Review Summary: a walk in the park except the park is a desert and the dunes consume you
Outside the Dream Syndicate - the brainchild of kraut-jesters,
Faust, and the legendary 1960s drone-birther, Mr Tony Conrad - is a 2-sided 2-song’d suite of shimming wasteland heat.
Side A is a sinkhole: a heady sandpit of high and low, pooled from violin (Conrad), drums (Zappi) and bass (Peran), bobbing/weaving within the glacial, hallucinogenic soup. In other words: twenty-seven minutes of glorious non-movement; an anti-song; the dazed feeling of arriving (but not arrival), spread like butter over infinite bread; a raga-adjacent exercise in restraint, time passing without user participation. In ‘other’ other words: experience the pulsating, stagnant thrum, gripping tight on mind, body and genitalia; experience minimalist decadence, captivating and immortal; experience soul sans body, via
the Side of Man and Womankind.
Side B is, instead, a mirage. Benefiting less from a head-space of attentive inattention - encouraged, or maybe necessitated, by the previous trip -
the Side of the Machine is a lush contrast of real, identifiable, fleeting movements: the splurge of fractal keys, sway of primal bagpipe mimicry (actually violin) and tangible, real-time variation in its rhythmic grounding. It’s by no means maximalist - still nodding back to Conrad’s NYC days and La Monte Young’s
Dream Syndicate, to whose eternal drone Conrad contributed in equal measure - but does have a less abstract, more physical heft to it than the 2-toned snare dirge of
Man and Woman. You’ll spot parallels to
Faust IV - also a 1973 release - though not in zane, but in melody and dynamics. These are the eager fingerprints of Sosna, entirely absent from Side A, sneaking into the final third through synthetic keyboard crescendos. Extra space is also built in for Zappi and Peran, imparting their personal rhythmic contours, chiselling quintessentially
kraut flavour back into the groove.
To the groove it always returns, though, for these Faust-ian flourishes do little to dull the ceaseless hum of Conrad - that constant ethereal twang - tying these discordant halves together. The resultant whole is opulent and primal in equal measure: a genuinely transportative experience, and defining collaboration of the 70s. In ‘‘other’’ ‘other’ other words: dream music, immortalised, forever.
