A while back, I got turned on to Turkish psych-folk band Mogollar - particularly their 1971 album Danses Et Rythmes De La Turquie. It's really brilliant stuff.
One day I was playing it at the station and another host happened to overhear it and we got talking about how great the album was but how brief the songs were. We imagined that catching Mogollar live the songs would likely have been epic jams that were just too brain-meltingly gigantic to fit on an LP back then so they distilled the essence of the songs for release on vinyl. We kinda wished there were 80-minute recordings back then but shrugged our shoulders and went back to enjoying what the band did record.
Then about a month or so ago, the same host mentioned the new Acid Mothers Temple record , Lords Of The Underground: Vishnu and the Magic Elixir and how it basically played like our imaginary Mogollar live show. The album is credited to Acid Mothers Temple with The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. but reading the liner notes it looks like a strictly AMT affair.
Opener "Eleking The Clay" is built atop layers of drone, squelching guitars and all sorts of bells and whistles and it percolates for almost 15 minutes. Forget Tim Horton's Tea - this is the real steeped stuff.
"Sorcerer's Stone Of The Magi" is actually a short piece written by bassist Atsushi Tsuyama so it doesn't melt the brain like the opener, but it's a decent respite before the epic closer, "Vishnu And The Magic Elixir." A 25-minute behemoth, "Elixir" is what would be playing on the spaceport in Kubrick's 2001 if the station had been built by a Turkish contractor working for a German multinational. Maybe. My mind is too liquid to really put together a coherent thought after listening to this record for the umpteenth time.
Don't forget to check out the band's Myspace page and official website.
I couldn't find an mp3 from the new record, or a video either, but here's a live performance worth checking out:
Thanks for reading, now start listening...
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