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Rating: Krautrocksampler.
A very lively compendium that often sketches, with daring language, skewed and discrepant sounds, iridescent colors, and aberrant, distorted, and cryptic perceptions, the Krautrocksampler has made Julian Cope a deity for the adepts of the Germanic Word scattered across the entire globe.
Julian Cope, an infernal helmsman wrapped in dissonant waves and cacophonous seas of Teutonic origin, serves as a guide to the pleasures of the bizarre and highly original sounds teeming in the restless German musical underground. But the chimerical musicologist (well-known for his artistic eccentricity à la Syd Barrett and his relative promiscuity with the hallucinogenic universe of psychotropic substances) from Bargoed, having abandoned the astral whims of Kraut-Rock, takes on the role of an eccentric cicerone, a quirky tutor, a dazzling light within the subterranean and sulfurous musical tunnels of Japan.
"Let there be light!", the visionary author of "Japrocksampler" seems to shout, with a stentorian voice, a delightful vade mecum that explores, examines, and sieves through the obscure, inaccessible, and enigmatic sound abysses of the Far East.
Food Brain, present in the aforementioned guide, is an extravagant ensemble that makes musical miscellanea its personal leitmotif. "Bansan (Social Gathering)", their only work. Totally instrumental. Sound eclecticism, versatility, and changing contaminations are liquefied in a viscous mixture with an oxymoronic flavor; pompous piano passages, unusual harpsichords, and sparkling keyboard fugues ("Waltz for M. P. B.", "One-Sided Love") alternate with murky, dark, and oppressive atmospheres characterized by sharp bass stabs and rough drumming ("Liver Juice Vending Machine", "Naked Mountain"). Dark shades, opalescent nuances, minimalism and improvisation are sprinkled with acid-lysergic moods, adorned with fiery and pompous organ raids (Hammond, especially) and with piercing electric lashes (Shinki Chen on electric guitar, a sort of almond-eyed Jimi Hendrix) exquisitely immersed in a frothy Rock‘n'Roll matrix ("That I Will Do").
Orgastic and delirious musical fragments are wrapped in corrosive and acidic miasmas with a distinctly Free Jazz taste, among cosmic glimpses and delirious clarinets ("The Hole In a Sausage", fifteen minutes of instrumental intoxication!). Crazy experimentations, robust wandering elephants in purple deserts, carnivalesque sound snippets stuffed with daring percussive incursions, and a slender Progressive veneer (and why not, Kraut-Rock!) make "Bansan" not only a fun and very enjoyable work but also unique in its genre (if one can speak of "genre").
And not just in Japan.
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