Now:
Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band – The Rarity Of Experience. This is going to take some digesting (it’s pretty long), but it’s clearly a major treat for lovers of exploratory guitar rock
Mondo Drag – The Occultation of Light. Superior stoner prog, gets the sound just right: http://mondodrag.bandcamp.com/track/initiation
Gnod – Mirror. Hmm, I liked Infinity Machines, but this is just dreary angst punk, like any number of forgotten acts ploughing a similar furrow in the late 80s
Damien Jurado – Visions Of Us On The Land
David Bowie – Blackstar
Taarkus – ‘Stones’/’At Midnight’. Nicely doomy, female-powered, flute-featuring, retro rock: https://taarkus.bandcamp.com/releases
Then:
Lee F Cullen – Wild Honey Arabesques. Bloke from The Duke St Workshop moonlighting as a psych pop troubadour from a few years ago. Some nice stuff, though slightly dodgy drum programming highlights its bedroom recording origin
Boogarins – Manual
Breathless – Blue Moon
Neu! – s/t / 2. Limbering up for this week’s live excursion (below). Is ‘Negativland’ the first recorded appearance of flanged bass? Brilliant track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHrpxuXNY1U
Harmonia – Musik von Harmonia. Ditto. Machine music that’s the inverse of what Kraftwerk were up to at the same time.
Bert Jansch – Moonshine. Always nice to occasionally soothe the soul with Bert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2hYFsXbq5I&list=PL8a8cutYP7fouArs4TX_e15ywSWAx00K9
Sandy Bull – ‘Blend I & II’. Not sure how well this guy is known/regarded, but in the folk raga stakes, he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Davy Graham and John Fahey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUgj94xGS3g
Hawkwind – Space Ritual / Friends & Relations (live tracks). So, the big one. It never ceases to amaze, though any objectivity about SR went out of my window a long time ago. Really, what else even vaguely sounds like this? Many thoughts arose, the most basic of which being along the lines of ‘HW clearly weren’t going for the “let’s rock this municipal arts venue” vibe of, say. Deep Purple. But neither were they aspiring to the proggy uplands of, say, Yes. But there’s clearly a ‘serious’ intent here. What exactly were they up to in the context of 1972?’
Friends & Relations vol 1 is actually the first HW album I bought, and features both a cracking live take of ‘Who’s Gonna Win The War’ (much better than the more polished, Lloyd-Langdon featuring Levitation version) and a genuinely menacing take of ‘Robot’, which again gives the PXR5 version a run for its money. These tracks are now available on the Atomhenge box-set The Flicknife Years, but the latter is truncated for some reason. Here’s the glorious full version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5mcI9IPyLs
Live:
Michael Rother – Under The Bridge, London. The type of venue (attached to the urban development carbuncle of Stamford Bridge) that you want to walk out of as soon as you enter, doubly so when Rusty Egan is ‘DJing’ in your ear while you’re trying to negotiate the bar. Anyway… Mr Rother appears on stage without fanfare, accompanied by the drummer on Neu 75 that’s not Klaus Dinger and the guitarist from Camera. Pretty cool, and they create a decent facsimile of the Sound We’ve Come To Hear (though Rother’s guitar tone is actually pretty horrible for the first couple of numbers). I don’t mean to sound jaded, as I was genuinely lost in the moment a few times during their set (particularly in a hard and fast take on Harmonia’s ‘Veteranissimo’ (I think) and a nicely harsh ‘Negativland’ (very Loop-esque)), but the sense of veneration/ancestor worship at these type of gigs seems to interfere with my engagement and pleasure. I felt similar at last year’s King Crimson gig, though maybe less so. Ah well, it’s probably all in my head…
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