The Cosmic Jokers were one of krautrock’s strangest legends — not really a band at all, but a studio supergroup conjured from a series of acid-fuelled jam sessions by some of the Berlin school’s finest improvisers. Masterminded by the producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, and built around the guitar of Manuel Göttsching and the synthesizers of Klaus Schulze, their handful of 1974 albums are wild, cosmic and surrounded by controversy.

The short version

The Cosmic Jokers came together in 1973 when producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser gathered members of Ash Ra Tempel and Wallenstein for long, improvised studio sessions. From the tapes he assembled a run of albums in 1974 — “Cosmic Jokers”, “Galactic Supermarket” and the compilations “Planeten Sit-In” and “Sci Fi Party” — released, famously, without the musicians’ consent. Free-form, spacey and unrepeatable, they remain cult artefacts of the German underground.

Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s studio experiment

The Cosmic Jokers were the brainchild of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, the producer and writer behind the Kosmische Kuriere (“Cosmic Couriers”) label, and his partner Gille Lettmann. In 1973 Kaiser brought together an all-star cast of Berlin-school musicians — guitarist Manuel Göttsching and synthesist Klaus Schulze of Ash Ra Tempel, keyboardist Jürgen Dollase and drummer Harald Grosskopf of Wallenstein, and the producer Dieter Dierks on bass — for a series of long, improvised, LSD-fuelled sessions at Dierks’s studio. The Cosmic Jokers were never a real band, and never played live; they were a studio creation. Most notoriously, Kaiser issued the resulting tapes as a string of albums without ever asking the musicians’ permission — a move that would help bring his label crashing down.

Cosmic improvisation

The music of the Cosmic Jokers is pure, free-form space-rock — long, improvised jams built around Manuel Göttsching’s soaring, freaked-out guitar and Klaus Schulze’s droning organ and synthesizers, with Jürgen Dollase’s keyboards and Mellotron, Harald Grosskopf’s propulsive drums and washes of electronic effects, and on some records the spoken and screamed voices of Gille Lettmann. Unsurprisingly, given who was playing, it often sounds like a cousin of Ash Ra Tempel, structured into side-long suites that build from frantic acid freakout to floating, cosmic calm. Few records capture the Berlin school at its most uninhibited.

If this is your scene, the books go deeper →

The 1974 albums

The eponymous “Cosmic Jokers” (1974), the first and finest, is built from two epics — the twenty-two-minute “Galactic Joke” and the nineteen-minute “Cosmic Joy” — a first-rate slab of space rock. “Galactic Supermarket” (1974) followed in much the same vein, adding female voices and Grosskopf’s “helicopter” drums across two more long pieces. The later releases, “Planeten Sit-In” (1974) and “Sci Fi Party” (1974), were compilations of a different sort — shorter snippets from the same sessions, patched together with cross-fades and electronic effects under a loose conceptual theme, and brought to a young audience under Kaiser’s “cosmic” banner. All emerged within months of one another, and all without the players’ blessing.

Album by album

Four albums drawn from the legendary Cosmic Jokers sessions. Tap any title for its guide.

The players and afterwards

The Cosmic Jokers were less a group than a gathering — Manuel Göttsching, Klaus Schulze, Jürgen Dollase, Harald Grosskopf and Dieter Dierks, marshalled by the producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, the project’s invisible guiding hand. The unauthorised releases caused lasting bad feeling, and amid the controversy Kaiser’s label soon collapsed. The musicians, though, went on to great things: Manuel Göttsching to Ash Ra Tempel and Ashra and his landmark guitar work, and Klaus Schulze to a towering career in electronic music. Both men died in 2022 — but the strange, brilliant records made in those 1973 sessions live on as cult classics of krautrock.

Where to start

Begin with the self-titled “Cosmic Jokers” (1974) — the first and best of the set, and the purest distillation of these sessions, its two long suites a thrilling ride through cosmic improvisation. From there, “Galactic Supermarket” (1974) offers more of the same wild energy. Together they capture a one-off meeting of krautrock greats at full, unguarded flight.

Why they still matter

The Cosmic Jokers matter as a fascinating footnote that became a legend — a studio experiment that, almost by accident, produced some of the most uninhibited cosmic music of its era. Their tangled, controversial origins only add to the mystique, but it is the playing — Göttsching and Schulze and company, lost in improvisation — that endures. For anyone drawn to the wildest fringes of the Berlin school, they are an essential curiosity.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →