An Incredibly Spectacular Experimental Album Featuring Early Works By Yoko Ono

This album is special in many ways. How did I come across this album? Let me start at the beginning ...

Berlin, the city where I was born, grew up, and still live today, was divided for three decades. The Berlin Wall stood here, and the city was perhaps the most famous border between East and West. The Wall completely enclosed West Berlin, but also ran right through the middle of historic Berlin. The Wall separated not only the country and its people, but also its culture.

Most of the theaters, opera houses, museums, and libraries were located in East Berlin, which was the historic city center. In West Berlin, the loss was compensated for after 1961 with a lot of money from Western Germany, which was used to establish new institutions and construct new buildings. As a result, we now have a little more of everything. Originally opened as an arts and crafts museum in 1881, the Gropius Bau is now an authority on modern and contemporary art. The Berlin Wall ran right past the imposing main entrance with its horse-drawn carriage driveway, so in the 1970s a smaller entrance door was moved to the west side. Today, everything is back to the old way.

The Exhibition

This summer, an exhibition by Yoko Ono was shown under the title MUSIC OF THE MIND. It is a joint project of Tate Modern, London (shown 2024), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2025), and Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf. This exhibition brings together a wealth of works, objects, installations, performances, “touch poems,” and “instruction pieces” created by Yoko Ono. Above all, these short instructions, written on small cards, which describe a task for the performer, form an important centerpiece of her entire oeuvre. Since the 1950s, Yoko Ono has been writing down these conceptual ideas for herself and others in short instructions typed on a typewriter. An extensive collection of these notes was first published in 1964 as a small book under the title “Grapefruit” (500 copies), which she published herself.

Yoko Ono moved to New York in 1957 with her first husband, the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. There, the couple came into contact with renowned representatives of the American avant-garde. From 1960 onwards, they gave joint performances with La Monte Young and John Cage in a loft on Chambers Street. At this time, Yoko Ono was working on acoustic performances, but also on her first conceptual artworks. After her divorce, she returned to Japan in 1962 and continued her work there in a similar vein. She married for a second time in 1963, to American film producer Anthony Cox. After the birth of their daughter Kyoko, the couple returned to New York. Here, Yoko Ono continued her conceptual work and also produced experimental sound recordings based on some of the “instruction pieces” from Grapefruit.

In November 1966, Yoko Ono presented a solo exhibition at the Indica Gallery in Masons Yard, London. This art gallery and bookshop was one of the focal points of the London underground scene for two years, from 1965 to 1967. Among its founders was Peter Asher, whose sister Jane was in a relationship with Paul McCartney at the time. It was here that Yoko Ono and John Lennon met for the first time. Lennon is bold enough to immediately climb the ladder standing in the middle of the room and read the very small keyword written with the attached magnifying glass: YES!

Less than a year and a half later, John & Yoko are a couple. They are considered inseparable. In the meantime, strong tensions have built up within the Beatles, Paul and John are no longer in sync, and George and Ringo are unable to compensate for this. Many Beatles fans perceive Yoko Ono as a danger. John & Yoko are now also working together and releasing three extraordinary records on Apple and Zapple, which are incredible of for Beatles fans. After the breakup of the Beatles, John & Yoko then realize a joint project with the Plastic Ono Band in 1970 with two solo albums under their respective names. From this point on, the couple's further work should be well known.

Many objects in the exhibition show how important Yoko Ono has been to Lennon's work since 1967. These are very simple things, often just words and objects that speak for themselves or have a deeper meaning. Even if it's just an apple! Lennon also becomes politically active. John & Yoko are internationally present as activists with various happenings and declare a bed-in for world peace. Shortly thereafter, Yoko Ono developed the concept of billboard campaigns. This involved renting large advertising spaces in public areas. Key words were then displayed in huge letters on a uniform white background, often supplemented with a note in much smaller font. One of the most famous billboards was WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT. The exhibition at the Gropius Bau was impressive and interesting. I was particularly unfamiliar with the many works from before 1966.

In the courtyard of the Gropius Bau. The installation Wish Tree for Berlin (1996/2025) can be seen in the background. It invited visitors to write their wishes for peace on small pieces of paper and tie them to one of the nine trees.

Berlin wouldn't be Berlin if there weren't a second major exhibition taking place at the same time. This was also the case with Yoko Ono. In the equally renowned Neue Nationalgalerie, a modernist sacred building designed by architect Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968, the “instruction pieces” and similar concepts were presented as active performances. Here, visitors were invited to engage with one or more of the instructions. So it was not a counter-concept to the exhibition of works, but a logical addition. Thirdly, and this is also Berlin, the Neue Berliner Kunstverein erected a huge billboard at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Torstrasse: TOUCH.

The Album

Like any good museum, the Gropius Bau also has a bookshop. It always has thousands of art books, theoretical writings, and, of course, everything related to the current exhibition. This was also the case with Yoko Ono — T-shirts, pens, mugs, and even a music album. I wasn't interested in the CD, but I couldn't resist the vinyl. For 30 euros, I got a double LP with a gatefold cover and booklet.

The album features recordings based on twenty selected “instruction pieces” from “Grapefruit.” The recordings are very diverse, sometimes featuring instruments, sometimes everyday sounds, and sometimes atmospheric sounds. All tracks were recorded in 2024. The Stockholm-based ensemble The Great Learning Orchestra ventured into this repertoire. TGLO was founded in 1999 by Leif Jordansson and Pelle Halvarsson and, with a constantly changing line-up, is dedicated to avant-garde classics and contemporary compositions. Around one hundred musician and non-musician friends make up the ensemble, with the line-up being put together according to the composers' specifications. This makes them versatile and equipped to meet almost any requirement.

The press release reveals: “The sonic realizations presented here are of a number of different kinds, encompassing studio-based ensemble performances, but also location, environmental, and field recordings (and at times combinations of these), as the scores themselves dictate, and for the most part recorded live and acoustically, such that the performances, actions, situations, and environments that you hear are real.”

The album was released on the German indie label Karlrecords run by Thomas Herbst. The label primarily releases avant-garde and experimental recordings (Kammerflimmer, Xenakis, Zeitkratzer etc.). With catalog number 100, Karlrecords is giving us and itself a very generous gift. For the first time, a collection with a wide selection of Yoko Ono's “instruction pieces” is available as an acoustic document.

The recordings were made digitally and are very clear and clean. The production by Robin McGinley, who also did the sound recordings together with Ricardo Atienza, Niklas Billström, and Leif Jordansson, is of a very high standard. It takes a lot of courage and experience to embark on such a project and find the common thread and hold on to it firmly. The same can be said for the mastering and transfer to vinyl by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin. The pressing quality of this double LP at 45 rpm is more than adequate. Only the design of the cover and booklet falls short. Here, I would have liked the graphic designer to have paid visual homage to Yoko Ono. Why not a white cover, as with Grapefruit? Simple typography, striking, solid craftsmanship, and not artificial. Perhaps even typed on a typewriter? High praise for the unknown pressing plant! Incidentally, both LPs were inserted separately from the cover and packed together in foil, with the Hype sticker on top. In addition to the informative booklet, there is also a postcard with a download code for Bandcamp. There you can download the complete album, including the booklet, in all major compressed formats as well as in HiRes.

As I said at the beginning, this is a very special record. After sixty years, there is finally an acoustic collection of 85 minutes of Yoko Ono's conceptual art. These are not typical sound recordings, no close miking or plugin instruments, no dry studio atmosphere enlivened with artificial reverb. Here there are real spaces. Acoustic sculptures and atmospheres that you hardly notice when you are in the room yourself, but which now take on an oversized form in stereo.

When instruments are used, it is in an atypical way. In Pieces for Orchestra 1-3, for example, Yoko Ono demands: peel, peek, take off (listening tip). There are also spoken word pieces, instructions to count, ask questions, or simply shout in all directions! Simple instructions such as documenting a kettle boiling or sweeping a room are hard to beat in their radicalism. For most listeners, the album certainly opens up unfamiliar, perhaps even completely new experiences on their home stereo systems. It's not the silence between the notes that counts here, it's the seconds between the individual tracks that are truly silent. Otherwise, there is a more or less intense acoustic swell. The supposedly quiet becomes audible … for me, it's a long-awaited change of pace, allowing me to recalibrate my ears before, after, and between jazz, pop, and classical recordings.

Finally, I must say that I cannot deal with rating music on a scale of 1 to 11. What I do like to evaluate, however, is the repertoire value. By that I mean whether it is worth listening to the album once or more often.

This album is so special that it is primarily aimed at avant-garde listeners and Yoko Ono completists. All those who could hardly bear Unfinished Music No. 1 & 2 and the 1970 Plastic Ono Band album will not be happy this time either. But all the rest of us …