Brainticket
Cottonwoodhill

THE REVIEW

Warning!!! Only listen once a day to this record. Your brain might be destroyed!

 Read the warning? Ok, today you can listen to it, but only once, mind you, because a direct ticket to the brain costs quite a bit. In 1971, a bunch of hippies from various European countries decided to give Californians a lesson on how to make a record under the effect of lysergic acid. Swiss, Germans, English, perhaps a few Italian descendants (those are never missing) were among the magnificent seven of Ultimate Groove: Joël Vandroogenbroeck, organ, flute, and vocals; Ron Bryer, guitar; Werni Frohlich, bass; Cosimo Lampis, drums; Wolfgang Paap, tabla; Dawn Muir, vocals; Hellmuth Kolbe, potentiometers, sound generator, and sound effects cranked up.

 Be careful as these sublimates in the first two tracks of side A will try to confuse you, not letting you understand what they are hiding in the rest of the record. Thus, "Black Sand" and "Places of Light" might seem two nice proposals of healthy prog rock led by the Hammond organ with some pleasant oddities, like Joel's filtered voice in the first case and the slight funky jazz tinge in the second, where we will encounter the electronically manipulated voice of the sensual Dawn Muir.

Ok, now do you have your ticket ready in hand? Tear it off and enter... watch out for the windows that immediately shatter into a thousand pieces and the police cars speeding by with blaring sirens! Do you hear this funky groove of the guitar and organ? It will be ETERNAL: it won't abandon you for the rest of the first side and the entire second. You have just used your "Brainticket" divided into Part 1 and Part 2. Hang on to the headphones and every kind of daily noise will enter your head: jackhammers, gargling, crazy alarms, hellish laughter, showers of acid rain, shattering glass, teeth brushing, Dawn's psychedelic orgasm begging to be possessed, trains rattling on the tracks of deserted stations, echoes of a revolt quelled with machine-gun bursts, the boiling flow of a steel plant, howler monkeys from the Amazon forest, Beethoven's Ninth, crazy telegraph lines...

You are at the end of your rope, aren't you? And that damned loop of Hammond and guitar that never stops teasing the auditory nerve and Dawn imploring "it's all right... it's all right... it's all right..."  but how many times do you want to come, slut?!?  My time is up and there's still a sinister warning printed on the cover: "After listening to this record your friends won't know you anymore"....