Alex Oriental Experience | Die Gunst Der Stunde

Reupped by special request here.

While riding my bike down Steinway one unseasonably warm January day, I noticed a second-hand store on the west side of the street. I can't for the life of me remember what it was, but something compelled me to pull over, park and lock the bike, and check the place out. Was I looking for something, maybe cheap dishes or a vintage shirt? I don't remember. I do remember that I found loads of things in the $2-each CD section, including Die Gunst Der Stunde (Windows of Opportunity).

Recorded in 1997 by Alex Wiska (saz) and Reinhold Görlitz (drums) and released on Wiska's Wiska Records label under the name Alex Oriental Experience, the six tracks on this stripped-down minor masterpiece showcase not Wiska's Kraut-rocked-out electric saz--which is phenomenal, even this late in his career--but an interplay between his saz and Görlitz's drums that feels both brain-meltingly complex and yet so tightly wound together that you almost register the duo's feelers of sound as though emerging from a single instrument.

Read more about Wiska and his relationship to the German and Turkish psych scenes at Mutant Sounds.