Artist: Para Halu
Title: Space Rock
Format: CD
Label: Zaikadelic Records
Cat. #: ZAICD003
Release date: 11 January 2007
Track listing:
1. flipper [preview]
2. popeyote [preview]
3. crunchy christ [preview]
4. space rock [preview]
5. matter of course [preview]
6. karcos harcos [preview]
7. manntraxxx [preview]
8. cacao remix [preview]
9. glowing steel [preview]
10 ironiq iron [preview]
Review by O Cavalo de Pomba Gira taken from isratrance:
It’s spacey and it rocks, what else could you possibly ask for?
This one will rip your auricular sensors apart and make you SIRIUSLY move your gravity centre. The new lethal concoction of the Hungarian sonic wizards claims to be a tribute to the space rock era – however, you will by no means remain cloistered in your orgone accumulator (even if it makes you feel greater than all the Chinese Herbs and Jaegermeister available in the Pacific North-West). Out on the dancefloor ye shall go.
This happens to be a very typical trait of Para Halu – they make tracks and whole albums that have structures as involved as any Bitch’s Brew era Miles Davis oeuvre. You can sit and listen very attentively indeed – but some part of your body will inevitably keep time (fingers, toes, buttocks or all three). Out in the wild with the freaks of the field, with speakers blaring and auras baring . . . you’ll be further away than Major Tom in a matter of seconds, with the soles of your shoes doing the sacred tribal dance of Ground Control. And yet it has this almost symphonic feel to it – each track seems to be a new chapter in a story that you feel obliged to hear in its entirety. So if I were an audacious enough deejay (every day I’d biddy biddy bong), I’d probably get me two copies and just mix the hell out of them – couldn’t be a miss.
If we do get into individual tracks – well, each and every one of them could provide those vital moments of all-out dancefloor gyration madness when woven into a nocturnal set, the only shortcoming being that you’ll find yourself spending a helluva lot of time finding fresh stuff to mix it with. They’re likely to mix surprisingly well, though – the chaps pay homage to a variety of styles here, and it’s not just Hawkwind and fusion jazz flashbacks that you get. Some parts of tracks are surprisingly similar to the really greasy and pulsating specimens of techno . . . if techno ever dared to do 148-152 BPM, that is (Cacao Remixed is the most obvious example). Crunchy Christ, the eponymous track, Karcos Harcos, Glowing Steel and Ironiq Iron are probably my favourites . . . and the rest of them are more than simply adequate. I must say that I haven’t heard a release of this quality since Scatterbrain’s “Infernal Angel”, and definitely prefer it to the “World of Peace” (also an excellent album, as a matter of fact, but lagging somewhat behind Para Halu’s most recent release insofar as madcap footstomping momentum is concerned).
Now let us consider the Ultra Special blow-by-blow account of individual tracks.
Flipper
Starts off with bubbling cauldrons of golden smoke followed by howls of cuckooing momewraths tastefully arranged against the background of a smooth beat with buzzing mad clocks popping up every now and then. The beat becomes more driving gradually, inevitably making your gravity centre mobile as stray meteors pass by chased by charged particles, with alien whispers telling your perception to flip.
Popeyote
A rabid pulsation of a helicopter preparing for takeoff is set off against droplets of molten lead floating away into psyberspace. Before you know it, there's the sound of gigantic hammers driving nails into the coffin of consensual reality, and you know something's about to happen. Suddenly, all goes dizzy and the beat goes manic; the sonic landscape gives you a very strong nitrous flashback, you take a few steps forward and fall into a vertical tunnel with rubber walls, falling, falling, falling ever deeper into the rubbery underworld.
Crunchy Christ
From the very first few seconds the beat chews you and squashes you square from all sides, aided by a myriad of tiny sensient sparks dashing here and there, then they fill the entire sonic space, the beat turns into wisps of greyish-blue smoke, and just as some unknown entity voices your own surprise for you, it comes back with a vengeance, transporting you to the largest cathedral you've ever seen. A choir of robots chants a mechanical psalm, and you are approached by Pontiff Albert Hofmann, who smiles at you and hands you a very crunchy serving of Corpus Christi.
Space Rock
You find yourself galloping along the trail of lost souls with hells bells on DMT chirping away meditatively. There are many spaces where the cosmic pump sucks your brain out, then back inside it goes, but hey, it isn't your brain anymore! Trying to come to terms with this rather disconcerting fact, you notice a skinny creature with the head of a frog wearing a Hawkwind T-shirt, and it holds a kazoo in its hands. The ghost of mickey finn emerges from behind the creature's back with a pair of bongos, and the tribal rhythm carries you ever further.
Matter Of Course,
The beat is windy here, and it carries leaves of silver and blue, each of them large enough to serve you as a magic carpet. You hop on and fly over the land of squelches, magnetic fields and electric frogs, into the snowstorm that rages over a crimson mountain ridge . . . is that the Wild Hunt that you see in front of you?
Karcos Harkos
The first thing you see is a fluorescent porcupine reading the most bizarre mantra you've ever heard, and there's a swarm of bees buzzing back and forth over its head in a figure of eight. Infinity. Bees? Bombers carrying tiny blue pills, one of them is melting on your tongue and then it's you reading the porcupine mantra with all the zeal you can master. Karcos harkos. Karcos harkos. Karcos harkos. A choir of voices joins you in a contrapunt, and you just cannot point out the moment when the chant becomes a wild and ecstatic tribal dance and you grow an extra pair of arms, which you use to accompany yourself on the crystal marimba.
Manntraxx
The locusts are marching from sunrise to sunset, while the celestial screen of silk is pulled away to reveal a fleet of octagonal spacecraft. They hang in silence for a moment, sounding as though they were diesel-powered and rather rickety . . . but once you get sucked into the hatch of one such ship and find yourself in the pilot seat, you realise it's no diesel - the spaceship has lungs, it enhales, then exhales, and you're in a different galaxy many light years away . . . yet the beat reaches you even here, and shakes you to the marrow.
Cacao Remix
You wake up and realise someone's playing a minimal techno record way faster than it was supposed to go originally, which strikes you as a major improvement. It is on some radio, apparently, which is obviously trying to change the station. As you make a cup of cocoa, you realise you're inside the radio, with transistors and circuit boards buzzing away. The buzzing gets louder and the walls begin to vibrate, then a gust of wind blows the electronics away and transforms you into a high-voltage electric current . . . you find a fitting cable, dive in and travel onwards, neither caring where you're going, nor how long it shall take to get there; it's the most natural thing to be an electric current and to travel through endless cables, after all, isn't it?
Glowing Steel
The steel woodpecker is hunting little copper bugs in a forest of giant mushrooms. Amazed at the sight, you completely forget to watch your step and fall into a pool of ooze, rapidly sinking; then you hit the bottom and go through, ending up in a tunnel with glowing mushroom roots forming chaotic patterns on the walls. Every step sounds like the tolling of a rubber bell, and as you walk a little further, you enter a secret nanobot production facility . . . there are millions of them made every second, each a tiny speck of silvery dust; they chirp away as they are born, then leave through a portal of glowing red. Out of curiosity, you step in - the next thing you know, you are in a space where there's absolutely nothing but an even glow radiating from every direction, with no surfaces, no objects, no ups and no downs. Oddly enough, it feels like home.
Ironiq Iron
A syncopated motor propels you onwards through endless caverns with tiny invisible moths flying through the walls leaving glowing trails behind them. The cavern labyrinth finally ends, and there's an enormous hall where a few hundred dwarves are hammering away at tiny anvils very rhythmically, and a couple of dragons are circling lazily right underneath the dome, which looks as tall as the sky itself. One of them notices you, swoops down towards you. Your eyes meet - the creature chuckles and offers you a ride. You mount it and it takes off, through the hole in a stained glass window and away into the wilderness of turbulent air currents and crackling sparks of static.
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