FRAGMENTS OF LIGHT

The first Sensations' Fix LP was more or less a happy accident, and never intended as a finished album. You might get the impression it was recorded off the cuff in guitarist Franco Falsini's basement, and guess what: you'd be right. After sweet-talking a traveling salesman out of his demonstration MiniMoog, Falsini began goofing around with the new equipment in the Virginia home of his American wife, trying "to go beyond the sound of the guitar", quoting a 2012 interview.

The band itself didn't even exist at the time. It was only much later that Falsini would share the tapes with friends in England, and then receive an unsolicited record deal from Polydor (Italy): in retrospect a mixed blessing for such an underachieving visionary. A new band was quickly assembled, and those same basement demos became their debut album...an odd start to what would be an unusual career.

The album's name was chosen well, with eleven (mostly) instrumental song fragments filling only 37-minutes. But the music remains untethered to any concept of time or space, and is best summarized by the song titles themselves: "Music Without Gravity"; "Music Is Painting In the Air"; so forth. The latter in particular can be heard as the signature track not only of the embryonic group, but arguably also for Progressive Rock in general, expressed in a simple yet soaring four-minute epiphany.

For spiritual guidance Falsini made a role model of ROBERT FRIPP, in a fan letter printed directly on the album's back cover: "Dear Robert, you'll be glad to know that the heavenly music organization is here too." It might have been a subtle marketing ploy as well: anyone hip enough in 1974 to catch the reference to Fripp and Eno's commercially obscure "No Pussyfooting" album would likely be on the same wavelength as Falsini and company.

It's too bad Polydor Records didn't subscribe to the same heavenly music ethic. But in retrospect they did us all a favor by rashly signing such an unlikely ensemble, much like they did with the Krautrock troublemakers of FAUST three years earlier, and probably with similar regrets. In this one happy instance, being condemned by a fuzzy memory to repeat the mistakes of the past was a blessing in disguise.