Tangle Edge - A Review of Aphrodite's Groove

Tangle Edge

Aphrodite's Groove

Digital Download

TEDA 9

Release Date: April 2021

Norwegian psyche/space rockers Tangle Edge have released quite a lot of material during the past year in streaming/download format, but this live set from 1986 may be the crown jewel in the group's ongoing digital archive collection. Aphrodite's Groove was recorded direct to cassette 4-track in Narvik, Norway. Some of the material on this special digital download album was originally released as a limited edition cassette in 1986 by Mushroom Records. For this new expanded edition, the group has restored and remastered the original cassette tapes for optimal sound quality. The result is quite spectacular, and Tangle Edge fans can now enjoy virtually the entire concert uninterrupted and in its best possible aural format. In a sense, Aphrodite's Groove is Tangle Edge's Space Ritual: the live sound of a band captured in all its psychedelic glory, primal energy and lysergic frenzy. Heavy, edgy, raw, and relentless, Aphrodite's Groove features Tangle Edge at their most unhinged and uninhibited, playing at times with an almost reckless abandon. In this early incarnation of the band, Ronald Nygard (guitar), Hasse Horrigmoe (bass), and Rune Forselv (drums) function as a stripped down power trio, very much in the spirit of Guru Guru (especially on their monstrous UFO album) or Ash Ra Tempel circa 1971. There are even times when they approach the frenzied acid meltdown madness of the early Jimi Hendrix Experience and Blue Cheer. As a result, Aphrodite's Groove is nearly 90 minutes of stoned out sonic overload and stoned in psychedelic high voltage. Always known for their wildly inventive and provocative song titles, Aphrodite's Groove is comprised of some of the group's earliest unreleased material. The opening track, "Guardian of the Past," begins in somewhat muted fashion but quickly develops into a frenzied psyche guitar jam, while the almost Kaleidoscope-like "Inside the Pagoda" develops a sense of mystical grandeur with its middle eastern scales and modal variations. The wonderfully schizoid "The Pope of the Frozen Ones" is King Crimson-esque in structure but completely acid freakout in execution with its flailing drums and Nygard's atomic crash and burn guitar mayhem. "Chew" is equally frenetic, a virtual maelstrom of sound, with some very effective metallized wah guitar and crushing supersonic bass grooves from Horrigmoe. Nygard's shrieking guitar solo will all but sear your cerebral cortex. The album's dense, murky mix, instead of being a liability, actually adds to the sunless gloom of tracks like "The 7th Heaven on the 11th Floor" and "Algaea Meets the Pinworms." The former is essentially an early version of what would become "Solorgy" on the group's debut album, In Search of a New Dawn. The version here is less elaborate than the extended mix on New Dawn, and is altogether more freeform and visceral. Horrigmoe's hammer & anvil bass anchors the piece to terra firma while Nygard's alternately slashing and scorching guitar solos navigate the upper reaches of the stratosphere. "Algaea Meets the Pinworms" features more of Nygard's psychedelic guitar assault, though here simmering on top of an almost blues-inflected bass and drum vamp. The jump to hyperspace-driven psychedelic blues rock is complete with the album's last two tracks, featuring vocalist Svein Harald Hanssen. "The Head of the Rose" is really a cover of  Hendrix's "Red House" and features some very Jimi-like gestures from Nygard, while "Dried Jockey Doogie" takes the group further into the wastelands of psychedelic blues rock and beyond. Aphrodite's Groove is a must for fans of  the Kraut space cadet nexus of the early 70s and San Francisco's Exploding Acid Inevitable of the late 60s. It will effortlessly take you back to the early daze of the Cosmic Couriers, with a roadside stop in Haight-Ashbury circa 1967. Turn on the lava lamps and fire up the hookah.

Looking Back on Tangle Edge: In Search of a New Dawn

When I first discovered Tangle Edge sometime around 1991--after reading a review of their debut album in the now long defunct Sound Choice magazine--the thought of a band from Norway reviving the kind of acid-drenched space rock that the early Hawkwind had pioneered was preposterous. After all, we were just a few short years away from the new millennium and we'd all long gotten over the acid daze of the early 70s. But on In Search of a New Dawn, Tangle Edge (primarily guitarist/keyboardist Ronald Nygard and bassist/keyboardist Hasse Horrigmoe but also joined here by drummer Rune Forselv) somehow managed to revitalize both psychedelia and art rock in a way that was indebted to the traditions of both without being derivative of either. In Search of a New Dawn, in addition to its striking futuristic Egyptian cover art, is eclectic in the best sense of the word, displaying such diverse influences as King Crimson, Hawkwind, the Grateful Dead, Gong, Eloy, Far East Family Band, Popol Vuh, and Amon Duul II. Using typically "progressive" instrumentation (flute, Moog, string ensemble and, incredibly, ring modulated penny whistle) to augment the more conventional guitar/bass/drum line-up, Tangle Edge moves from angular prog rock ("The Centipede's Tune") to thundering hard rock ("Caesar's Integrated Flaw") to middle eastern exotica ("Mushy Shadows from a Lost Caravan") to psychedelic freakouts ("Isis at the Invisible Frontispiece" and the mind melting "Solorgy"). The album's evocative arrangements feature both electric and acoustic guitars equally and showcase the group's tendency to stretch out into lengthy, feverish modal jams that are experimental yet oddly accessible. As a consequence, Tangle Edge occupies that shadowy nether region somewhere between the psychedelic space rock of Hawkwind (think In Search of Space) and the orgasmic/organic acid trips of the Dead at their lysergic peak. Seasoned with just the right amount of charming quasi-folky mysticism (which, incidentally, reminds me of the late lamented Third Ear Band), In Search of a New Dawn is now strangely apropos for a moment in time that saw the rebirth of psychedelia through the fractured lens of a generation that survived the excesses of both the new wave glam and the hair metal glitter of the 80s. Thirty years on, Tangle Edge's debut album can now be seen as a central ally in the war the Ozric Tentacles and Porcupine Tree were then quietly waging against the vast emptiness of a corrupt and controlling empire of factory processed sound.

Cassette Culture: Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit in the Pre-Internet Age, by Jerry Kranitz

 Jerry Kranitz

Cassette Culture: Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit

in the Pre-Internet Age

Publisher: Vinyl on Demand (2020)

320 pp.

Little attention has been paid to the origins of independent (i.e., primarily cassette tape) music since its first stirrings in the U.S. and elsewhere in the late 1970s. But it's a topic of vital importance, especially considering that so much of the terrain inhabited by today's independent musicians owes an incalculable debt to the pioneers of DIY music. This is heady pop culture stuff, and Jerry Kranitz takes it on with all the enthusiasm of a true believer and acolyte of the sacred cause. Written in an easily intelligible and fluid style that belies the complexity of the subject matter, Jerry's approach to the phenomenon of cassette culture is essentially exploratory, and his wonderfully detailed book is an attempt to understand its hazy origins, its contradictory motivations, and ultimately its historical trajectory from the rearview mirror of over 40 years. One of the persistent themes of the book is how DIY cassette-based music reshaped the cultural landscape of the corporate music industry before its current globalization in the wake of the internet and its current appropriation by multinational tech behemoths such as Amazon, Youtube, Spotify, and others. As a work of cultural history, Cassette Culture is a fascinating post-mortem of how independent artists drew upon materials at hand (inexpensive cassette tape, limited recording technology, primitive but innovative design techniques, shoestring budgets, and dodgy distribution networks) to forge a viable alternative industry for the production and dissemination of music that existed on the margins of society and eschewed conventional modes of manufacture and distribution. In a sense, Jerry's book both examines and celebrates Marx's prophetic vision that in a truly socialist future, shorn of the economic necessities of supply and demand and the market forces that drive unrestrained capitalism, the production of music (and all the arts, for that matter) would become ubiquitous among the masses. Instead of an elitist exercise in brute skill, pretentious showmanship, and cynical marketing savvy, music production and the expression of one's innermost drives and impulses would become available to anyone who had the inclination to realize his or her deepest aural fantasies. Jerry never questions the wisdom or desirability of the effects of such a revolution. Rather, he attempts to isolate a discrete moment in time and produce a more-or-less unified narrative of the tactical and logistical problems encountered by those who initiated this new revolt out of style, thereby declaring their independence from the ever tightening garotte of the commercial music industry. And he succeeds admirably in doing so. One of the deep ironies Jerry captures and focuses on from this now vanished flashpoint in time is that, in creating their own independent framework for the production and distribution of music, these early DIY artists discovered a sobering reality: that in order to maintain and flourish in any industry, whether on the margins of society or ensconced in its bureaucratic machinery, the creative aspirations of the artist will always be at odds with the economic necessities of the market of which he or she is a part. The alternatives were brutally simple: acquiescence or annihilation. As Jerry repeatedly points out in the pages of Cassette Culture, this persistent either-or dilemma was simply unavoidable. A grudging surrender to the implacable forces of supply-and-demand economics was, ultimately, preferable to the harsh silence of total anonymity. And yet, as the numerous interviews, commentaries, photographs and illustrations in the book demonstrate, it was a compromise worth making, for in the end the DIY approach restored to music a freshness, a vitality, and an excitement that decades of gross pandering and economic piracy had eroded. Artistic integrity is a very fine thing, but so too is eating. It was, as Bill Nelson once sang, "a fair exchange." As if Jerry's thoughtfully detailed text is not enough to admire, a 2-CD aural overview that documents this watershed moment in the history of twentieth century popular music is also provided, featuring tracks by R. Stevie Moore, Autopsia, Muslimgauze, and a host of other DIY artists who valiantly fought a battle royale against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a decadent and vainglorious empire. Did they win? In a way, they did, as the endless amateur music videos on Youtube can attest to. But let's not forget that to call one an "amateur," as Maya Deren pointed out so long ago in her defense of independent filmmakers, does not mean to suggest one is an inferior artist, but only that what they do is done for the love of the thing and not economic gain. Cassette Culture shares in this love and is itself both a love letter to the amateur DIY prophets and a hymn of praise to their victory.

Experiments for Guitar + Machines, by The Brain

The Brain 

Experiments for Guitar + Machines (2020, LP/DD) 

Workshop of Filthy Creation WLP02 

Website & availability: www.workshop-of-filthy-creation.com 

German-born guitarist/synthesist Karl Gottlaus (aka The Brain) is the latest in a long pedigree of cosmic couriers that extends back over half a century to such Teutonic sound engineers as Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kluster, Conrad Schnitzler, and Kraftwerk. But unlike most of his more famous compatriots, Gottlaus is just as likely to sculpt his dense, monolithic soundscapes with gritty, violent guitar as he is with otherworldly electronic tonalities. His aptly titled debut album, Experiments for Guitar + Machines, explores the dark terrain that intersects abrasive industrial landscapes and brooding ambient shadow worlds. While his analog synth textures (primarily a Minimoog and ARP Odyssey) generate icy sturm und drang backdrops obviously derived from the repetitive minimalist drones of Zeit-era Tangerine Dream and the early Klaus Schulze, his brutal, incendiary guitar work owes much to the Fripp/Frith/Pinhas school of abstract schizoid man mayhem. This is especially true on side one’s two extended tracks, “Molecular Turbulence” and “Abrasions,” where screaming, tortured guitar solos ricochet against synthesized walls of sound like exploding metal from the sky. The album also features intriguing and extensive use of audio generators, which sound as if they’ve been fed through a battery of outboard effects such as ring modulators, filters, fuzz boxes, and echoplexes. Their eerie clang and clatter on “Explorations of a Perimeter beyond the Eye of Nightmares” impart a strangely evocative “machine-over-man" aesthetic that recalls the early iconoclastic work of Kluster and Lard Free. The album decelerates to a relatively quiet, but nevertheless restless, close with “Cold Troubled Sleep.” Its mournful pulsating synthesizer, sweeping audio generator effects, and Frippertronics-inspired guitarisms guide the listener through a bleak, desolate glacial landscape worthy of a Tanguy painting. Though this certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste, for those interested in sonic experimentation, edgy minimalism, and electronic improvisation, Experiments for Guitar + Machines is a rare bird in today’s overpopulated market of faceless MIDI poseurs still mining the now exhausted deposits of their ambient-industrial forefathers.