Brainticket – Cottonwoodhill
Brainticket was an experimental quasi-Krautrock band who were belched out of the hub of the spiral galaxy known as Switzerland in 1968. The band released an astounding psychedelic / musique concrete artifact in 1971 that sports the unlikely and awkward name Cottonwoodhill. Although Swiss in origin, it easily crosses over into neighboring Krautrock borders in most people’s minds. After a couple of short, four-minute psych rock jams that prominently display soothing flute melodies, spastic organ outbursts, and rocking bass, drums, tablas and heavily distorted electric guitar, this group of acid gurus launch into a hyper-intense 25-minute masterpiece of psych / concrete insanity. A very repetitious, distorted electric guitar line backed with tabla serves as a nice rhythmic backdrop for a myriad of concrete sounds: glass smashing, motorcyle revving, sirens wailing, crowds cheering, school bells ringing, electronic swirls flitting, some insane reverberated laughing, rain pouring, water rushing,
bottles crashing speaker to speaker, vigorous tooth brushing, gargling, spitting, cars crashing, bells tolling, glissing potentiometer havoc, machine guns and bombs blasting, a chimpanzee laughing, a snatch of Beethoven’s fifth, some robotic-sounding voices fading in slowly while drowning out the music and intoning the word “Brainticket” over and over then fading back out again, trains clacking and explosions exploding. All this while a young British lass delivers a lengthy breathy monolog regarding life, love, LSD and other universal concerns–hamming it up in a most emotionally over-the-top and erotic way. As it says on the album cover: “Advice: After listening to this record, your friends won’t know you anymore. Warning: Only listen once a day to this record. Your brain might be destroyed!” After releasing three albums during their late 1960s / early ’70s heyday, Brainticket dissolved and re-coalesced with different lineups a couple of more times in the early ’80s and 2000s, as Cottonwoodhill went on to effortlessly loft the band up into the hall of Krautrock legends. And that album continues to blow minds to this day.
Label: Bellaphon Catalog Number: BLPS 19019 Format: LP Packaging: LP jacket Tracks: 5 Country: Germany Released: 1971 More: Mexico News Daily, Red Bull
Text ©2010 Arcane Candy
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