Garden of Delights reissue - the first on vinyl, with two bonus tracks recorded live in 1976 - is as close to the original as most ears will ever get. Worth every moment of the search.