Lost Horizon: Himmelaya reviewed

Stuart Douglas takes a modern kosmische journey from driving rhythms to hypnotic dream pop

“This is a record that deserves the komische tag, one that pays its dues to the artists who came before, while still contriving to come up with new approaches to the music.”

Perhaps the most over-used word in music reviews is ‘komische’. Every new release on a small label which contains so much as a passing resemblance to a bassline from an old Can record gets the krautrock (as we used to call it) label slapped on it, no matter that that the rest of the record sounds exactly like a million other guitar bands from the bad old days of indie landfill.

Not so here though. Himmelaya, the recent double album from Marc Hunt (aka Swordfish) of electronic band Astralasia, is a record which you could confidently drop into the bins alongside Neu, Can and Faust – or, even more plausibly, next to those slightly folkier outliers in the Krautrock pantheon, Sergius Golowin and Bernd Witthüser. The musicians and the label point to similarities to Ash Ra Tempel and, more specifically, the work they did with vocalist Rosi Muller on 1973’s Starring Rosi LP, and that’s equally valid (there is a track on here called Ashra Shirley, after all). Point is, this is a record that deserves the komische tag, one that pays its dues to the artists who came before, while still contriving to come up with new approaches to the music.

Joined by Jochen Oberlack of Bellerophon Records and vocalist Britt Rönnholm (of Us and Them), the album was apparently originally planned as a purely instrumental release, before Swordfish invited Rönnholm to contribute spoken word passages (hence the Golowin comparisons), starting with a striking part-spoken/part-sung vocal that adds an extra layer to the driving rhythms of opening track Belle Du Jour and turns my personal favourite track Black Forest in which she seems to be channelling Nico, into the kind of mesmerising track I’ll be recommending to people for years to come.

The whole album is similarly generally upbeat, even danceable, veering between the prog end of the genre and the more repetitive hypnotic rhythms familiar to fans of the German bands of the early ’70s. At times, in fact, the hypnotic element is enough to count almost as dream pop, even ambient, particularly on the second disc, where final tracks Nimbus Titherward and Metronopolis reference Tangerine Dream and bring the album to a perhaps unexpectedly meditative close.

❉ Lost Horizon – Himmelaya (2LP/2CD, Fruit de Mer RecordsCat. No.: winkle 59) is available from Norman Records.

❉ Stuart Douglas is an author, editor and owner of the publisher Obverse Books. He is the creator of the Lowe and Le Breton Mysteries series and has written four Sherlock Holmes novels. He can be found on Bluesky at @stuartdouglas.com