AHORA MAZDA

This album is a really fabulous psychedelic nugget from the land of the flowers and the windmills. It combines both more close-to-earth flute fronted bluesy jazz rock in style of German Rufus Zuphall and free freak-out improvisational soundscapes with some really cool jazz styled saxophones. These both elements are presented in the funny opening track "Spacy Tracy", telling us a tale of a girl interested in the psychedelic way of life, starting as a mellow groovy rocker later morphing as completely free improvisation. "Timeless Dream" is then a minor key melodic tune, having sadly a quite disturbing fade-out ending taking place in the middle of the song. The two following about eight minutes long songs combine again the freeform improvisations and nice themes, featuring some very good jazz saxophone tunes from Mr. van Wageningen, and also Peter Abbink blows some really good raw electric guitar solos in style of Jimi Hendrix and Manuel Göttsching. "Power" is one of the few mostly constructed songs, containing really weird and scary effects used in the singing verse, creating a very mysterious overall feeling.

The last five bonus tracks are a bunch of excerpts from the band's collective jazz improvisations, which sound sometimes resemble the primitive passages of Syd Barrett's "Lanky", sometimes the cosmic electronic sound walls of Hawkwind. Sadly the excerpts are only cuts, varying in length from under two minutes to over four, beginning and ending from a silent void. I wouldn't have mind hearing some improvisation "mistakes", rather the hearing only glimpses of the grooves. But anyway, I really liked the little melancholic but still laid back feeling of this album, and I would recommend it warmly to anybody liking both 70's psychedelic blues/jazz rock and dreamy impressionistic collective jams. Also the flute melodies are here very strong, so the fans of that instrument might want to try giving this album a listen.