Label: Submergence Format: 2CD
The psychedelic rock freak out is not dead, despite rumours to the contrary, and Flourescent Tunnelvision is here to prove the point, ramming home on a coasting scrawl of fuzz, wah, delay and phasers set to half-past stun; the amps probably go a long way over eleven, too. The full benefit of this collection is naturally to be gained at the maximum volume the speakers and neighbours will bear, conjuring up wind tunnel audio effects across the stereo spectrum – as a good proportion of the tracks do in spades. The rest of the bands here do their best to blow minds through other methods for a pastime, and whatever the approach, the results are generally trippy in several senses of the word.
Circle blast off first with the controlled groove of “Veisti” which has all the liberally-sprinkled FX settings Flying Saucer Attack used to do so well, but with far tighter group dynamics and an almost viscerally-felt surge of dissolution into their intruments. F/I are in the spacey camp, swishing analogue synths around the old familiar space rock interaction of noddling guitar, bass and drums with a nod or too to Cul de Sac (who really should have been on this album) before filtering things through an avant garde lava lamp to wobbly effect. Pseudo Buddha like their hallucinations full-on, so layer echoed voices around the scrawled fuzz guitar and improvised liquid rhythms. The spirit of Amon Düül lives on, thankfully. Somehow, so does that of Nikola Tesla on Russian group Zelany Rashoho‘s offering which is as jumbled up in its wandering cross-rhythms and discordant pipes and keys as the unreproducible title (not because it’s in Russian, which it isn’t, but because it’s a string of symbols…).
This is only half way through the first disc; more spacey synthery from Oranj Cllimax leads to false memories of the ambient future where Hawkwind run things on Mars, circa 1973; Djam Karet wash up on an undertow of pink noise and oscillator bends before stoking up the beats and bass without once resorting to techno clichés, while Quarkspace‘s “Brainhaze (D.O.B.H #3) nods back to the Seventies free festival daze as if it was, um, last week. The hash was so much stronger then, wasn’t it? As for The Melodic Energy Commission, not only do they have an amusing name but they gat a prize for being uncategorisable other than in the sense of doing a very nifty job of making heads spin on their somewhat queasy freeform uncoiling of their instruments from inside out, especially the mightily-thumped percussion. Finally for Disc One, Ektroverde (which like Circle, is Jussi Lehtisalo) shut things down for the moment with “Suru” and all things fed back and riffed-up into big chugging chunks.
Faust emerge “From The Upper Underworld” into the opening track of Disc Two, and the subtitle “Little Ravvivando” fails to prepare for the occluded pulse of beautiful organ swirls over the unsteady thumps of weight-lifting percussion as the dub mix rises to the fore. It’s almost like The Faust Tapes in miniature, as snoring, shouting, fragments of singing, conversation and chanting drift across wavering tones and crashing metal sheets, and the (un)structure becomes what can only be described as gloriously Faust-shaped, and chaotic in excelsis. To follow, Volcano The Bear‘s “Strausshand” wheezes and skims on strings and breath with a hint of ominous Tibetan threat and a swooping turn around brazen fanfares and a conclusion where it sounds like the drummer has taken a passing dislike to the drumkit while a folk melody gets a bolshie balalaika bashing.
So some more laid back synth’n’ebow groovology from Escapade makes a pleasantly linear interlude on some choppy riffs and energetic rhythm section work before taking things a few steps to the left into outer space; Tombstone Valentine like their prog with a violin among the wavery oscillators and halting piano synth, and this they display with quite aethereal aplomb; Mushroom just do what they like to do, which in this case is a funky tuba-led swingalong thing. The way the tuba and Oberheim interact to produce the bassline makes “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” well worth it too. All this and Tree Sine and their bleepy shuffle into places where Jazz and Add N To (X) meet, and 2012‘s “Look” features the St. Petersburg multimedia performance which provides the images for the album sleeve photos, and synthetic sounds to match in a dark ambient wash of conglomerated electronics. Final epic duties fall to Subarachnoid Space, who close proceedings with the near-quarter hour “So Near And Yeti So Far”, taking their time to get all the feedback trails, tinkled cymbals and effects into where they want them before kicking off into the long road of following the guitar delay into infinity and all the skyscraping, searing fireworks that implies, and then some. And again.
Flourescent Tunnelvision does everything a compilation of this music should do – it has breadth, variety and a time-stopping ability to seem even longer than the mere two and a half hours of elevating and distracting sounds it contains. While a lot of the artists seem rooted in the past glories of the power of the analogue synth and the fuzz-wah, they do what they do in fine style throughout, and the others have fun with being silly or weird as the mood sees fit. The unconverted may not be entirely convinced by everything on the album, but it’s a full, satisfying wedge of unashamed wigout music for the most part.
-Antron S. Meister-
