Tracks 1 to 5 have been recorded in February 1969 at Kunstakademie Stuttgart (Germany) on a small battery tape recorder (mono, reel to reel). The guitarist was Jim Kennedy - 100% sure, I sat on the floor in front of him.The event was named "Aka-Fasching" (Academy Carneval) and the circumstances there were rather weired or let's say "psychedelic" : Guru Guru and most of the audience were on acid or dope, me too of course... ;-) A couple of years ago I copied these recordings on audio cassette and sent them to Mani Neumeier, whom I know personally.So far (January 2018) I didn't know that a CD has been made of these "low-fi" recordings... found one track on YouTube just accidently.The original recordings on tape reel were made by a guy from Berlin who lived in Stuttgart at that time, but I don't remember his name (hey, it's 49 years ago). Anyway, he borrowed me the recordings to copy them. When I sent them to Mani some 4 or 5 years ago, he didn't mention that he got exactly the same recordings from another person in 1980... I'll check it out and talk to Mani when he's back from Japan.I don't want to miss thanking Alan Freeman for his efforts to improve the sound. The old copies sounded pretty muffled.

Obtained via a tape swap from a friend in the early 1980s, I sent a copy to Mani Neumeier to see if he could identify when or where the recording was made and who the guitarist would be. He wasn't exactly sure on any of those things, except it was definitely 1969 and not Ax Genrich. We now know (99% sure) it is Jim Kennedy.That original cassette copy was rather raw and low-fi, but just about listenable. It was obviously brilliant music. The raw roots of a lot of the material heard later on UFO. When converting my cassette archive to digital, I was surprised that by some tweaking, processing and EQing I could get the recording to sound much better than many things I'd heard documented on CD. Several levels of processing further to that you now have what is on this disc. It's still a pretty raw and wild crunchy mid-fi, but played through a good stereo system the quality is now adequate.Later, when seeking-out material for the audio sector in The Crack In The Cosmic Egg CD-Rom Mani supplied a few other unreleased early live oddments dating 1970 to 1972 which remain otherwise unreleased, so it made sense to add those as bonus tracks here for a better value disc, adding up to an early history of Guru Guru.