Live, Electric Moon always hit you right in the third eye and this album recorded in Battenberg on the second of July (my birthday) in 2011 is a good document of everything the band are great at. So grab your stash, flick through some underground comix, get the joss sticks started and clutch your pocket I Ching and off we go.
“Cosmic Creator” starts as a slow burner. Komet Lulu’s bass riff holding the track somewhere near terra firma whilst Sula Bassana gives us some wonderful echoed guitar notes that fall like stars on a summers night. Alex Simon on drums shows how much subtlety can be drawn from the kit by using it as an almost ritual instrument. Then, all of a sudden the bass takes off and the drums kick in to one monster riff that could probably be heard by the monks in Tibet.
This is music to reach the summits of mountains by, the goal to get closer to the godhead, the place where spirits dwell among the prayer flags and ancient souls blow from the winds from the peak. You are dancing with Shiva as the rhythm carries on and guitar gets more spaced out, tripping the light fantastic into glorious nirvana. It’s a relentless pulse that keeps taking you higher, the smoke swirls around and the guitar fries your brain as it coils around you serpentine like.Big booming guitar bass notes introduce the title track. We then enter an almost Eno-style ambient proceedings as the guitar and bass notes drone on, sending you into a state of inner bliss. When the drum begins to shuffle in, it feels like we are by the mother river watching the world in all its multi-colours drift by before our eyes. Again the bass plays a melodic riff, holding the track in place and providing a lynch-pin for your mind to grab on to as you float on strange waters. You drift through time as the music envelops you and sinks in through every pore of your skin. It pulses around you, the guitars climb and soar and suddenly you are meditating at the edge of the universe.
“Lost And Found Souls” starts with a big guitar riff, flanged and wah-wah’ed into cosmic oblivion. Soon some lovely echoed lead leaps around over the main riff. This is where we hit pure psychedelic territory as the wave of rainbow vibes crash over you and you are swept away on a lysergic ocean. The music becomes a powerful whirlpool that slowly drags you under and you swim against its force, trying to make your way back to reality. Guitars wail and scream, but the rhythm pushes you forward towards the water’s source, the birthplace of being.“Burning Battenberg” starts with Gong-like electronic flutters and pulses. The rhythm starts to pick up more of a jazz vibe and feel as the Philipp Wolf plays around the whole of the kit, almost taking on a tribal beat. The bass is a steady throb that moves and interplays between lead guitar lines. Then suddenly the whole track shifts a gear into some fast freak-out. By the now the guitar is almost playing a raga and tapping into the music of the mystics. It is the tripped-out sensuality of a separate reality; a searching for peace among the cosmos — an enlightened headfuck that pulls you through the ethereal into the infinite.
This is Electric Moon’s voyage of discovery into your inner self; get on the bus and go for a ride. Who knows where you may end up?.
-Gary Parsons-
