MAGNOG

There was actually a bit of a buzz with this band as Rolling Stone, NY Times and Guitar Player all reviewed it and the band would go to Europe and play in a festival over there. PEARL JAM requested that they open for them on some gigs which they did. It was while recording that second album that the guitarist became seriously ill stopping the recording process in it's tracks. Kranky wanting to keep the buzz going asked the band about releasing some of the demos they had received earlier and the band obliged also sending them some newer demos. So "More Weather" is what Kranky released in 1997 taken from demos recorded between September 1994 and October 1997.

The music is dense, dark, abstract, experimental and inventive at times. The bass player and drummer both add moog while the guitarist adds effects and there is a samey feel throughout this mammoth recording. It was my second spin of this last weekend that I thought I'd take a chance and spend last week with it feeling yeah it seems like a 3 star recording but there's so much to like that it might grow into a 4 star. Turns out this became a chore to get through each time. I mean it's a lot. So despite liking their sound and feeling this is a pretty good document to own for fans of this band, it's hard for me to recommend this as a stand alone recording in the world of psychedelia. But grab their only studio release if you can.

The range of music is astonishing, from the 51-second "Vacant Chair" to the 30+ minute "Mystery Goodness", a title which doubles as a five-syllable synopsis of the entire album. Although maybe 'goodness' is the wrong word to describe the 2.3 hours of dense, intimidating Space Rock compiled here: truly more Space than Rock, and so thick in atmosphere you could slice it with a diamond-bright laser beam and leave not a mark on the amorphous cloud of sound.

None of the eighteen total tracks has a legitimate beginning or end. Instead, they each seem to fade into and out of a jam in progress, which only adds to the uneasy sense of cosmic mindwarp, "Somewhere Between Asleep and Awake", as the title to one of several 10+ minute workouts asserts. In short, there isn't a stable foothold to help your balance anywhere over the entire album.

The music occasionally locates a grinding, Post-Punk, Space-Kraut groove (in the latter half of the nearly 13-minute "Chopstick", for example). But it mostly follows an intuitive path of pure, improvised electric guitar ambience, often without any rhythm: in the short "Pattern Shifter", or the two-part "Goom Chi Pan". The home-recorded, low fidelity 4-track production is an acquired taste, but it suits the raw underground power of the music. Note the instrument lineup: aside from their standard guitar, bass, and drums, each of the three young players (amazingly all still in their teens when this music was recorded) is also given credit for 'delay', and all those effects pedals must have been overheated near to melting from the constant surge of high voltage.

It's a lot of music to digest, for psychic reasons more than the obvious time investment: I've had the album in my library for over two years now, and have yet to survive the whole thing in one sitting. Two stars for the challenge, and because it should only be approached with extreme caution: like an unshielded electrical cable, posing a fatal hazard to careless pedestrians.

[ Postscript: guitarist Phil Drake was forced to quit the music business for health reasons, before Magnog's sophomore studio album was completed. He died too young, in November 2015: a victim of medical negligence, according to his mother. We will never know how he might have matured as an artist and musician. But on the evidence of Magnog's limited recorded output, what was lost to us might have been extraordinary. ]

When it was released in March of 1996, this self-titled debut was compared in the music press to early Ash Ra Tempel, and not without reason. The group is classified here as Psychedelic/Space Rock, but this is Space Rock as the Germans used to play it, circa 1970: dense, unnerving explorations of infinity, the musical equivalent of dark matter. Imagine the drifting interstellar guitars of "Traummaschine", cranked up to occasional brain-melting volume.

And yet there are moments of unexpected beauty in the music, silver linings around all the churning guitar abstractions and overwhelming reverb effects. "Learning Forgetfulness" has a lovely, Eno-esque melody, with barely audible spoken poetry from an obvious teenage voice (the average age of the Magnog trio was around twenty, at the time). And in "A Moment's Seam" the band miraculously conjured a facsimile of an actual song, one of the more haunting ballads ever beamed down to Planet Earth from beyond the stars.

The longer tracks do tend to wander, like stray asteroids adrift between galaxies. But over its generous 77-minute length (actually longer, on vinyl), the album is able to sustain an awesome mood of cosmic introspection.

Ill health broke up the band before a second album could be realized. But in an instant of time almost too short for anyone to notice, Magnog flared like a supernova explosion: shining briefly and brilliantly before contracting to neutron ash.

To me this is their masterpiece, the other album is really good but there's something extra going on here.

The guitar player, Phil Drake, died last year, by the way, so the Magnog there is is the Magnog there is. It's hard to imagine they could have topped this, though. It's shame, he couldn't have been very old, but this is his legacy and it's something of which to be proud.