The Unfolding
How To Blow Your Mind And Have A Freak-out Party

THE REVIEW

I turn on my Lava Lite lamp, wait for it to warm up to the right point... turn off all the other lights in my room and let the night get swallowed by the mellifluous shapes the bubbles begin to take, as the green heat pushes them towards the sky... okay, it's time to hit the play button.

The drum introduction seems to come from the deep nothing until it acidly dissolves in the tape rewinding with a suction... "I've Got A Zebra - She Can Fly" starts, and within a few seconds, you're inside the whirlwind. There's no better way in the world to begin "telling" how you can blow your mind and join a freaked-out party. An authentic gem of original psychedelia from 1967, incredibly soft and sensual that kidnaps you from your couch and transports you into a world of colors and beautifully undefinable shapes and the only contact keeping you tethered to reality seems to be Dalton's voice entering and exiting the clouds drawn by bass and drums and crossed by the deviant and sharp guitar solos... wow, more than five minutes suspended in a magical and mysterious otherworld. "Play Your Game" joyfully and carefree accompanies you into the glittering splendor of New York of those years, where the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield could have caressed music with the naïve rigor of the Beatles, Kinks, or Hollies... before being swept away by the heroin-driven anxieties of the Velvet Underground. But immediately the journey resumes, and in the company of a "Girl From Nowhere" we are brought back into a now more adrenaline-pumping suspension with its vaguely Middle Eastern gait leading us into the schizoid world of Flora's vacations, where her lyrical female voice is disturbed for just under two minutes by cacophonous background noises, like wind imitated with voice, explosions, and heavy erotic-sexual sighs.

But as always happens, holidays end too quickly, and the journey must resume as we are introduced to "Love Supreme Deal Meditations" where a distorted folk mixed with Arabesque atmospheres accompanies a perfectly balanced nursery rhyme between childish and pirate singing, made by white men who have sailed the 7 Seas far and wide and now have landed on "Prana," and as soon as they taste the forbidden delights of the place, their voices boom in their minds, while gongs and sitars lead them through the rugged beauties of the paths of consciousness until they meet "Electric Buddah" who with firm and all-knowing voice reveals unknown truths allowing himself to be carried into a hypnotic mantra disturbed by background voices, tambourines, and transistor noises off frequency, almost purifying filthy sinful souls, before a salvific "Hare Krishna."

And finally, we're out, with the "Parable" in a "dialogue" between a tried but conscious voice and a mocking yet solemn flute definitively bringing us back here, immersed on the couch again, with the bubbles propelled by the green heat, seeming not to have cared at all about this magnificent journey through a fantastic album, in its apparent naïveté.