Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO - Magical Power From Mars
(Important)
This compilation of three rare, out of print EPs plus a new bonus track contains some of the more accessible music from the wonderfully weird and prolific Acid Mothers Temple collective. Let's ignore the groaningly silly titles (most, inexplicably, are puns on David Bowie titles) and concentrate on the music. The opening "Ziggy Sitar Dust Raga" is a droning sitar loop (duh!) featuring Cotton Casino (she of the most amazing cigarette trick this side of Emmanuel, and who has since fled the commune for a solo career) damaging her sitar and proving once again that Lennon was right when he said that Yoko Ono did all this 35 years ago. It's all hauntingly strange and perhaps addresses another Bowie musical question, "Is There Life On Mars?" If there is, this might be what it sounds like, and it's enough to fuel those SETI dudes' nightmares for weeks.
"Diamond Doggy Peggy" is the more familiar and less exciting noisy sludgefest that most fans seem to enjoy. Naturally, it's an unstructured cacophonous mess with Casino banshee wailing all over the place as if she unsuccessfully tried that Emmanuel trick and stuck her ciggie where it didn't belong. If you're into that sort of thing, there it is. Personally, it sounds like that old experimental noise jam, "Want You Baby" on The Plasmatics debut EP where the members recorded their instruments while isolated in separate booths so they couldn't hear what the others were playing. It didn't work then, and it doesn't work now.
Like his famous brother, Charles Foster, "Alladin Kane" (the bonus track) is an enigma wrapped inside a conundrum. It opens to the hum of deep space with electronic bleeps and bloops swishing past our spaceship on our journey to the far side of the sun, as Kawabata Makoto's guitar scrapings emerge from the deepest black holes of the universe like desperate pleas for help from a dying universe. Altogether, not unlike the mood created by the floating monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey as soundtracked by Tangerine Dream instead of Richard Strauss.
Spatial exploration is also the theme of the final track, "Cosmic Funky Dolly," which continues the nebulous, electronic bleeps, blurps, and machinery hums like a krautrock rendition of Ligetti's "Requiem...," although it's occasionally difficult to tell when Higashi Hiroshi's synthesizers end and Casino's wailing begins.
For fans of the loopier, more contemplative electronic side of Acid Mothers.
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