Guru Guru
Ufo

LA RECENSIONE

“Stuff that detunes the brain”, this is how Julian Cope defines the debut of Guru Guru from the pages of his famous “Krautrocksampler” and even just considering the eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds of the concluding “Der LSD-Marsch” we can only be fully de-tuned with him. But let's go in order.

The band revolves around the figure of the eclectic drummer/singer Mani Neumeier, where the word singer here takes on a different value, as we cannot help but assign the word “new” to the debut of Can a year before, with vocalist Mooney who madly blazes the trail. But here the vocal sounds are doled out and tribalized, becoming the perfect counterpoint to Ax Genrich's guitars, which sketch plots in imbalance between the noisiest free-jazz and heavy, powerful riffs that would even make Iommi blush in Black Sabbath's debut. Uli Tepte's bass drags the instruments of his two companions and leads them vigorously along the path, where even Neumeier's drums venture into free-form territories, dismantling the conventional structures of rock music... like an adult leading two children by the hand inside a luna park, having to hold them tight so they don't run away mad, attracted by the dazzling lights of the stands. All this (and much more) is the introductory “Stone In”, which launches “Girl Call” with a “languid” pace like a territory pulverized by a nuclear explosion and develops into a noise-rock orgy with a guitar trying to overthrow your nervous system and drums seemingly trying to paint all the shades of madness, in an almost math-rock exercise incredibly ahead of its time. An exercise that culminates in “Next Time See You At The Dalai Lhama”... a liquid and terrifying hallucination, where even Tepte's bass struggles to stay on track and is dragged into the frantic derailment. A freak-mystical sonic painting. The ten and a half minutes of the title track are signals picked up from the depths of space, almost to emphasize their total adherence to the Cosmic Music movement defined some time earlier by Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream... the instruments allowing the voices of the cosmos to be heard are transistor radios, tapes, contact microphones, gongs, intercoms, echo effects, and electronic drums, all manipulated directly by an alien superior intelligence. And we return to the concluding “Der LSD-Marsch” which takes up the spatial echoes of “Ufo”, transforming them into the most modernly noisy piece ever heard until then, so much so that it would take more than ten years before Sonic Youth would speed down the tunnel designed in 1970 by the mad architects of Guru Guru.

And try to re-tune your brain now, if you can.