Sunday, April 1, 2007

Hovercraft - Experiment Below,CD,1998,USA

Hovercraft is a power-trio from Seattle formed in 1993 by bassist Beth Liebling (Eddie Vedder's wife) that plays mostly improvised space-rock jams in the vein of Hawkwind. She and keyboardist/guitarist/samplist Ryan Campbell used to play in Space Helmet with future members of Magnog. The single Zero Zero Zero One (Repellent, 1996) and the two extended jams on the EP Hovercraft (Repellent, 1996), Stereo Specific Polymerization and Thixotropic, add enough dissonance and idiosyncracies to redefine the idea of psychedelia.
Akathisia (Blast First, 1997) is action painting performed by an epileptic acrobat. The album contains five lengthy compositions. The 15-minute Quiet Room is a ghostly, industrial soundscape that merges Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive and Glenn Branca's guitar maelstroms, interspersing galactic dissonances with minimalistic repetitions, crescendos with deflagrations, hypnotic arpeggios with forceful fugues. The atonal mini-symphony Angular Momentum is the closest piece to Glenn Branca on the album. The 12-minute melodramatic raga Haloparidol re-enacts Jim Morrison's calvary The End, the intrepid journey into the labyrinth of the soul, the devastating neurosis, the anguish, the dilemma, and the exoteric quiet, and the petrifying horror. Vagus Nerve is a little too loose and amoebic, whereas the final, 14-minute dadaistic apocalypse of De-Orbit Burn is the ultimate display of guitar noises, like the Sonic Youth jamming with Red Crayola and King Crimson. Hovercraft relishes in exposing the nervous fibres of guitar-based music. The guitarist who calls himself "Campbell 2000" is a mad genius if ever there was one.
Vagus Nerve/ De-Orbit (Mute, 1997) is the remix album.
The sonic jungle gets even thicker and wilder on Experiment Below (Blast First, 1998), whose tours de force display the evil qualities of the exoteric ceremonies and sex orgies. Anthropod starts out slowly, with Chrome-esque android noises, then soars in a galactic take-off, the Sonic Youth-esque guitar strumming frantically with a metallic tone, then indulges in quiet, disjointed jamming, the guitar crackling over the melody hummed by the bass, and finally erupts into a forceful space-boogie The ten-minute Phantom Limb is one of their trademark symphonies of dissonant guitar strumming. Metallic tones collide with ripping distortions. The drumming is steady and menacing. Sound explodes and abates, flies towards the distant stars and collapses in black holes. Another ten-minute opus, Transmitter Down, uses guitar noises as support to the firing power of the drumming. When the drumming stops, the guitar fades out, emits subaquatic sounds. Endoradiosonde shakes with the science fiction vibes of early Pink Floyd, a stew of supernatural suspense and rhythmic progressions that borders on the mystical and the trascendental. That suspense is released slowly in Wire Trace, where music is reduced to ugly alien frequencies droning in the background while a lonely heartbeat pumps blood to the organism. Only shadows populate the desolate landscape. The hellish finale, Epoxy, is a jangled mess of riffs and beats that accelerates into orbit. Each piece is a different experiment in coupling noise and rhythm. Psychedelic, cosmic and avantgarde music have found a new meeting point.

get it here

4 comments:

PUPUT 12 said...

hy mate nice file u had???may i request Ichirou Agata spkie album?and riot squad david bowie band??

Anonymous said...

I was looking for MAGNOG and found this on your side.I'll check it out.Thank you very much !!!

Rick Wakeman said...

muchas gracias desde Chile, Sudamerica

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