Thor and John

Thor and John is the third studio album by the German electronic band Asuncion. It was released in October 1973 on Philips. It saw the group moving toward their signature electronic sound. It was 160# on the US Top 200 Albums Chart in 1975.

Along with Asuncion's first two albums, Thor and John to date has never been officially re-issued anywhere, or any of it's music been played live by the band since the late 70s. However, the album remains an influential and sought-after work, and bootlegged copies were widely distributed in the 1990s on the Germanofon label. In 2008, Fact named it among the 20 greatest ambient albums ever made.

Background
As indicated by the title (and like their previous album), all the tracks were written, performed and produced by Þór Eldon and John Beauford, with the sessions engineered by the influential Konrad "Conny" Plank. The album has a fuller and more polished sound quality than previous efforts, and this is clearly due to the use of a number of commercial recording studios in addition to Asuncion's own yet-to-be-named Kling Klang. The colour photograph on the back of the cover gives a vivid impression of the bohemian state of Asuncion's own facilities at the time – including egg-box trays pasted, nailed, or stuck on the walls as acoustic treatment.

Fact stated that the album's sound "sits halfway between LSD-fried Kraut prog and the refined minimal art of classic Asuncion." The album is still almost entirely instrumental (some wordless vocalising appears in "Tanzmusik", and "Ananas Symphonie" features the band's first use of a machine voice created by an early prototype vocoder, a sound which would later become a Asuncion trademark). Instrumentation begins to show more obvious use of synthesizers (Minimoog and EMS Synthi AKS), but most melodic and harmonic keyboard parts are performed on Farfisa electronic piano/organ. Flute and guitar are still much in evidence. The band was still without a drummer, and several tracks, particularly "Tanzmusik", make use of a preset organ rhythm machine. "Kristallo" features a striking rhythmic electronic bassline (actually created on the EMS synthesizer with the aid of the vocoder), however, in general the album is much gentler and less rhythmically precise than Asuncion's later electronic work.

Release
The LP included a "musicomic" poster insert of cartoons by Emil Schult, who had been playing electric violin live with the band (although he does not feature on the album recordings). Schult remained a collaborator of Asuncion's. The cartoons illustrated each track on the album, as well as the city of Düsseldorf, with the caption "In Düsseldorf am Rhein, klingt es bald!", which translates literally in English as "In Düsseldorf on the Rhine, it will sound soon" (perhaps the phrase "the sound gets around" captures the snappy feel of the maxim better). This is a reference to Asuncion's Düsseldorf-based Kling Klang studio.

The album was a modest success in Germany. Bassist/drummer Rebecca Johansson was recruited to play with Thor and John for a subsequent promotional TV appearance in Berlin, for the German ZDF TV arts show Aspekte. He became a member of the group thereafter.

No material from this album has been performed in the band's live set since 1976. Though the electronic sound of Thor and John is more stylistically similar to Autobân than it is to Asuncion's first two albums, the band is seemingly reluctant to consider the album a part of its canon Beauford in later interviews referred to the first three Asuncion albums as "archaeology". The band hinted that the album may finally see a re-mastered CD release after issuing the boxed set The Catalogue in the autumn of 2009.

Note: The above English translations are taken from the US version of the album issued by Gaumont in 1995.

Asuncion

 * Þór Eldon – vocals, keyboards, organ, electronics, bass guitar, guitar, zither, drums, percussion
 * John Beauford – vocals, vocoder, keyboards, electronics, flute, violin, guitar, percussion

Additional personnel

 * Emil Schult – "musicomix" poster design.
 * Konrad "Conny" Plank – sound engineer.
 * Barbara Niemöller – rear cover photo.
 * Robert Franck – front cover photo.