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Rating: 16 Pages is not an album: it’s a notebook found on the ground after a collective trip, stained with incense, sweat, and acidic ink. Sixteen sheets torn from a parallel late ’80s, where Italian psychedelia doesn’t ask anyone’s permission and keeps flowing under the skin while the rest of the world pretends to be somewhere else.
Effervescent Elephants come from that liminal zone inhabited by No Strange, Birdmen of Alkatraz, Steeplejack: not a scene, but a constellation. Bands who don’t play for the market but for visionary necessity, as if fuzz were an internal organ and reverb a way to breathe better. Here, psychedelia isn’t revival, it’s a symptom.
Initially recorded and circulated as a private tape, 16 Pages has the smell of worn magnetic tape, of copies handed from palm to palm, secrets shared only with those who “get it.” Every track is short, unstable, often unfinished — but that’s exactly where the magic lives. There’s no final form, only apparitions.
September seems to materialize like a memory that isn’t yours. For No One is a phrase repeated too many times in front of the mirror. The Atomic Lizard slithers out of the amplifiers like a mutant creature made of garage and acid, while My Generation is not a tribute but a release: spat out, deformed, rewired. When the Music’s Over (yes, the one by the Doors) never really ends: it expands, it unravels, it watches you while you try to figure out if you’re still in the room.
The sound is raw, handmade, imperfect — and therefore real. Guitars flicker like strobe lights seen with closed eyes, rhythms that seem to come from another room, voices that don’t sing but conjure. This is psychedelia that doesn’t promise glossy cosmic journeys: here you descend, you dig, you stay.
And it’s no coincidence that from this magma, a historical consciousness emerges. Lodovico Ellena, mind and spirit of the Effervescent Elephants, would later become one of the fundamental narrators of the history of Italian psychedelia, even writing a book about it. As if 16 Pages was retroactively an autobiography written before knowing it was one. First the vision, then the story.
Heard today, 16 Pages doesn’t sound dated: it sounds out of time. It’s a record that doesn’t ask for attention, it demands it. It doesn’t accompany, it drags. It doesn’t comfort, it opens doors that maybe were best left closed. Sixteen pages, sixteen thresholds, sixteen little mental short circuits.
Put it on. Turn off the light. And don’t trust too much what you see afterwards.
Tracklist
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