Album Review: Electric Moon, Phase
If you don’t have room in your heart for the psychedelic bliss of Electric Moon, I humbly submit you don’t have a heart at all. You might want to have a doctor check that out. For the rest of the hearted, the since-2009 German cosmic rockers founded by guitarist/effects-specialist/sometimes-keyboardist Dave “Sula Bassana” Schmidt and bassist/sometimes-vocalist/noisemaker/graphic-artist “Komet Lulu” Neudeck — both of whom now have their own record labels in Sulatron Records and Worst Bassist Records; these are industrious hippies — have been reaching for the galactic barrier via sound, and the 2LP collection Phase gathers a curated smattering of work from their first decade together.
Out through Neudeck‘s Worst Bassist imprint — for what it’s worth, I’ve seen Electric Moon live more than once and she more than holds her own on bass — in limited double-vinyl and double-CD editions, Phase checks in at about two hours long when the bonus tracks (for the CD or DL, the latter of which is included with the LP) are considered, and features no fewer than four different drummers, including Sula Bassana himself, the founding-and-current-returned Bernhard “Pablo Carneval” Fasching, the UK-based Michael “Bongolious Maximus” Orloff, and Marcus Schnitzler, now of The Spacelords.
These are not the only drummers Electric Moon has had — there was also Alexander Simon circa 2011-2012, and I’ll note here just to note somewhere that as of 2020, they’ve added a second guitarist in Johannes “Joe Muff” Schaffer — but obviously plenty nonetheless. If the band had so chosen, Phase probably could have been broken into different volumes, perhaps with some other tracks from splits or album releases added along with what serves as the bonus tracks here, and turned into at least four single-LP offerings, but there’s something to be said for the method Electric Moon employ in delivering these remastered pieces to their loyalist cult fanbase. When they do something, they go all-in.
So it has been throughout the 12-plus years since their coming together. Particularly in their extended cuts, they are a head-first dive into spaced and spacious heavy psychedelia, drawing on classic jams, psych and krautrock ideologies — it is not a coincidence that Phase opens with covers of Tangerine Dream‘s “Madrigal Meridian” and The Beatles‘ “Tomorrow Never Knows” — and the invitation they extend toward the listener to be immersed in wash and open stretches alike is singular even among mostly-instrumental, improv/spontaneity-based groups.
The chemistry between Schmidt and Neudeck and will to experiment, the sense of playfulness they bring to works like the 17-minute “D-Tune” that serves as the bulk of side C of Phase, aren’t to be understated. Rather, they are a ready blueprint that others have followed in their wake, and along with demonstrating the band’s ability to mold itself around the personalities of different players in and out as the memorable “The Loop” from 2017’s Stardust Rituals (review here) gives way to “Your Own Truth” from 2013’s You Can See the Sound Of… EP (reissue review here), Phase highlights their work in crafting material fluid in either long- or short-form modes.
By the time they get down to “Moon Love” from their debut album, Lunatics, which takes up the whole of side D at nearly 23 minutes, that particular point has been well made, but it’s also worth pointing out that Phase emphasizes the vocalized material from throughout the band’s tenure. Neudeck has rarely been a singer of the frontperson type, and the vocals in these remastered versions hold to that ethic. Vocals are atmospheric, sometimes spoken, usually coated in effects — part of the overarching experience of the song — yet her delivery of the verses in “Tomorrow Never Knows” in a kind of proto-New Wave declarative voice are righteous, and the same holds for “Stardust Service” when they get down to the bonus tracks.
In the context of the group’s discography, she is a somewhat reticent presence singing, but that human voice proves pivotal to the material here. As colorful as they make it, space is still huge and easy to get lost in. Sometimes a few lines are enough to remind the listener they’re still there. That function, of course, isn’t always what Electric Moon are going for, but it serves Phase well as regards the 13-minute “Spaceman” from 2011’s The Doomsday Machine (review here) and casts their work in a different (moon)light overall, serving as a clear purpose behind the collection’s existence in the first place.
Perhaps these are more phases than a singular phase, ultimately, since even the bonus tracks cover a span of years between The Doomsday Machine‘s “Stardust Service” (19:44) and “Stardust (The Picture)” (10:14) from Stardust Rituals, but one way or the other, Electric Moon bring together these songs, long or short, jammed or structured, adventurous or grounded, original or cover, in a spirit of celebration not only for what they’ve accomplished over their first 10 years, but a kind of rediscovery of the path they’ve walked.
As though, looking behind them at their footprints, they have some more sense of where they were headed on that decade of willful meander. As a fan of the band, which I am, my hearing of it is much the same, despite being aware of the fact that they could easily do a Next Phase 2LP follow-up that includes nothing but four extended, side-swallowing instrumental pieces and thereby tell a completely different story. That’s a part of who they are as a group, multi-faceted within the liquefied parameters stretching to one rounded corner or another of heavy psych, space and krautrock.
The simple truth is that if Phase makes you feel anything in listening, as it inevitably will, then on an artistic and expressive level, Electric Moon have already won, but the way they go about it, the underlying narrative being created about who Electric Moon are and what they do and can do in their music, is something distinct to this release. It makes Phase more than just a ‘best of’ — or what Neudeck might more likely call a ‘worst of’ if the pattern holds — and it enriches the story of Electric Moon as a project, which one hopes will only continue to be told.
Electric Moon, Phase (2021)
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Tags: Berlin, Electric Moon, Electric Moon Phase, Germany, Phase, Worst Bassist Records
