Sparifankal
Bayern Rock

LA RECENSIONE

After the disappointing experience with the CPM musical cooperative, some musicians from Embryo and Missus Beastly tried the canonical path for producing independent music by founding the label April Records. This time it went decidedly better, so much so that the German CBS, by financing the project, allowed the birth of Schneeball, a small record label still in full activity today with many interesting titles in the catalog.

The first album produced by April is this unknown "Bayern-Rock" by the equally unknown band Sparifankal, a Bavarian quintet with a folk past. The name derives from a hippie commune active since the early '70s around Munich; five dissidents from the commune set up a musical formation of the same name with an entirely popular repertoire, always sung in a very peculiar Bavarian dialect, a language drawn from medieval German mixed with words difficult to translate as they were taken from the Esperanto vocabulary, a verb used mainly by the American counterculture of the '60s. The only member of the five with some posthumous recognition, the bassist and singer Florian Laber, came from the cult band Siloah and had some "on the road" participations in the wanderings of Embryo. From their first public appearances in 1972, Sparifankal established themselves as an extremely politicized ensemble and social denunciation group. After four years of live performances in smoky beer halls, furious brawls, chases, and arrests by the police, and daring prison escapes, the five found themselves on the stage of two small theaters with an entirely new repertoire. From these two evenings, the live album in question was drawn and published in 1976; a very strange album, difficult to compare to any other production belonging to the "krautrock" genre. Quite challenging at first listen, it reveals itself with patient attention to be extremely interesting, especially for the use of strictly folk instrumentation like ocarina, drums, ukulele, dulcimer, kazoo, French horn, harmonica, and various electrifications, for the creation of a "proto-punk" that anticipates, in some guitar parts but especially in the way of singing (à la Klaus Dinger), the La Düsseldorf of the self-titled album and Viva.

Since it wasn't a studio project, Sparifankal can be easily forgiven for a technically just sufficient result even if the collection of songs is anything but predictable. Essential arrangements with a pulsating rhythmic progression and improvisations ""how it comes it comes, and if it doesn’t come, it will come next time"" (Bluus Fo Da Peamanentn Razzia, De Groskopfadn, Bis zum Nexdn Weidgriag), alternate with light-hearted metaphysical serenades with a constantly enveloping rhythm (Dees Land Is Koid) and slower but equally intriguing moments, albeit at the limit of electric approximation with good melodic doses performed on guitars, ethnic flute, and ocarina (Wans Ums Farecka Nimma Ged, I Mechd Di Gean Amoi Nackad Seng, Da braune Baaz). Although in the original LP version the song texts are accompanied, it's impossible to translate their meaning, the language is too ancient, not even Ebernard Schoener's grandpa in a wheelbarrow would have succeeded; however, it is presumed that the themes dealt with can be traced back to rock in opposition. All in all, an interesting document from the German underground that did not compromise commercially, trying through basic amateurism and youthful naivety to introduce part of the lost German culture in a rock context that wasn't necessarily intellectual.

The rest of Sparifankal's discography is cautiously discouraged for the most demanding lovers of lost-era German rock, due to the shift towards nice "little structures" between folk ballad and a poor copy of certain electric blues.