Originally released in 1977, Gert Thrue’s Sound Painted Pictures Of Cosmic Love is a cult classic from the early Danish cosmic music scene. Across four evocatively titled pieces of varying lengths, Thrue and his collaborators, the drummers Jan Preus and Per Høyer, take the listener on an expressive journey through a celestial constellation of organs, keyboards, synthesisers and drums. In the process, they reach into the infinite while pursuing the lofty spiritual goals Thrue articulated in the album’s bilingual liner notes.

I really wish to be in harmony. To feel and learn the power which makes the flowers grow, the power which make the seed sprout and break through the earth. The cosmic power from the universe called love and brotherhood, which radiates from the universe and exist everywhere, but only is realized by few. If you reach that, will you have no need for concern or doubt, because then you will understand that nothing is impossible for you.

When we contacted Thrue about Sound Painted Pictures Of Cosmic Love, he was willing to licence the album but unwilling to discuss it. Instead, he referred us to a 2012 interview with Lars Rørbæk from Clemens Records. We extracted quotes and background information for these liner notes from that interview before also speaking with Høyer. As Thrue explained to Rørbæk, “I’ve put [the album] behind me. It is a closed chapter.”

Born and raised in the port town of Ebeltoft on Denmark’s rural Djursland peninsula in the mid-1950s, Thrue got his start as a self-taught musician on bass guitar and organ. When he was fifteen, he made friends with a younger teenager who played the drums and lived just down the street, Per Høyer. Not long after, they started practising in Thrue’s parent's basement in various short-lived jam bands. When they weren’t playing together, they bonded over progressive music of the day, like Jimi Hendrix.

Outside of jamming with Høyer, Thrue played bass in Fabel, a Danish language psychedelic rock group from the nearby seaport town Grenaa. Two members of the band, the Serwin brothers, played him albums by Hansson & Karlsson, a Swedish instrumental jazz fusion duo who’d performed and recorded with Jimi Hendrix and had a cult following across Europe. Hearing Bo Hansson play the Hammond Organ was a revelatory experience for Thrue, who purchased a Hammond TTR-100 Portable Organ in 1974.

Thinking back on his friend at the time, Høyer remembers Thrue as a quiet introvert. In light of this, what happened next was quite surprising. Six years after Hansson & Karlsson stopped performing together, Thrue overcame his insular nature and travelled to Stockholm in 1975 in search of Hansson, eventually finding him on a nearby suburban island, Lidingö. “When I first decide on something, it often becomes extreme because I go all the way and go about it systematically,” Thrue reflected.

Hansson welcomed Thrue into his home, and they spent the day together. “I saw his studio and got an insight into his special sound on the Hammond [M-100 series] organ,” he remembered. The next day, Thrue visited the composer Ralph Lundsten. In the mid-sixties, Lundsten collaborated with a Finnish engineer, Erkki Kuriniemi, and built what was arguably the world's first polyphonic synthesizer with a sequencer, marking him out as one of the pioneers of electronic music in Scandinavia.

On the 26th of February 1976, Thrue and Høyer made some rudimentary two-track demos at a small recording studio located inside Brdr. Jørgensen music shop in Herning. Thrue shopped those demos around with several different Danish record labels before contacting Palle Juul, who told Thrue he could record at his Stuk Ranch studio if he financed the sessions himself. Unsurprisingly, he accepted Juul’s offer.

Not long after, Thrue hired the drummer Jan Preus and headed to Stuk Ranch with Høyer in tow. He’d budgeted for three days of recording and mixing with the engineer Per Popper Rasmussen, so everything had to happen at breakneck speed. “It was probably an advantage that large parts of the numbers were improvised,” he said.

Over the first day, Thrue and Preus tracked the A-side, ‘Sound Painted Pictures Of Cosmic Love’, an eighteen-and-a-half-minute cosmic synth-rock odyssey. That night, he asked Høyer if he wanted to play the drums on their second day in the studio. As Høyer remembers it, Preus took this suggestion the wrong way, packed up his equipment and went home. “I never saw him again,” Høyer explains. “I don’t think Jan Preus and Gert [Thrue] ever spoke again after the session.”

On the second day, Thrue and Høyer completed the shorter B-side tracks ‘Travellin' By Thoughts’, ‘I Play The Body Electronic’ and ‘Cepheus’, before mixing everything on their final day at Stuk Ranch. All four songs became Sound Painted Pictures Of Cosmic Love, Thrue’s first and only album. On a stroll through Aarhus, Thrue chanced upon some cosmological artwork by the Dutch artist Johfra Bosschart in a display window. In his words, “It kind of summed up the meaning I had for the project.” From there, Thrue approached Bosschart about using it as the album’s cover art before releasing it through Stuk to minimal fanfare in 1977. After the album was released, Thrue and Høyer performed it live for a Red Cross fundraiser at a local high school. It was the last time the two friends played together and the first and only performance of the music on Sound Painted Pictures Of Cosmic Love.

Decades later, they were both surprised to learn the album had acquired a cult reputation with record collectors and DJs, but as Thrue explained earlier, he saw Sound Painted Pictures Of Cosmic Love as a moment in time that has long passed. Høyer feels similarly. “Recently, I tried to listen to it, and I must admit that I didn’t bother finishing it,” he explained.

However, where Thrue sees a closed chapter, we see new beginnings for a visionary and pioneering album richly deserving of reassessment and appreciation within the pantheon of early European experimental rock music and electronica. Forty-five years after it was first released, Frederiksberg Records is pleased to present the first official digital reissue of Gert Thrue’s Sound Painted Pictures Of Cosmic Love.