The second of Steven Stapleton’s personal picks from his Nurse With Wound list collects together a host of lesser-known German contenders and proceeds to chuck you off the eclectic deep end from the offset.
The album opens with a healthy dose of Wolfgang Dauner, whose “Output” is a crumbled stiltskin of a track that sonically scrambles, has you free-falling through its bent-up shrapnel like a slippery coathanger. That unusually smooth piano finale ends the experience, segueing nicely into the tumbler roll of “The Executioner” by My Solid Ground.
They were a really obscure kraut-ish/rock faction on Bacillus Records, whose druggy swagger here is the first to steal my heart in an echoed sacrament of voice columned by a Giacometti gallop and a wah-pedal horizon. A track that had me running towards their 1971 debut (with its truly “terrible” cover) and that bloody lovely thirteen-minute Popol Vuh-like “Dirty Yellow Mist”’ that dwells within. The loose-limbed juggle and errant angle that is Association P.C breaks next, a certain amount of jazzle greasing up the collide and grumbling echo, picked up artfully by the theremin fluidity of the Fritz Müller track. He was an artist who Stapleton would later collaborate with on Erroneous’s Tickety-Boo, here presenting a pessary of psychedelic slippage that’s very NWW, chock full of weird juxta-javelins and sloth-like sonics that entrap a street band as it corkscrews its way down a watery drain.Exmagma’s magnetic draw is undeniable, one of two bands here involving the late and great Conny Plank who with his fellow conspirators conjures a poke around the proggy pie with octopus fingers. “It’s So Nice” is all Zappa-esque silly string to start with, before tendrilling a taste for the more tripped out, and this is another unknown I’m going to have to shine more light on, methinks, and something that definitely shares Stapleton’s love of eerie ambiances.
Now I’m a fan of Anima-Sound, especially Limpe Fuchs’s solo stuff, and their inclusion here is a welcome one, “It Loves Want To Have Done It” mining a uniquely organic handmade approach to improvisation far removed from the rocky / jazzy musicality most of this album satisfies itself with. A genre that pink panthers some lightheartedness on Tomorrow’s Gift’s “Jazzi Jazzi” or, in Out Of Focus’s case, yawns too predictably in the vocal and guitar-noodling department. Theirs is the only track here that doesn’t really do anything for me, quickly compensated for by the excellent Beefhearted screamedelics of Brainstorm’s bloat. That early patchouli-soaked seventies flavour is all over this release, high on possibilities, its head firmly down in the jam jar, often filling whole sides of wax with ease; I’m very surprised Finders Keepers have managed to squeeze so much into this double LP given the excess these bands loved to revel in.This is a freedom of expression that the eight-and-a-half minute Thirsty Moon track “Big City” luxuriates in, offering up a funk percussive swimming in swervy sax sneaking out from rickshaw field recordings. The vocals hook into a Talking Heads-like elastication as that infectious beat brings on a need to play NWW’s “Two Golden Microphones”, and all that diversifying colour bleeds, becomes UFO-blurred to exit on a subtle twist of Trinidad.
Which leaves the final track by Gomorrha to notch up a staggering thirteen minutes of off-piste fret-ologicals after it quickly burns off that Genesis normality of its intro. “Trauma” is an effect-riven savannah that’s wet and glistening, as a vampiric organ scoops up a moiré-soaked last word.A worthy competitor for Volume One? I’d like to think so.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
