datashock & shivers

Volume IV

This German psych collective have no fixed line-up, a policy which suits their without-portfolio sound down to the ground. This LP finds their cavernous, exploratory sounds taking curious, malformed shapes, sprawled across two sides of un-pigeonhole-able weirdness. It's all too easy to start going on about krautrock when you're dealing with an experimental German band, but there are undoubtedly shades of the less beat-oriented bands of that era embedded within this LP's grooves. Mix those influences with the kind of anything-goes backwoods psych that keeps labels like Digitalis in business and you've got one humdinger of a far-out improv trip. The mastering talents of that increasingly prolific engineer-for-hire Pete Swanson are recruited to glaze the whole album with a kind of soft-focus vagueness that prohibits you from latching on to anything especially tangible. Instead you spend the whole time chasing ghosts through swamp mists, trying to work out what the Dickens is going on. Even at the closing moments when you happen upon some field recording of a gently babbling brook, you won't really be any the wiser as to how, or indeed why you ended up there.