VOLUME 10

Strange time in a band's career to be experimenting with hallucinogens, but then again what do I know? David Gilmour started flirting around with cocaine in his 40s...

Starting out with a a series of menacing violin strokes, screeching and writhing over an elegant, if not rather mumbling piano, hazy synth percolations from way in the back and then something as disturbing as strings being plucked like a rooster losing it's feathers. There is no melody only brooding atmospheric noise.........but navigated through by the utmost care and fragility that the piece becomes musical, albeit a strange hybrid of it though, with ambient whiskers attached and long yearning cello like cries.....and then the hypnotic Shaman drums commence and you're out on the prairie running with the buffalo.

To me it feels as if the opener, Paraboiled, welcomes you into an album that seeks out the same as the old Indian medicine men of the west. As a matter of fact, I hear a lot of Indian spiritualism in Volume 10. Paraboiled is like walking into an Indian séance - with Richard Harris suspended from the tee-pee roof, dangling away in eagle's claws. The whole track is like a small 7 plus minute raga that ends in those drums and an organ that only rarely takes form, and when it does it's like a warm gust of winds.

By stripping their expression down to a raw caveman-like essence Electric Orange have succeeded in doing something, that I thought was near impossible. They have actually managed to do a modern Krautrock album, that not only sounds incredibly unique and original, but interjects itself straight into what the real and genuine Krautrock of yore was all about: mystery and fumbling around in strange dark places with but a mere flashlight and an adventurous soul. Volume 10 takes Krautrock back to the trip - the interstellar space voyages and freak out sessions of 1971.............but it's never a real "throw-back" album. It utilises some of the same instruments sure, but the overall musical expression has more in common with a modern SWANS release than say Yeti, Tago Mago or NEU!'s debut. I often think of SWANS The Seer when I listen to this album. Maybe I've completely gone fishing, but there's a similar magnitude of sound going on - something that almost sounds teutonic and Magma-like huge, only far more loosey goosey, wavering and Hiawatha inspired.

Another one of Volume 10s defining qualities is the free form of the material. The music often wafts overhead you in swirling patterns for then to be sculptured into something altogether different - a sporadic rhythm intervenes, an organ cuts through, a guitar slushes away and swoosh now the music seems to have caught wind of something intriguing and consequentially adapts and transforms into a collective sonic force: The tune is now under way.

Ranging from phonofiddles and banjos to double bass, moog, mandolin, mellotron and guitars in reverse - the arsenal of this group is anything but ascetic, even if the flow of the music occasionally can feel that way - meaning that it sounds like a 'back to the basics' kind of thing 'Let's just jam together, although it'd be cool if none of you had any preconceived ideas coming into it'.

What more? Well some of this album genuinely sounds like a band trying to make ambient music - only with all acoustic instruments...............and then suddenly the electronics turn on together with a full rockin' explosion of the aforementioned Shaman sensibilities, and what you had in mind with those thoughts about ambient music are suddenly put to shame; -everything now is different and a thousand miles from the tee-pee where Richard hung (out) at the very beginning.

If you have ever wondered about how prog would've sounded like, if the Cherokee had been a major contributing factor in sculpting it, then this is the album for you. Dig out your old tomahawks and some peyote and get ready to party like it's 1999, there's dust and colourful feathers everywhere and you're in a drug induced trance. HEIYAHH YAHH YAHH!!!

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