NIK RAICEVIC

The most ridiculously short LP I own. I mean this album totally about 24 minutes, 12 minutes per side. Gee a Genesis, Todd Rudgren or Klaus Schulze album has more music one one side than this whole album (but Nik Raicevic's other albums are closer to 40 minutes, which is more normal). It sounds like a sound effects library album to me, just tons of sci-fi noise played on a Moog and that's about it. I like this type of stuff, and love the cover that was done by Raicevic himself. Also the album came with a warning sticker on the shrink wrap that states: "Do not listen to this album if you are stoned", but most copies no longer bear that warning as many tore the shrink wrap long age. My copy doesn't have the warning (but my copy of Magnetic Web does, which I'm so delighted). If you want something more melodic, this isn't where to do, but for those who like off-the-wall electronic music, this comes recommended.

I can see many people would be quick to dismiss Nik Raicevic, but I love his ventures in to weird cosmic sci fi sound effects. There really isn't much in the way of solid melodies. Mort Garson has his weird moments, but he also had a melodic approach which Nik Raicevic didn't. I also wondered if he had Mort Garson as a mentor for concept Moog albums. If Mort Garson did Astrological (Sings of the Zodiac series), Occult (Black Mass, The Supernatural) and even Sex (Music for Sensuous Lovers) Moog albums, so Nik Raicevic did a Drug Moog album. This album was released in 1970 on Buddah, but he was quickly kicked off the label, so he started his own label, released four more albums, although the Numbers album is often thought to have dated from 1968, which is actually the Head album, probably actually the reissue. The Buddah LP is said to come with an 8-page coloring book, but most copies no longer come with them, probably due to children using them as coloring books. This is basically three lengthy cuts, "Cannabis Sativa" starts off with pulsing droning Moog, with lots of strange sound effects. "Methedrine" is full of strange sound effects that I find hard to describe, while the last one, "Lysergic Acid Diethelamyde" is basically "Cannabis Sativa" played at twice the speed. It's a bit strange for a guy who apparently stayed away from drugs to do such an album, but he did. It's too bad that Buddah didn't like the content of the album. Truly off the wall stuff that I find actually enjoyable.

If anything Nik Raicevic has some very loyal followers. I have tried to understand why such an unimpressive and uncreative effort has been rated among or, worst of all, even better than far more ground breaking works included in this Prog subgenre. Die hard loyalty, I suppose.

Anyway, this 1973 release goes by the name of "Magnetic Web", in it you will go through all kind of electronic music composition self indulgences, which by the way, have already been presented to me by this same musician in his first release "Head".

To be honest I thought that time, maybe, was what this guy needed. Maybe then he would have realized that he was not the only person on earth to own synths and synth- less followers. But, sadly, I was proven wrong. What this guy REALLY needs is talent and far more demanding and cultured audiences.

Foul mouthed words won't do the trick, better yet just ignore it and be happy!.

* 1 PA star.

Really?

When I was around 9 or ten (in 1970), I, as any member of my nuclear family, had the chance and fortune, of having around a "do-it yourself" electronic synthesizer, my Dad built up, (He did this as a hobby, as the passionate electronic-engineer he was by heart ), well, also there were drum-boxes, sound-processors (or effects), pre-amplifiers (fuzz included!), digital clocks, and whatever was sold under this big USA 60-70's "do it yourself" era.

Anyway, we had a perfectly functional moog like synthesizer lying around the sofa, or table or more than once "erased" in the closet . All of us, bros and sis, played the synth, and had tons of fun!

What an amazing and extraordinary music instrument the synthesizers turned out to be. For music in general, not only for prog! And to think that this ¨electronic¨ music-revolution started in 1930 is enlightning .

And by the way, if you wonder how those family sessions would have sounded, if recorded? Without the need of "pharmaceutical" references of course, but we could have named our unreleased project: "Electrified Children of Mexico" (with a photo of a Sonora's desert stallated night), it would have been exactly the same. Moreover, we learned to switch and un-plug, simultaneously, far better than this guy in 1970.

*1 " a limited & poor catalogue to market synths", PA stars

"We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold."

Imagine sitting in a dark damp cave somewhere in the deep south of America. Strange flocks of insects buzz frenetically around in these elliptic circles - zooming back and forth back and forth - complimenting the tiny chicken chirps from way in the back of the darkness. Out of the blue and quite hegemonic, like whisking up a couple of eggs, everything suddenly forms hazy fragmented whispers of music, like had 40 age old wizards suddenly commenced with a series of electronic magic tricks. That's Head for you right there - a contourless excursion into sorcery.........and drugs. There's a reason why the tracks are called Cannabis Sativa, Methedrin and Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. Was good ol Nik delightfully delirious while or at least prior to recording this record then? Well it's hard to know for certain, but I'd bet a couple of beets on it. Hell, just take a look at the small print on the front cover:

"INSIDE YOU WILL FIND SOMETHING COLOURFUL TO DO WITH YOUR HANDS WHILE YOU LISTEN TO THIS ALBUM"

Heh...

For 1970 this record is quite ahead of it's time, beating a guy like Conrad Schnitzler to the punch of freeform, almost industrial electronic music. There are certainly shimmers of the metallic reverberations that were still to come with groups like Faust, Throbbing Gristle and Zoviet France. Hah and then to think that the tracks featured on Head actually date back to 1968, and suddenly we're looking at one of the most innovative and experimental artists inside the first wave of electronic music..........and to top it all off - this cat is American! A looooong ways from the electronic explosion waiting to happen in Germany - making this proto kosmiche record seem all the more astonishing and innovative.

First long cut Cannabis Sativa takes you straight out of the comfort of your chair and throws you in the frying pan. There you lie for a good 17 minutes - slowly dissolving like a sexy nob of butter. At first it's a sizzling sensation, but then it picks up with some R2D2 like noises bleeping away like rushed robot rhythms. Midway and suddenly we're entering the aforementioned cave, where most of the cosmic battles of this enigmatic album take place. A circular notion comes back into the music and it starts swirling in these long stretched strings of synthesised sound. Oozing like an open wound the track has finally reached the right consistency - grown thick enough to overflow from it's ridges.

To me these somewhat illogical descriptions sound an awfully lot like I'm talking about German act Kluster - especially with those solemn elliptic drones that edge their way into your eartunnel like a tjuh tjuhing caterpillar, and while there certainly is a few parallels to be made between the two, Raicevic still sounds more fidgety and "nervous" in his delivery. The synth squawks always come jumping - clumsily, out of their place and most of the time sounding particularly crude and naive. Maybe that's what you get when you put a young kid behind this brand new gizmo that can produce sounds that seem to be harvested in outer space. That's basically what the Moog did, it brought the solar system into hundreds upon hundreds of tiny rooms. On Head it is still in an embryonic state. You sense you've tapped into the early days of experimenting with this thing - before it got to be the keyboard equivalent to the guitar solo. It's rough, raw, buzzing, humming and at times quite beautiful in it's own little universe, because trust me, once this baby starts going it feels like a large portal to the stratosphere opens up, and you can almost feel the vibrations of the earth pirouetting on it's own axis.

3.5 stars. Recommended to people who are looking for space journeys while they're swooping round in caves. This is truly music for the head just like the title says. Smoke if you got em folks - this is the best part of the trip, the part I really like. I really like it yeah.

A purely electronic affair that will remind many listeners of early "Cluster' circa '72. Best known for naming his tunes after illegal substances, Raicevic produces yet another splodge and splatter ridden synth bloop album. Every sound appears to be squashed through massive reverb and filters creating an eerie and celestial feel from beginning to end. Released on the self explaining 'Narco Recordings' - it will give you an idea of what to expect.

This is free of vocal and conventional instruments throughout, just like his previous recordings. You end up with an uncompromising mid 70's melange of sound that had no chance at all of breaking the top 100 in any country. I'm quite sure that's how he'd have wanted it...

Supposedly Raicevic played percussion on the Stone's 'Goat's Head Soup'. Listening to this you'd find that very hard to believe. Two more dissimilar albums you will never hear.

Apparently Raicevic gave up after this and sold his keyboards to up-and-coming ambient meister 'Steve Roach' who would go on to the present day producing beautiful waves of ambience.

It's such a pity he stopped here. Perhaps his brain just imploded? After all - each of his albums had a sticker attached to it reading 'Do not listen to if stoned'

Man, Raicevic looks too cool to have released this oddball 1971 electronic monstrosity. He looks like he should have been James Bond before Roger Moore. However, what went on inside that head at the time of these recordings is another matter altogether...

Strangely, my copy is named 'Beyond the End... Eternity' and not the above, where, if spoken will make you feel like you've got a mouthful of marbles breaking teeth as you try to pronounce it.

It looks like I've ended up with some 'hooky' copy of this, as mine consists of 4 albums covering two cd's. Mind you- they're mighty short. This LP for instance only scrapes a miserable 27 mins in duration. Oh well, you'll be glad there's no rambling aimless review then?

At the ripe old age of 38 in 1971 Raicevic released this warped electronic mish-mash of an album on an unsuspecting public. This is early proto electronica from which I'm sure 'Aphex Twin' got many ideas and inspiration from. 'Kluster' also spring to mind. This, however, is far more synthetic. 'Beyond the End... Eternity' is entirely electronic with no vocals which will give you an idea of the kind of difficulty your brain will have trying to come to terms with this recording.

The whole thing ends up sounding like some weird evil alien dentist from Sirius B drilling away at E.T's. jawbone as he struggles to stay awake under anaesthetic , whilst floating creatures swarm around his big malformed head.

An extremely unusual album and one I'm glad I bought. A very difficult album to describe as there's nothing conventional about it at all

No wonder my dad thought I was mental 20 years ago...

Back when I was a small kid (1979-1980) my father would occasionally buy odd and unusual, or just obscure albums. He wasn't exactly a music expert, so I was often wondering if he bought it because he liked the artwork or the title, or maybe the instruments used? The Internet obviously didn't exist, couldn't find info on this stuff, you pretty much had to go by word of mouth, or perhaps the owner of the record store. My father's more normal record buying habit at the time was Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young), Neil Young, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and It's a Beautiful Day, and for electronic music, it was Jean Michel Jarre. Magnetic Web was one of these odd obscurities he bought at that time, really strange electronic music, with a warning sticker on the shrink wrap that stated: "Do not listen to this album if you are stoned" (I don't recall his copy having that warning, or the shrink wrap). He got rid of it (I wished he didn't because I liked it, though I didn't know why then, looks like even at age 7 I wanted to hear the unusual), and all these years I was starting to wonder if my mind was playing tricks that there was an album called Magnetic Web. In 1984, my father bought a copy of Jarre's Magnetic Fields, which I knew wasn't the album I was thinking of (but then he was into Jarre, so it was expected he'd buy that one), besides that one was released in 1981, and Magnetic Web was released in 1973. Years later, comes the Internet, surprised to find the Magnetic Web album in an entry of the Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock and to find out the artist was named Nik Raicevic. Well, in 2006 I was able to acquire me a copy and it came with the shrink wrap and warning sticker, which made me an ever happier owner.

Perhaps this album was too strange for my father's taste. This was his fourth album, and by this point he acquired an ARP 2600. The title track starts off with some cheap sounding drum machine before the synths kick in. It's basically a bunch of pulsing. He really got some reedy sounds off the ARP. "Light Stimulus" features a bunch of computer-like sound (of the trippy '70s variety), while "Edge of the Unknown" features strange droning sounds and trippy organ at the end. "Dance of the Supernatural" has this mechanical pulsing sound, while "Interplanetary Beings" features strange laser sounds. This one could have been easily used on the movie Fantastic Planet. "Cosmic Aura" really trips me out with those bizarre Moog leads, but the song ends abruptly leading me to think he simply ran out of tape before he finished recording it.

He only recorded one more album, Zero Gravity in 1975 before retiring (it's been said he sold his synths to Steve Roach, then a San Diego race care driver).

I love this stuff. Very unconventional stuff that reminds me a bit of Mort Garson at his weirdest (like Lucifer - Black Mass). It's pretty safe to say if you like Mort Garson's more off-the-wall stuff, you'll like this!