Friday

the plastic people

...if ever there was a case of hep cats having trouble with the squares and agents of oppression it was these cats...over there in prague in the seventies the government was running scared of any thoughts and ideas that had an air of free spirit and freedom, hence the plastics getting the bums rush and suffering all kinds of' harassment and bad vibes...having party style gigs in out of town farms and such well away from cops and various prying eyes of paid snitchs the combo were well supported by the czech underground and this spurred them on to tape their music in secret and the result was this, their first full album (this disk is the reissued extended with contemperanious noise) that was recorded in 1974 over a period of months...smuggled out across euroland the tapes ended up in france and were pressed up and egon bondys happy hearts club banned found its way onto the market in '78...originally it came in a foldout sleeve complete with a thick, 60page 12" book giving the history of the underground counter culture czech style...usually compared through the years to such luminaries as the fugs/zappa/velvets, which is all true but their influences, style and interpretation/creation comes from a broad spectrum which must include the full jazzbo vibes along with krautrock droning/quick cut edits(not to mention singing in funny voices), intense real poetry and centuries old folk grooves and the thing that kept them going through the years of the downpresser man and time in the joint - a sense of humour, the words maybe in a language foreign to most but the humour shines through canterbury style with a softs/caravan kind of thing, though more in the groove than the sound and ain't no right-on cat gonna miss it...there's a basement creepiness to this thats straight out of zappas cucamonga period of sleazy beatnik shenanigans...add this echoed creepy voodoo to some eastern mystical riffs and brother, there's an intense trip looming ready to transport the listener to different times and ideas, ideas of basic freedoms that horrified the power structure into a frenzy of bad karma spiralling out of control ever onwards...these thoughts of freedom even today paralyze most squares, freedom is okay in abstract form, non specific and harmless but those thoughts in action will bring ferocious pig activity or 'directives' to go shopping like the wives from stepford...another prime example of the sound of the disk being almost as important as the noise emanating, that the way of the production/recording is the path to the toppermost of the hep/underground poppermost such as blue cheers vincebus/the screech from stooges first three wax/german oaks bunker bad trip plus many many loner/stoner/bad drug basement psych/echo chamber drone outs...an important document that has much to say in this century as it did in the last, the struggle continues in many ways on differing' levels, freaks must be vigilant for the futures uncertain...

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