This was the second album by Germans Tomorrows Gift (recorded in 1972), and isn’t as well known, perhaps due to being unavailable as a reissue for many years. For the last few years it’s been available as a CD‑R bootleg from Shroom Productions, but now that you can buy it on a proper CD it seems like a good time to give this classic the public look-in it deserves.

Tomorrow’s Gift started out in the late 60’s as more of a conventionally-styled heavy progressive band with a late psychedelic hangover, though by no means ordinary or forgettable. Driven by heavy, churning organ and guitar riffage and ornamented by iconic flute and the masculine vocals of fiery-haired heart-throb Ellen Meyer, Tomorrow’s Gift Mk. 1 bore some general comparison to Frumpy, but in my opinion were better by and large, certainly less patchy and more likely to appeal to today’s underground heads. Tomorrow’s Gift had darker overtones (as you’d expect from a band who had song called things like “Prayin’ To Satan” and “The First Seasons After The Destruction”), though not without some non-soppy love and light vibes to counteract the despair with some inspired hope, their riffs leaning more to a Teutonic Purple/Heep-like proto-metal than hippy blues rock. They could also jam up a weird storm, as documented by the 20-minute live jams found on the various artists live albums ‘Pop& Blues Festival ‘70’ and ‘Love and Peace’, where they twist “Season of the Witch” (as “Sound of Which”) and “Indian Rope Man” (interspersed with their own “At the Earth”) respectively far beyond their original structures into demented heavy psychedelic jams.
By 1972, Tomorrow’s Gift had been reduced to only keyboardist Manne Rürup and bassist Bernd Kiefer from the original line-up that recorded the debut, and took on board drummer extraordinaire Zabba Lindner from crazed underground rockers Sphinx Tush to create a totally different instrumental group that would tackle music that was far more original, unconventional and psychedelic, and with more insane spontaneity and light-hearted nuttery. In fact you might as well regard Tomorrow’s Gift Mk. 2 as a totally different band, because there is no resemblance between the two whatsoever.

‘Jazzi Jazzi’ [2:53] opens the album with chintzy keyboard notes set to a counterpoint of angular Egg-like bass, kazoo, whistles and other assorted nuttiness, churning out a repeated groove that builds in madness and hilarity before changing into an Egg-cum-Zappa-cum-Supersister-cum-Moving Gelatine Plates progression of happy, complex Canterburyesque chops sure to please any lover of those groups. This flows straight into ‘Der Geier Fliegt Vorbei’ [8:44], as flute tweets over a twanging march on keyboards and two-note bass, a little reminiscent of a repetitive Soft Machine groove circa their debut. Howling winds and echo build around the flute as it all swells and collapses before taking up the charge again almost immediately, bass slamming on the fuzz-wah as drums crank it up before it all falls sloshily into an underwater realm of trippy sound splashes like a marine hall of mirrors – it’s almost like Mort Garson’s joined the party doing his Lucifer – Black Mass kind of Moog head music. Again a seamless portal-slip occurs as bass and drums take up a plodding repeated riff, glacial keyboards shimmering like curved shards of glass, all sounding like a minimal Matching Mole or Egg doing early 70’s Floyd. A few minutes in it breaks down into disjointed fumbling, before picking up the same groove again with renewed drive and deeper inner-spaciness, before again collapsing at the end.
‘Allerheiligen’ [4:34] begins all deeply cosmic, and for a second I keep thinking it’s the start of Hawkwind’s “Assault & Battery” with added pingy synth-like bass splodges, before it drops into a weird Floyd-meets-Vol. 2‑era Soft Machine zone, with thin, reedy distorted Dave Stewart/Mike Ratledge organ riffing off against submariner bass pokings and boinging drum accents. After a bit of whacked-out insanity in the middle a lovely reprieve of multi-tracked complex finger-picked guitar chimes in and takes over, sounding slightly sped-up and subtly treated, refreshing as a vibrant spring day after a light rain. Tripping. Of course.
‘Wienersatz’ [2:16] follows with free-form drum and bass splatterings in the background as weird, silly German voices mutter and sing tunelessly to a growing swell of organ and coalescing bass that sounds like a bunch of madmen conducting a church ceremony.
‘Naturgemäß’ [16:47] begins relatively peacefully but strangely, with a random wash of bass, percussion and glistening keyboards that keeps struggling to coalesce into some beautiful lacewing, and keeps falling into a heap that then takes off in another strange direction of spaced-out freeforming, groping for an anchorpoint from which to take flight. Eventually they settle on one, taking a tangent into a growing slow, subtle groove carried from intricate guitar structures, rolling restrained drums, cinematic flute palettes and quiet meandering bass melodicism. It’s an understated approach to deep psychedelia that works gorgeously (and certainly this album is a delight to trip to!). After a few minutes they turn to a repeated jazzy riff that’s pinched from the Nucleus album ‘Elastic Rock’, soon alternately broken up by chaotic interludes with mad piano rushes. Another few minutes and this whole groove has subsided to understated minimalism, so quiet and spaced you can hear crickets and little birds, as droning washes of keyboards drift us into blissed-out oblivion to the slow rambling tick of drums and the star-voyaging repeated jazzy bass line, carried over the celestial oceans to whatever may lie beyond. Which turns out to be the chaotic interlude-with-piano bit from before, soon broken up by crashing fuzz bass riffs that change the course of the whole shebang into a stomping sloppy finish.
‘Didden Für Dunden’ [4:04] rises out of the ashes with wet electronic sounds zinging, sliding and lurching out of every corner, dripping with echo and delay, molding 4‑dimensional form out of the space between your ears. Sound-effected drums ping and bash around a bit, at one point taking off in a primitive drum-machine-like charge before stopping dead and returning to freeformed brain damage. Overall the whole track is like this, kind of like Limbus with better access to studio effects, and there you have it, the album ending on a weird and seemingly unresolved note of random splat. These guys certainly weren’t aiming at the album charts, but in (not) doing so they crafted quite a weird and wonderful little golden egg for us to rediscover with joy over 30 years later.

Shortly after, Lindner made the great experimental percussion album ‘Voll-Bedienung of Percussion’ [Brain, 1974] with Carsten Bohn of Frumpy, and around the same time Tomorrow’s Gift morphed into Release Music Orchestra, with the addition of Norbert Jacobsen on clarinet and piano. Their first album as RMO, the live ‘Life’ [Brain, 1974], had some similarity to the more structured instrumental style of ‘Goodbye Future’ but was less experimental and psychedelic, though still great stuff. Later albums saw them turn more and more into a standard slick jazz-rock fusion band, as Kiefer left and many others joined.

As mentioned above, for many years this classic album remained criminally un-reissued on CD. A few years ago Shroom Productions put out a CD‑R bootleg version, but this year saw the first proper CD reissue. It seems like an authorised reissue, but who can be sure these days, and it’s certainly not made explicit on the packaging. Regardless, the sound is excellent and does sound like it could be from master tapes. The CD comes with the two LP-side long live tracks that the first incarnation contributed to the various artists live albums ‘Pop & Blues Festival ‘70’ and ‘Love & Peace’, as bonus tracks.