Adam Majdecki-Janicki (a.k.a. Adam Kaufmann) is one of the leading lights in the Polish neo-psychedelic rock music scene. This album serves as a good introduction to the broad palette of his work.
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Our comrades at German’s finest psych label, The Lollipoppe Shoppe, release a wild album of heavy-duty psychedelic rock by The Cosmic Kangaroos that sounds more like a 1960’s California (West Coast) indie monster rather than a gem recorded in the 1990s. This label has a knack for absolutely incredible rare gems!
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N.R. Safi is the leader of the band psychedelic rock/drone band The Myrrors, yet this side project goes off on into a rather personal trajectory for him. This particular release combines the drone and rock he’s mastered, but it’s also layered with tapes from Afghanistan, where his roots are. Imagine Throbbing Gristle and Amon Düül II jamming in the outskirts of Kabul with local musicians, and maybe you’d get close to the vibe this album is giving.
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Latvian band The Pink Elephant play a mellow psychedelic rock that has an authentic vibe to it. Not a bad neo-psych release at all.
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From Kaliningrad, Russia (formerly my material ancestral Linn homeland of Koenigsberg, East Prussia) hail one of the most impressive psychedelic folk records I’ve heard in some time. From the cacophony of the violin starting the album, it morphs into a Beatlesque horn arrangement. Those few seconds set the tone for what I figured would be a very heavy listening experience. Sunset Wings, led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Aleks Popov team on this album with fellow singer Evgeniy Brodsky. What makes the album crucial listening, along with the impressive instrumental array you will see below, is the adaptations by poets and…
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From the Upupayāma Bandcamp site: Upupayāma is the musical persona of Alessio Ferrari, an Italian multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who lives in a small mountain village above the city of Parma. In addition to playing guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums, Ferrari himself also incorporates a number of other instruments into his work, including sitar, erhu, transverse and wooden flutes, and a variety of percussion instruments. This is a stunning debut by Upupayāma, whose take on psychedelic rock caught my attention. The album swims along nicely, reminding me of bands like Kikagaku Moyo. I hope they stay on this vein. It’s pleasantly heavy…
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Sweden’s Höga Nord Rekords always produces some from psychedelic rock, but this 7-inch singe from Fontän is a kraut-y scorcher. Fontän hail from Gothenburg, the home of the label, and they produce two solid slabs of fine psychedelic fuzz with a gently grooving drum beat, dubby bass, loads of echo and electronic effects, and some impressively clean production for the genre. The single will be out on November 26, 2021.
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The spirit of Krautrock has spread well beyond the German-speaking world, and has for some time now. Primitive Air is an American collaboration between Drew Piraino, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Emil Amos reminds me of the more freaky (yet still gentle) parts of bands like Popol Vuh and modern bands like The Myrrors. This is a blissful little record, and it would have sit comfortably among the greats of German psychedelic music of the late 1960s and early 1970s had these folks been around during those heady days.