I've had a real soft spot for this obscure German epic since discovering it on some pirate music server decades ago. It might even have come from a Hotline server, it's been that long.
I suppose this album is considered by some to be psychedelia—and with the driving acoustic guitar acoustic guitar and Indian instruments, you can practically hear bell bottoms flapping in the breeze—or even krautrock due to its drawn-out, linear and insistent nature. But, besides the facts that krautrock was never this patchouli-scented, and that this came out in 1972 where psychedelia had been deader than a doornail for several years everywhere except Turkey, stylistically I consider "Crawling To Lhasa" to be less like those and closer in spirit, and even perhaps a direct acoustic precursor to, something like Magma's 1973 "Mekanïk Destruktïẁ Kommandöh". Like MDW, this album is almost just a single long rock raga, and also like MDW, it seems to exist in a world of its own, like it's a relic of some parallel dimension where popular music had forked off onto just a slightly different path. I'm sure it must be 15 or 20 minutes before there's even a chord change on this album. Only Germans ever made music like this, and only for a few years around this time. And with the post-hippie vibe and dominance of acoustic instruments here, this doesn't even sound like any of those. If Neu! had been brainwashed to join a hippie cult in San Francisco, maybe they would have made something like this.
