VOLUME TWO

The introduction of this album is perfectly symbolized by the definitive idea about their music, as reported into the following sentence: "There is music for the body and there is music for the mind. Music for the body picks you off the floor and hurls you into physical activity of whatever type you may prefer at them moment. Music for the mind floats you gently downstream, through pleasurable twists and turns, ups and downs, rapid and calm waters".well in particular this latter metaphor is their crazy idea of creating a "psychedelic flow" around their sessions of free music and the style from Canterbury as well, which is not strange for me, especially if I regard of their long music career, often coherent with this music idea .

Talking about the present album, you can listen to a few instant crazy fragments coming from Hopper's moments of madness (above all for the concise British alphabet from "a" to "z" and vice versa) with the support of R. Wyatt, but also to the reasonable track "Out of tunes", in which their team work is better defined.of course the short length of the songs allows to appreciate their "stupid" but well constructed and arranged music idea, even though better things would have characterized their most convincing and inspiring albums in the next period. Anyway, coming back to this work, I find something more interesting in the second side, especially track two and four, in which Hopper and Ratledge are conscious to be intelligent musicians; while the last tune-finally- is the best manner to conclude the album: "10.40 Returns to the bedroom" still represents a true team work, however being quite far away from the most inspiring moments of the psychedelic side regarding the music-genre of Canterbury (by thinking of the works by Khan, Gong and Hatfield & the North, for example) .

Important but not completely essential work, even though their next albums -true surprising gifts- will be appreciated by a wider "underground" audience, as for the diversity concerning their music.so half another half star at least!