SLIDING GLIDING WORLDS

Many regard this as their best cassette-era release, but I'm not one of them, as I fell "There is Nothing" and even "The Bits Between the Bits" are better. But of course, this being an OZRIC album, it's full of great stuff, and I never ran across a bad OZRIC album. This being originally a privately issued cassette, the cover artwork was still black and white (done by Blim, an anonymous figure responsible for the trippy colorful psychedelic artwork once the band started recording for proper labels). The band also witness the most major linup change at this point, with two major figures coming in. One is the arrival of drummer Merv Pepler. He was obviously responsible for several of OZRICS best albums, and he stayed with the band until 1994 (previous drummer, Nick Van Gilder aka. "Tig" left because he really wasn't too interested in the music OZRICS played, and you'll find out once he joined Jamiroquai for a short time from 1992 to '94). Another key figure to make his premiere here is John Egan, on flutes (sometimes he goes by his Gaelic name of Eoin Eogan, since if I'm not mistakened, he is Irish). He is still with the band to this day, and he was responsible for giving the band a more ethnic bent, which obviously helped improved on the band's sound.

"Sliding Gliding Worlds" is quite an accomplishment given it was originally a privately issued cassette the band released themselves. While I though "There is Nothing" was better because it was more energetic and exciting, "Sliding Gliding Worlds" was perhaps a more consistent offering (you don't get experiments like the original version of "The Eternal Wheel", for example) and the band was obviously going for a more exotic and ethnic feel. Here you get the original version of "White Rhino Tea" (later re-recorded for Strangeitude). This version has a more '80s sound (especially the drum machines). "Kick Muck" makes its premiere here as well (exactly the same as "Pungent Effulgent", but with an ambient experiment tagged at the end, rather than seguing in to "Agog in the Ether"). "The Dusty Pouch" was the album's only excursion in to reggae, but what makes this really interesting is John's exotic flute at the end. "Mae Hong Song", despite the Chinese title, sounds more like Balinesian gamelan. "(Omnidirectional) Bhadra" has more of an Indian feel, no doubt helped by someone named Marcus "Carcus" playing tabla. It's amazing that in '88 any band would combine both digital and analog (since too many bands at that time were too stuck on digital to give a rat's ass to anything that existed before the Yamaha DX-7). This is some great material, to say the least, and it's little wonder why the band would get proper label treatment pretty soon after this.