"China" is almost all most krautrock aficionados have come to expect from a guitar freak-out out of 1970's Germany - unencumbered by technique or convention, and rhythmically driven to the point where repetition becomes addiction. Too bad the rest of this album is more or less like all the generic hard-psych-blues-rock-whathaveyou from 1970's Germany you so often have to dig through trying to get to some other China.
Oh well, at least this time we tunneled in the right direction. Try doing that with a Birth Control record, and you're more likely to end up as Morlock fodder.
Even if due to a partly equivocal mix-up with symphonic rock, prog tends to get associated, as a whole, with big productions, lots of bombast and technology (as materialized in the form of such quaint apparatuses as those synth-cubicles); and yet, like any genre that developed some kind of grassroots appeal, even there you had your struggling artists, trying to make it out of their parents' garage.
This is one such case; a lo-fi rudimentary stab at some form of electronic prog out of France, to which, in one of those ironies of history, the future can be kinder than its present ever would, as its dated technological markings can nowadays offer themselves to a lot of retro fetishism, whose focus on its primary objects of desire tends to benevolently smooth out the kinks of the package they came in.
For my part, since synthesizers aren't exactly something that can in and of itself get my motor running, this record's potential charm (aside from the "It's alive!"-looking cover photo; that's good fun) lasts for about the duration of the first track, "Balance" - this, despite its rough beginning, where they sound like their compatriots Shylock having misplaced their tuner; but which they then make up for by going into unexpected overdrive. After that, I really needed the presence of some stronger ideas, that actually worked with the specific material circumstances in which this music was made, instead of making it feel remedial because they just couldn't get 'better' production values; but, then again, even with all the caveats, I suppose that (electronic) prog wasn't exactly the genre most fit to understand that it's not so much the production values you have, it's what you do with them.
Trans Am and The Fucking Champs (who must be pretty sure of themselves, though I don't hear it), two bands which I am slightly (the first) or barely (the second) familiar with, apparently joined in on this EP for an unapologetic trip down guilty pleasures lane, only to prove that they are guilty for a reason - unless you take them as creative starting points and not ready-made templates; but for the most part that is not what you get here. A couple of tracks in particular (and apparently more in the Champs' wheelhouse), with some juvenile double-tracked electric guitars, don't even meet the high-school hard-rock band standard. Beyond that, they go for a more acoustic pastoral number, and another one with some goth-sounding guitars, that don't strive to be anything more that merely ok (which they merely are), but it's only on "The big machine", with its mechanical jolts and electrical discharges, that they get creative with their inspiration, and show they could come up with something exciting together. Even if it feels a bit derivative of the King Crimson sound circa Lark's Tongues in Aspic - particularlyof what Jamie Muir's percussion work brought to it, with his unconventional kit of things to make noises with (from which Bill Bruford, drumming alongside him, subsequently took a lot for his own style) - they do put it to good use, so I can't complain. Otherwise, I'm just relieved that I have never listened to a Whitesnake album; if I had, I suspect I might have come out of this with a newfound appreciation for their art...
Usually there's only one reason for anyone to track down this album, and it's because they became fans of Jan Dukes de Grey's insane sophomore release and tried to find if they could get their hands on some more of the delirious same, only to find out that the answer is a resounding no, as this doesn't really hold a candle to Mice And Rats In The Loft - even if you can retrospectively see a little something of the latter in the former, as no more than a year separates their release dates. There is the same sort of intense, bordering on paranoid, approach (they don't call it acid folk for nothing), with an almost hostile delivery, full of up-close vocals and hyperactive instrumental noodling. However, on this one, the musical resources are much scantier (I know there's other stuff, but all I can ever remember hearing is acoustic guitars, congas, and some flutes) and the material is all fractured into tiny songs, which sound very much alike, being given no chance to evolve in any way, as there's 18 of them crammed into one LP - in diametrical opposition to the mere 3 that made up the follow-up, each given all the elbow room they needed to spread their manic wings. "Trust Me Now" (clearly the last thing you should do when it comes to these guys), with its conga-driven one-guitar-riff pushiness, apparently at the service of a hard pitch for us to jump off a cliff (you know, normal stuff), is probably the best résumé of what this still very weird record is all about, but I just don't have room for more 17 near identical songs in my musical loft. That's where the psychotic mice roam.
One good thing about CD reissues of old prog LPs is that they sometimes break down into different tracks those overwrought suites, wherein a few snippets of good music would sometimes get shackled with a lot of ludicrous stuff, and which you couldn't get to without suffering through all the fantasy moog schlock in which they were encased, just to satisfy another one of the many equivocal assumptions associated with the genre - that the longer the compositions, the more progressive they are (which eventually led to the consecration of side-long album tracks as the rite of passage for the automatic cultural classification of an act as supposedly 'progressive'). Case in point? "Telesterion", once an instrumental section of "The Alchemist's Suite" (which practically (oh, so close...) filled the B-side of this US prog album), that was finally allowed to shake its compositional multi-part bondage, and can now, with its spacey synths and tribal drumming, experience a free and autonomous aesthetic existence as just a nice slice of mood prog; one that wants nothing to do with all that chrysopoeia shtick.
Asakawa's second album follows the lead from the first. "花いちもんめ" and her take on the traditional Krishna chant "ゴビンダ (Govinda)" sound to this day remarkably hip and entrancing - a couple of oriental psych-folk-jazz bangers that can easily remind us of why folks like George Harrison & Co. were drawn to those parts of the world, and how it all came together -, while the rest of the record meanders about in a more or less loungy way. On the plus side, I'm thinking that if I listen to enough Asakawa records (there's quite a few to choose from), I just might be able to put together a top-notch personal anthology yet. More to follow, I guess...
Maki Asakawa seemed like a cool character, the type of person you could bond with over a smoke, in those days, in those clubs; but I can't say her debut album doesn't sound a bit hit and miss. The obvious approximation to western modes of expression, in the general compounded form of torch psychedelic jazz/blues songs, while competent, even endowed with a personality, doesn't feel transformative enough to make this approach sound particularly interesting on its own terms; and to appraise it just as a form of cultural mimicry would entail, by definition, that its artistic merits would always be relativistic. In fact, that aesthetic option reveals itself all the more equivocal once you realize that it's the haunting rendition of a haunted traditional japanese song, 赤い橋, that completely steals the show, indicating that a much more original path was open for inquiry, but was largely left untrodden. Perhaps it was one of those cases where we can't let go of our influences, or are afraid to do our own thing and fall flat; but that woeful lament alone suggests that, in this instance, it most likely would have been the other way round.
The debut album from Argentinian proggers Espíritu is bound to be instantly derided (one look at that cover should suffice) by anyone who has not developed some tolerance for classic prog tropes (specifically, of the Yes-clone persuasion), even though, while I myself have my days on that matter, I can actually handle it just fine. For "Eterna Evidencia", though, I need not make any allowances: it is shameless prog gone wild, and one of the greatest moog runs of all time.
