The Gunter Schickert renaissance continues. The mesmeric German guitarist, previously fairly obscure in the annals of Krautrock, has seen several of his crucial solo albums reissued in the last few years, all of which are amazing, big aQ faves. Schickert's discography isn't that extensive, but everything we've heard has been pretty special - he's a three time aQ Record Of The Week honoree, in fact. We made the reissues of 1974's Samtvogel, 1977's Uberfallig, and 1983's Kinder In Der Wildnis ALL Records Of The Week.
Some years ago, somehow we got on his mailing list, so occasionally we get emails from him (all in German and thus mostly unintelligible to us; we think they often have to do with yoga), and know Schickert is still active, making music. However, this album represents the first brand NEW (rather than reissued) material from him we've ever heard, and we're pretty excited. Ziguri, whose name is derived from a hallucinogenic cactus, is a pulsating power trio originally formed by Schickert with the rhythm section of Udo Erdenreich and Dieter Kolsch. The band actually dates back all the way to 1987, when they first formed, playing gigs in punk squats and other underground venues but not it seems recording anything. They then had bit of an hiatus for many years, though, but now are back with what's apparently their first album, produced by Schneider TM. And it's basically exactly what we'd want / expect a new Schickert set to sound like!
It starts off with a strange song called "General Klickman", in which sweeping, spacey, chiming textures from Schickert's effects laden guitar merge with heavy duty bass & drums groove, a deep dark choogle coming out of some backwoods kraut-swamp� vocals are at first a chipmunk babble, then a raspy chant, in English, about a "General Klickman", who is "in the sky", apparently "waiting for you". We're not sure what it MEANS but they sound like they mean it.
Then, on track two, "Massa", an instrumental, the essential echoing nature of Schickert's guitar style comes to the fore, his repetitive patterns interlacing hypnotically, very much in the vein of his classic earlier solo album material, gorgeous and darkly dreamy. The rhythm section provides solid back up, with some fairly heavy and emphatic build ups. Next, "Yoyodyne" (a Crying Of Lot 49 reference, presumably, or perhaps one to the Buckaroo Banzai movie?) is another vocal number, the chanted vocals and woozy late night blues psych stumble reminding us a lot of an earlier, classic krautrock trio, Guru Guru - there's definitely a Guru Guru vibe to a lot of Ziguri's music. "Bella Hopp" follows (on side B of the vinyl), with much in the way of percussive trance-inducement (from all instruments), it's on the same spectrum with AR & Machines, and GR & Machines too, again as with much else on the album. The babbling vocal part that sounds like "haw haw haw" gives a nod to ZZ Top, perhaps, as well.
And then, the throbbing, bass-heavy snake dance of "Goa Constrictor", the album's nearly 12-minute finale, is something that fans of bands like Circle. Pharoah Overlord and Salvatore will fall for; ominously atmospheric, inexorably propulsive, adorned with wordless, exotic sounding vocal scat-chant. It and the other psychedelic mantras here are manna for admirers of Schickert's earlier work (especially the more band-like Kinder In Der Wildnis), he's still got it; furthermore, as we said, fans of Circle-like krauty hypnorock in general, ought to dig it too.
The lp version includes a copy of the cd, but the cd version does not come with a copy of the lp.
Back in stock at last! Compact disc reish of a 1971 private press LP from Krautrock obscurity Zippo Zetterlink, who play wacked-out, damaged hippy blooze rawk like the they thought their kraut contemporaries Ash Ra Tempel, Guru Guru, and even German Oak were too, uh, polished and tight...yup this sure is raw, loose, "crude and demented" (according to the Crack In The Cosmic Egg authorities, and we must concur). The album starts off with the side-long "Zippo Zetterlink In The Poor Sun At Sunday Night In The BLOW UP" (at least, I *think* that's the title...who knows!). Twenty minutes of broken-down electric blues acid excess, the band a wrong-track train(wreck) chugging along at 15mph, spewing a black/purple/yellow cloud of steam and smoke with a sweet musty smell. Following that, four more tracks, equally jagged, meandering, and messed-up. Mainly this melts rather than fries, if that makes any sense to you. There's some comic relief from ZZ's drug-induced instrumental claustrophobia in the form of some actually decipherable bogus blues vocals at one point, and a sample of a news report on Beethoven's birthday that surfaces in the last track. Maybe just maybe these guys thought they sounded like Cream, but if so they were insane (or more like, way too high) 'cuz this is the sort of blues rock that closer in spirit to Michael Yonkers or Keiji Haino than Eric Clapton that's for sure! This is sure gonna sound *wrong* to most folks, but that's where you come in, the discerning kraut/acid/psych fan who just wants the worst (wurst?) 'cuz the best won't do, or already did.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Legendary lost krautrock treasure (so obscure that NONE of the krautrock obsessives here had even heard of it) originally released as a triple lp in 1970 and lost to the ages not long after. We weren't sure what to expect really, but the second we laid eyes on this, we knew it had to be good. The original elaborate mirror sleeve has been reproduced as a triple cd quadruple minigatefold, all the art metallic and reflective, the cover textured and trippy with a little eye-like mirror right in the center. Inside, lyrics, acid drenched landscapes populated by plastic toy animals, and song titles like "In - a) Beginning b) Analysis Of True c) To Hear Inside d) A Very Simple Song" and "Out - a) Misty Tour b) Water Sound c) Television d) Organ Dreams (A Very Simple Song)"... crazy long titles, but then the songs are crazy long as well, all in the twenty minute range, three cds, an hour and forty six minutes...
But don't be expecting that typical propulsive, motorik groove, nope, this is way on the other end of the spectrum, with one foot in the sort of drifty, abstract new age drift of groups like Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh, but with the other foot squarely in some other dimension entirely. A world of damaged, freaked out crumbling soundscapes, dense black holes of outer space FX, stumbling deconstructed folk and a lo-fi orchestra of tape experiments and druggy noisemaking.
The tracks are so long that it's hard to describe them individually, as each track is a series of parts, 10, 20, more, it's all like one huge twisting squirming living thing, changing shapes constantly, blurry and indistinct one second, sharp and crystalline the next, long stretches of hiss and thud and clatter, peppered with gorgeous little pockets of lilting fuzzy folk, only to be pulled apart moments later into shards of angular sound and chunks of smeared melody. The whole record is like navigating a wandering stream through some underground cavern, whirlpools of sound and abstract swirls everywhere, the listener floating dreamily as the sonic landscape subtly shifts and shimmers in the background. Random bits of echoey percussion underpin mysterious voices, singing, and chanting and groaning, long stretches of conversation and bits of found sound, chaotic squalls of caveman percussion all tangled up with detuned spaceship guitar, loads of microphone rattle and tape hiss, but the majority of the record is made up of abstract clouds of sound that drift and shift and subtly change over the course of minutes, the sounds of jets, running water, warbly organs, reverbed wheezes, voices chopped up and blurred into fuzzy streaks, dense clouds of crowd sounds, tape speed shifts and chipmunk like vocals, sweeping industrial soundscapes, children playing, backwards loops, everything dusted with a thick layer of FX.
Trip - Flip Out - Meditation is almost less music, and more some massive sonic experiment, a travelogue in sound, a crazy freaked out drug trip, captured and carved into wax, at once totally epic and ambitious, but at the same time totally primitive and childlike. Sure it's German and from the seventies, but this is a record that might appeal less to straight krautrock fans, and more to lovers of all things strange and wonderful and all fans of damaged outsider musical weirdness.
