Tortilla Flat
Für Ein 3/4 Stündchen

Tortilla Flat - Für ein 3/4 Stündchen - 1974

However you look at it, the music of the first half of the '70s represents a great creative push in the musical field. Afterwards, it's true, there are episodes, sometimes ingenious, sometimes overwhelming in beauty and originality, but gradually more isolated and rare. That fortunate five-year period is terrific; wherever you cast your net, you catch well, anywhere in the world. This group, Tortilla Flat, was not even present in the already exhaustive DeBaser database, yet they produced an album that calling beautiful is truly an understatement.

In fact, little is known about this band. They operated with as many as seven members in Westphalia and were led by brothers Hans and Hermann Basten (drums and flute/guitar respectively). Their album was released in 1974 and turned out to be a spectacularly beautiful painting: varied yet compact in sound. Played with great mastery, innovation, and intelligence, it is full of personal and never repetitive solutions. Among the tracks, it is impossible not to mention "Leere, Chaos, Schopfung" with jazzy shades, delicate tones, vaguely Brazilian, "Obit, Anus, Obit Anus" and its leap between Canterbury, Focus, and primordial Jethro Tull, "Fatimorgani" which seems like a preview of "San Jacinto" by Peter Gabriel, "Temperamente" with its light and sublime dialogue that refers to the Dutch cousins "Supersister" first and to Caravan towards the end, "Mohre" with semi-acoustic textures, so transporting and imaginative, "Tortilla Flat" with its attacks of traditionalism between flamenco and incredible previews of the '90s Nordic prog, with a subtle taste for dissonance, made pleasant by a rich, never predictable rhythm. All steeped in psychedelia, fragmented, playful, hypnotic, yet so precise and focused. And above all, that flute, whose presence, albeit massive, never becomes cloying, never fills enough and, without saturating, whirls in a dreamy and charming manner, between an electric guitar and a piano, between a syncopated rhythm and a pulsating bass, doubled by a few keyboard notes or the unmistakable arpeggio of the semi-acoustic Gibson ES-175 or the glockenspiel or a soothing violin.

Overall, the work could be identified as one of those rare and exciting Canterbury works away from its motherland, but there are so many and such pleasurable overall elements that labeling it is just not appealing.

Are we tired, scared, horrified, disgusted of pronouncing the word progressive again? OK, let's define this album as psychedelic folk with jazz shades, but for heaven’s sake, let's listen to it, hear how beautiful it is.

sioulette