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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Hovercraft, a power-trio from Seattle formed in 1993 by bassist
Beth Liebling (Eddie Vedder's wife), played
mostly improvised space-rock jams in the vein of
Hawkwind.
She and keyboardist/guitarist/samplist Ryan Campbell used to play in Space Helmet with future
members of Magnog.
The single Zero Zero Zero One (Repellent, 1996) and
the two extended jams on the EP Hovercraft (Repellent, 1996),
Stereo Specific Polymerization and
Thixotropic,
add enough dissonance and idiosyncracies to redefine the idea of psychedelia.
Akathisia (Blast First, 1997) is action painting performed by an
epileptic acrobat. The album contains five lengthy compositions.
The 15-minute
Quiet Room is a ghostly, industrial soundscape that merges
Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive
and
Glenn Branca's guitar maelstroms,
interspersing galactic dissonances with minimalistic repetitions,
crescendos with deflagrations, hypnotic arpeggios with forceful fugues.
The atonal mini-symphony Angular Momentum
is the closest piece to Glenn Branca on the album.
The 12-minute melodramatic raga Haloparidol
re-enacts Jim Morrison's calvary The End, the intrepid journey into
the labyrinth of the soul, the devastating neurosis, the anguish, the
dilemma, and the exoteric quiet, and the petrifying horror.
Vagus Nerve is a little too loose and amoebic, whereas the final,
14-minute dadaistic apocalypse of De-Orbit Burn is the ultimate
display of guitar noises, like
the Sonic Youth jamming with
Red Crayola and
King Crimson.
Hovercraft relishes in exposing the nervous fibres of guitar-based music.
The guitarist who calls himself "Campbell 2000" is a mad genius if ever there
was one.
Vagus Nerve/ De-Orbit (Mute, 1997) is the remix album.
The sonic jungle gets even thicker and wilder on
Experiment Below (Blast First, 1998), whose
tours de force
display the evil qualities of the exoteric ceremonies and sex orgies.
Anthropod
starts out slowly, with Chrome-esque android
noises, then soars in a galactic take-off, the
Sonic Youth-esque guitar strumming frantically
with a metallic tone, then indulges in quiet, disjointed jamming,
the guitar crackling over the melody hummed by the bass, and finally erupts
into a forceful space-boogie
The ten-minute Phantom Limb is one of their trademark symphonies of
dissonant guitar strumming. Metallic tones collide with ripping distortions.
The drumming is steady and menacing. Sound explodes and abates, flies
towards the distant stars and collapses in black holes.
Another ten-minute opus, Transmitter Down,
uses guitar noises as support to the firing power of the drumming.
When the drumming stops, the guitar fades out, emits subaquatic sounds.
Endoradiosonde shakes with the science fiction vibes of early
Pink Floyd, a stew of supernatural suspense and rhythmic progressions
that borders on the mystical and the trascendental.
That suspense is released slowly in Wire Trace, where music is
reduced to ugly alien frequencies droning in the background while a lonely
heartbeat pumps blood to the organism. Only shadows
populate the desolate landscape.
The hellish finale, Epoxy, is a jangled mess of riffs and beats
that accelerates into orbit.
Each piece is a different experiment in coupling noise and rhythm.
Psychedelic, cosmic and avantgarde music have found a new meeting point.
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