MIJ
Yodeling Astrologer

In one of my previous reviews, I talked about the German duo Witthüser & Westrupp, deliberately trying to use the term "cosmic folk" sparingly; by pure chance, today I dusted off this old album from 1969 and now find myself compelled (albeit reluctantly) to use the definition "cosmic folk"; I just don't know how else to describe the music of MIJ, aka Jim Holmberg. I've never found precise information about this "folksinger," an anonymous character who played sporadically on the streets and main squares of New York City. He was noticed by producer Bernhard Stollman, who proposed recording a studio album for release in the Esp-Disk series dedicated to the American underground, alongside names like Fugs, Godz, Ed Askew, Cromagon, and company. The album has been released in several LP editions with different titles: "MIJ," "Color by the Number," "Zero the Fool," "Tarot"; the musical content always identical, I have chosen, however, to review it with the title given to the 1993 German reissue on compact disc. Incidentally, Holmberg would have liked the album to be simply titled "Astrologer," defining himself as an astrological rocker who happened to land in a space-time purely by chance on a planet he perceived as hostile.

Stollman brought Jim Holmberg into the recording booth on January 12, 1969; to contain studio rental costs, the allowable time for recording was barely three hours, including mixdown. However, MIJ had a good repertoire of songs ready and was accustomed to performing "unplugged," so this didn't cause major issues apart from some imprecisions on the guitar, which made the record even more beautiful and sincere. The music is at times simple, at other points more complex and varied thanks to sudden rhythm changes, always straightforward and without frills, veering between acoustic psychedelia and metaphysical folk, all recorded live with only a 12-string guitar and voice. The songs, whose lyrics are taken from the author's personal poems, delve into themes bordering on esotericism, speaking of paradisiacal visions, planets covered in flowers, stars, and various celestial bodies; the scenes flip during repeated falsetto moments with terrifying situations between fairy tale, dream, and nightmare, all well-aligned as if the singer were giving his interpretation of the figures belonging to the magical deck of cards, the gypsy tarot. On the other side of the glass is a sound engineer, Onno Scholtze, imported from the Netherlands when Esp three years earlier began taking an interest in Dutch free jazz. It is largely due to the still early-career Scholtze that the sonic features of the album take flight. He tries to enrich the raw sound of the guitar and voice with long effects of reverb, delay, and metallic flanger, and perhaps without intending to, he creates that magical acoustico-spatial situation that made MIJ’s record a cult object.

The atmosphere is full of astral echoes, interstellar whistles, whistles, Apache howls, strange effects that seem electronic but are achieved solely by sliding the strings or with the mouth, and with a good dose of noises coming from the studio not erased during the final mix, such as voice commands and jokes between sound engineer and musician. Everything sounds very low-fi, reaching pure distortion in "Never Be Free" while hypnotic fascination constantly pervades, both in the accelerated guitar moments accompanied by sharp vocalizations of "Grok (Martin Love Call)" and in the more relaxed and carefree passages of "Lookin' Out Today". Closing the album is the long "Look Into the (K)Night", the darkest, most meditative, sinister, and complex piece of this surreal sonic merry-go-round. On the back cover prominently is the reproduction of the "fool," the sketchy joker, intended in the poetic parable of Jim Holmberg as the mad wanderer, the man of the street, the one who sees things from a socially different perspective, perhaps, but he is not even sure whether it is the right one.