The Electric Family - Ice Cream Phoenix (2003)

×

The Electric Family - Ice Cream Phoenix (2003)

Close

The Electric Family, led by singer and songwriter Tom "The Perc" Redecker, is not a group; it is a tribe of singers and players drawn from more than three decades of German space music. Previous records featured members of Thirsty Moon, Embryo, Amon Düül II and Grobschnitt as well as kindred spirits from the Tav Falco and Jimmy Page/Robert Plant bands. "Ice Cream Phoenix" (2003) is a true unity project. Part of the album was recorded in the old Studio of the DDR in the former East Berlin and brings together musicians from both sides of the fallen Wall and beyond, including pianist Rainer Kirchmann of the band Pankow, Agitation Free drummer Burghard Rausch and pedal steel guitarist Hermann Lammers-Meyer, a veteran of stone country sessions in Nashville and Austin, Texas.
The best psychedelia, of any era, is picture music, and you can virtually see the atmospheres and undiscovered lands of "Ice Cream Phoenix": the twilight tension between Peter Apel's gritty lead-guitar outbursts and Redecker’s deep prayerful singing in "Last Phase of the Moon"; the shifting weather patterns in "Airchild," from the foggy morning whine of Lammers-Meyer’s steel guitar to Hanno Janssen’s ascending drumfire; the proud desert-exile life evoked by the dusty guitars and murder-ballad voices of Redecker and Carlo von Putten in "Wisdom of Wolves."
You can get lost in this record - in the trance guitars and keyboard rings of light in "Landmark Visions"; amid the volcanic clusters of gothic piano in the steady climbing jam "Solid Structure"; and in the blinding resurrection of Pink Floyd’s one-chord thunderbolt, "Careful With That Axe, Eugene." The Floyd first recorded the song in 1968, for a BBC Radio session, as "Murderistic Woman," then twice again for a 1968 single and in Rome, in late 1969, for director Michelangelo Antonioni’s provocative misfire on student revolution, Zabriskie Point. In the 1970 movie, Antonioni used the Floyd’s performance to amplify his explosive climax, the destruction of the Death Valley clifftop house - a metaphor for Antonioni’s vision of a doomed capitalist America. The Electric Family take that cleansing drama to their own extremes: the menacing gleam of a fuzz-scarred steel guitar; the angry circular breathing of a didgeridoo; Indian tambura and prayer circle drone. When the blowup finally comes, you feel the mounting fear and paranoia vanish in wide open space, in a warm new air.