(About the Pyramid label from Toby Robinson)
Pyramid came about almost entirely by accident. As an escape from the daily chore of patching pre-war sine-wave generators through ring modulators in the WDR electronic music studio, a Canadian artist friend of mine called Robin Page and myself recorded - rather drunk at 2am - a number of Slim Gaillard songs (Flat-foot Floozie with the Floyfloy, Shoe-fly pie and Apple Pandowdy(?), etc) on acoustic guitars at the WDR studio.
Robin had been in Cologne about 2 years and his paintings and sculptures were selling so well that he had brought over a few ex-students from Leeds (where he had been head of art) to help him in the studio priming canvases, starting sculptures.
But now his life-long ambition was fulfilled and his art was selling well - naturally, he wanted to make records. In the basement of the semi-derilict building where his studio was housed was a Turkish guy who had a cutting lathe and a press mainly to produce bootlegs for a large Turkish community. Robin asked a student to design the cover, and almost before our hangovers had subsided, he presented me with a copy of Pyramid 001 - a couple of drunks warbling very poorly. I don't know how many were made, but Robin gave some to mates - the rest I think he threw away when returning to Canada.
He persuaded me (by paying for it himself) to have a batch of albums run of some pieces I had made by bouncing sounds between two Revoxes over and over - until the his became unbearable. This became Pyramid 002. I think we had 100 made by the guy in the basement, and we sold a few at 4 marks each. I think each album cost under a mark to make, so there might have even been a small profit.
My work at WDR was pretty undemanding - every now and then we used to have a visiting composer in to make a piece, but for the most part, Jim (an American who also worked there and once told me that for over 2 years he had dropped a tab of acid each and every morning and was not entirely comprehensible) and I used to try out new configurations of connecting the various boxes together, record the resultant din, log the wiring and dial settings on forms, and file them away for Karlheinz to listen to at a later
date.
Consequently, I was very bored. The most interesting people used to hang out in the Turkish ghetto, where it seemed almost every building had an illicit club in the basement. You had to be known to be let in. A called Alex Meyer - a nutter who slept in his battered van with at least three Hammond organs - knew most of the clubs where the interesting music was played. We used to go out most nights and get drunk. He was constantly trying to persuade people to let him sit in on sessions, but as he invariably insisted on filling the stage with 3 or 4 organs and several leslie cabinets (and then played music, although wonderful, that was entirely unrelated to the piece the band was playing,) was not much in demand.
He took to parking his van outside Robin's studio, and one day I borrowed a Nagra from WDR, and recorded him on a derelict floor of the building. I think we decided on the Cozmic Corridor name because I made my little control room down the corridor from Alex. Later we overdubbed guitars,
vocals and noises on the 1" 4 -[track] we did another couple of albums with him. Alex, his van and organs left Cologne sometime around 1975 - I believe to take up residency in a hotel on the Balkan coast!
Alex also used to hang around with a poet from Metz called Pauline Fund and a Swiss guy - I believe from Basle - who called himself Poseidon. Pauline wrote and sang something on Alex's first album. Poseidon wasn't a musician, but was hugely tall and thin, and completely mad (which helped) I think they mainly earned a crust as performance artists. By the time I had started to work at Dieter Dierks' studio in Stommeln (1973), he had got a few musicians to front him, and we did an out of hours session there. Later we overdubbed keyboards and extra guitar, and called the band Temple.
My older brother, Mike, had been touring Europe in an electronic group called Gentle Fire for some time, and one of their pieces involved huge 'oven racks' which when hit make a variety of noises when mic's with contact mics. I nicked the idea, and along with a few other musicians (who couldn't use their real names because they were exclusively contracted to major labels), we recorded loads of stuff that eventually resulted in three albums under the name The Nazguf [fax is blurred on this word. cm].
Although only three people were credited, four or five were involved in the project. They made a few live performances in art galleries in Cologne and Dusseldorf.
All of the recording for Pyramid was done totally informally and ultimately, what decided whether something was released was if Robin would get one of his students to design a cover. If a cover existed, a small run would be paid for by whoever could afford it (normally Robin and me), and the albums distributed among the participating musicians. A few nightclubs had record bars, and sold our stuff. No tabs were kept on how many had move, and I don't remember doing reruns on anything.
Basically, they were vanity pressings and a way of keeping Robin's students entourage occupied. I had to use pseudonyms for my involvement because most of the studio time was purloined without the proprietor's knowledge.
The strange mix of stuff that was recorded for Pyramid was not due to any choice - it was simply that I recorded everything weird I could find as an antidote to the more commercial stuff I was recording to make a living. Even the albums I did for the Cosmic Courier label seemed fairly commercial in comparison to what I really found fun, and were made under severe pressure as most were done at Dieter's which was the priciest studio around.
So basically, Pyramid's output was a loss-making enterprise designed albeit unsuccessfully, to keep some vestige of my sanity in tact. I was just fortunate to have the keys to a few studios, and a lot of talented musicians who were prepared to mess about in the middle of the night in return for a few Kleine Reblaus and a few copies of the resultant cacophony! Still, it ain't all bad.
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p.s. Alex Carretero (of Guerssen Records) says on the Facebook Krautrock group "Zeus B Held has confirmed to me his presence in the recordings Toby did in Cologne" which confirms what I'd read elsewhere about Zeus remembering those sessions but not remembering any releases. A similar word from Reinhard Karwatky could be useful if anyone can trace him. He's still living in his birth town, so anyone local with the ability to chat with him would be useful! Wah Wah are issuing the two Baba Yaga albums, also recorded by Toby Robinson during the same era, so maybe some contact with Ingo Werner may result?
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Auf dem Cover steht u.A. das Pseudonym des Artikelschreibers Genius P. Orridge (nicht der Typ der sich Genesis P-Orridge nennt)
Greetz von einem der es damals zeitecht mitbekam
Gwyn Mooser
