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Friday Full-Length: Brainticket, Cottonwoodhill

Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 22nd, 2016 by JJ Koczan

Brainticket, Cottonwoodhill (1971)

The lingering anecdote about Brainticket‘s 1971 debut LP, Cottonwood Hill, is that when it came out the record’s inner sleeve carried the warning that after you listened to it your friends wouldn’t know you anymore and that if you listened more than once per day, it might destroy your brain. Fair enough, I guess. The five-track offering from the German outfit is more than fairly acidic, and it wouldn’t have been the first album saddled with lysergic properties. I don’t know that twice a day would do it, but I’d think if you went a week listening to the three-part title-track that only counts two of its parts as parts (is your mind destroyed yet?) four times every day, you’d emerge from that experience a different person than you went in.

Brainticket, led by founding keyboardist/floutist/vocalist Joel Vandroogenbroeck didn’t quite invent psychedelia or space rock, and they didn’t quite invent prog, but they certainly helped shape the blend of them that krautrock became, and Cottonwoodhill‘s brazen experimentalism over its five songs showcases a lot of the signature elements of the genre. Weird, found sounds populate “Brainticket Part I” while organ plays out behind, bells ring, crowds cheer, and vocalist Dawn Muir interjects creepy whispers over Ron Bryer‘s looped guitar: “I did it. Yes, I did.” The proceedings only get stranger the farther out Brainticket go, and after the already trippy start to the album with opener “Black Sand” and the subsequent “Places of Light,” they wind up traveling a good distance into whatever sonic cosmos it was they were charting. The second part of the three-parter is “Brainticket Part I (Conclusion),” and I think if you were to ask why, you’d probably be missing the point. Not that there isn’t a plan at work, but the forms it’s drawing from aren’t intended to be generally conventional, or accessible. They’re intended to be classical music from the future, and they may yet be.

When “Brainticket Part II,” the 13-minute closer, picks up from the preceding conclusion, it not only revives the same progression but brings Muir on for a spoken word freakout that proceeds to shouting before giving way to weird buzzing that turns out to be repetition of the song and band’s name, then goes too, and other pieces come and go, Muir returns, shouts out the album’s final moments in a flurry of noises, some mechanical or urban — modern chaos — and others deeper back and obscure. It’s a tripped out happening, but underlying it all is the sense that Brainticket — the aforementioned, plus bassist Werner Frohlich, keyboardist/noisemaker/producer Hellmuth Kolbe, drummer Cosimo Lampis and percussionist Wolfgang Paap — like earliest King Crimson taken to its logical, raw-creativity conclusion, are in their minds even as they sound like they left them far behind.

In 1972, the band would release the somewhat more conventional Psychonaut, and follow it with 1974’s Celestial Ocean. They had two albums out in the 1980s, and like most bands, had undergone significant lineup changes along the way. With Vandroogenbroeck as the remaining original member, Brainticket offered up Alchemic Universe in the year 2000 — a good time to be prog, existentially speaking — and last year, they issued Past, Present and Future, which followed a 2011 box set on Vandroogenbroeck‘s own Coloursound Recordings imprint which had 18 CDs and was dubbed The Coloursound Box.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

Fuck this week. And not like, in-a-loving-relationship-expressing-physical-intimacy fuck it, or even just-having-a-good-time-consenting-adults fuck it. Fuck it in the worst way possible. Shamefuck it.

That’s about all I want to say on the matter. Moving on.

The response to adding Mars Red Sky to the All-Dayer was encouraging. If you haven’t bought your ticket yet, it’s Aug. 20 at Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn. Ticket presales are here. Thank you for your support.

Next week: Reviews and streams for Deathkings, Elephant Tree — whose debut album is a big part of what’s carried me through this terrible fucking week — and one on Tuesday that I don’t think I’m allowed to say yet but I’m also stoked for. If I can manage to do so, I’d like to squeeze in a Hexvessel review as well, but I’d also like to fucking play in traffic, so we’ll see which comes first.

Also next week: Fucking somehow, a list of over 100 albums to watch for in 2016. I don’t even know how many are on the list. Might be over 110 at this point. I’ll count ’em up and get it posted. I don’t know how. Or when. But whatever. It’ll happen. Then I’ll be done with lists for a while.

If you didn’t see on Instagram, the last of the merch orders go out tomorrow. Apparently international shipping costs have gone up considerably since the last time I sent packages out of the country. I won’t wind up with nearly enough net to buy that camera, or a plane ticket to Australia. I told The Patient Mrs. to pay student loans with it, because she’s been stressing about that, and everything is fucking pointless anyway so we might as well throw it away on bullshit like interest we’ll never manage to pay off if we live to be 150. Anyway, I very much appreciate your placing an order if you did. You made life easier for my wife, and that’s not something I’ll soon forget.

These are hard days. Other days will be better. Music still sounds good.

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