Some records exist outside of time not by design but by circumstance. Magic Theatre was recorded in the spring of 1972 in the Stuttgart studio of pianist Horst Jankowski, submitted to MPS, and promptly shelved. It sat untouched for three decades, until Jankowski - shortly before his death - returned the tapes to their rightful owner. What emerged was one of the most genuinely unclassifiable documents of the European underground.

Drum Circus were a Swiss percussion ensemble anchored by Peter Giger, who would go on to found Dzyan, and expanded here into something considerably stranger. Giger brought in two additional drummers - Marc Hellman and Alex Bally - establishing a rhythmic foundation of considerable mass and density. But it is the guest cast that transforms the project into something approaching a minor summit: Joël Vandroogenbroeck (Brainticket) contributes flute and additional instrumentation, weaving the same cosmic multiculturalism that defined Cottonwood Hill; Carole Muriel, also of Brainticket, provides vocals of an almost narcotic quality; and Gerd Dudek - wind player and member of Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra - brings a free jazz lineage that runs all the way back to the European avant-garde's most electrically charged moment. Hellman and Muriel would join Brainticket following these sessions, which makes Magic Theatre in some ways a document of that band before it fully knew what it was.

The album's centrepiece is the twenty-one minute title track, a sprawling psychedelic ritual whose lyrics were partly written by Timothy Leary and partly drawn from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is music conceived at the intersection of pharmaceutical mysticism and ancient cosmology - Muriel's voice moves through the piece like smoke, Vandroogenbroeck's flute traces patterns that feel simultaneously ancient and synthetic, and the three-drummer foundation generates a low, grinding trance rather than anything resembling conventional rock propulsion. Elsewhere the record shifts register entirely: "Groove Rock" delivers eight minutes of driving, MPS-flavored jazz-fusion with Dudek's reeds cutting over a locked rhythm; "Papera" and "La-Si-Do" are brief, almost playful sketches that reveal a band comfortable with structural variety; "All Things Pass" dissolves into something close to pure atmosphere.

The connection to the network around Leary's European exile - the same constellation that would shortly produce Walter Wegmüller's Tarot, Sergius Golowin's Lord Krishna von Goloka, and Ash Ra Tempel's Starring Rosi - makes Magic Theatre a crucial and until recently missing piece of that extraordinary moment. Garden of Delights' vinyl edition is the first time this music has appeared on LP. Essential.