SPACEBOX

A seminal work for some, a music from another planet for others, Spacebox's (Uli Trepte's project, after departing from Guru Guru) set of kraut rock experiments and grobian elations is a significant spot and work, inside the plural German Rock scene and the tough avant-garde of old music itself. It is perhaps only a very difficult code to break, a highly pretentious agitation and claustrophobia, plus a brief kind of an implosive and strangling virtuous art, that, first of all, sends the message that all the classic kraut and shock-rock bands have sent, then, second of all, speaks only towards those that, themselves, choose a difficult, gnashed and introverted value in music.

Within kraut rock, Spacebox's sense comes late and definitely non-innovative, but it shakes the beliefs of harmony and aestheticism, the same way any master or old-rocker did before, drastically, even hurtfully, mixing numbness with aggressiveness, turning rock and acid music in a turmoil of a plumber exploration.

In Spacebox the pleasure point meets with the boiling and excruciating one, reason for which the program and the shuffle of extreme music this album has is, relatively, ecstatic but not wonderful, and intriguing but not undisturbing. Kraut rock itself is a movement surfacing the artists and their advanced art, not the music or its taste reach; Spacebox emphasizes that a lot, Spacebox being the most precious of the two project, putting a brave edge between what's a temperamental and torrential music and what can be called music at all, since it melds and improvised until the best qualities are those suffocating, strange, diluted and sequential bites and essences; commonly said, it's quite something for any fan, acid listener and kraut-head, and quite nothing for anyone too "faint-hearted" or even calofile.

The wide sum of caustic elements are well able to place an original caliber in Spacebox, still (rather helpfully then conventionally) the influences bare the characteristic s of jazzy and acid sound kraut, with a space and psychedelic ironic elegance and a full practice of heavy and untidy rock. There is an undeniable hint towards the grands from the late 60s-early 70s that processed their raw chemical so intensely it became an indescribable and infernal "complexity" - Spacebox, still, keep a straight line of rock and lyrical psych, even if it is protuberant and nervous.

Uli Trepte is Spacebox's kraut-meister, leading with a strong hand and an unstirred ideal the whole experiment, tough race and cold expression of Spacebox. He punches in a perfect way the atmosphere and rapture, so that his vision could only go, unnoticeable!, into an excessive dream, during a couple of pieces and some minor blokes.

Spacebox has an epic composition that tends to be apart from anything else, still most of the short pieces are equally "scrumptious" and characteristic, flooding with different tensions and acid exhilarations, plus with some art techniques and sound phobic airs that define the mood and clean the space-plug of your mind thoroughly. The first two pieces seem raw gems, distorting as much bass and jazz kraut as possible. Further on, Trepte's improvisation and bloody cuts of lyrical and instrumental frenzy make a noisy impact, along some stormy and sloppy cliques. A lot of Spacebox is music of the void, of acid rock, of a sulphuric blow-up art, or of an eccentric collage of ripper-open convolutions and soft-experimental trepidation - a music pretty impulsive, howling and far from tidy or balanced moods.

Uli Trepte fills a good solo moment of dark and dense kraut, by the book, with his two Spacebook works, the first one being the best and the most "far out".