Manuel Göttsching

Manuel Göttsching (1952–2022) was a German musician and composer, founder of the kosmische/krautrock group Ash Ra Tempel alongside Klaus Schulze and Hartmut Enke in Berlin in 1970. A defining figure of the Berlin School of electronic music, his 1981 solo recording E2-E4 — a continuous seventy-minute synthesizer improvisation, released in 1984 — is widely cited as a direct precursor to house and techno. His work, continued under the Ashra alias, also included a collaboration with Timothy Leary and decades of electronic experimentation.