Plain and Fancy: 07/27/24

Cool heavy rock from Ainigma, a young trio from Germany, who released this record in 1973. The sound is dirty and sounds a lot like garage. The keyboards roar, the guitar has a fat, hard sound and the loudly mixed drums are played with great power. At the time, Ainigma consisted of the two 15-year-olds Michael Klüter (drums) and Wolfgang Netzer (g) and the 17-year-old Willi Klüter (keys, vocals). The ideas for the songs came from Willi Klüter, too. the great attraction comes from the simple, brute and naively youthful recording. The trio plays the songs clean and hard, between the loudly turned up amplifiers the flat dynamics are not noticeable, the songs rock, are not a bit well-behaved, there are no long solos, but long motifs, so that three songs are over 5 and one even over 17 minutes long.

These quirks are charming and make up a good part of the appeal of the songs. It's lucky that the songs have been preserved at all! No band can sound like this today. The boys were self-confident enough to take their ideas to the “studio”, the parish hall in Garmisch, record the songs there and release the recordings on LP.

As always, Garden of Delights has once again done a great job and released the production in a comprehensive and informative way. The label has the right philosophy. Each production is excellently documented not only in terms of the music, but also in terms of the history and development of the band and musicians with text and pictures, including alternative covers and labels. Anyone who has ever placed their record with Garden of Delights to see it from the band's perspective will know that their classic from the good old days is well presented.