Moebius & Plank
Rastakraut Pasta

LA RECENSIONE

The album that closed the golden decade of kraut rock. Thirty-five minutes of pure madness, where the most orthodox kraut rock meets completely contrasting genres (reggae, ska). It starts with News, a track with a dizzying and sick funk base over which voices from television or radio newscasts are interspersed. Between PIL and Funkadelik. The title track is the true masterpiece of the album, blending funk, reggae, and ska. Catchy melodies but totally deformed and dissonant. Feedback 66 is characterized by irritating distortions over Holger Czukay's bass line: advancing between march and industrial, akin to 13th Floor Elevator, Suicide, and those Devo whose first album was recorded right in Plank's studio in Cologne a couple of years earlier. It continues with Missi Cacadou, a reggae/dub even more stripped down than the previous ones, bordering on surreal, with ostentatious vocoder and bass highlighted over an amorphous snare rhythm. Two Oldtimer is a track that comes closer to the Cluster style than the others, characterized by counterpoints between pianos and keyboards over a light bossa nova rhythm. With Solar Plexus, the path to the cosmos begins, with distorted voices that seem to come from the underworld, before the brief concluding Landebahn. An extremely important record that opened new paths, and metaphorically, as mentioned at the beginning, closed a magic circle for a decade fundamental to the evolution of rock music.