Echo

This is no one-man band thing. Achim Reichel has a whole cast, a kind of krautrock all-star thing going, with Conny Plank and Klaus Schulze and drummers and an orchestra and the whole nine. This is his moon shot, his bigtime epic and he delivers. The opening section, a quiet drive up a  rocky hill, is an exquisite kosmic landscape, and he returns to this in the final third. What he builds it all up into involves an orchestra, singers, and a controlled jamboree. People love the kraut and kosmische axis because of albums like Echo, where a single walk takes you through a bunch of locations, some entirely improbable but all of them welcoming.