I have always approached dance music with a certain prejudice that it is designed only to be enjoyed by those who are “off their heads.” Being that I have a somewhat conservative view on drug-taking, I have naturally never been let in on its furtive appeal; I never quite got the invite to that party, not that I should desire jumping around to DJ wotsit’s bangin’ choons any more than I am tempted to pop ten Mitsubishi’s in the ladies’ bathroom. (Once again, I digress. I’m doing a lot of that lately!) Perhaps just for once the peer pressure may have actually got to me. As I listen to V.E.G.A. I can’t help but feel kind of like there is a great big shindig going on that I’m not invited to…or maybe to put it more accurately, it’s like I’m stuck in a room surrounded by a load of mates dropping acid, where nothing they say makes the blindest bit of sense but to themselves.
I never quite heeded the warning from my esteemed associate that this was going to be a complete headfuck, but I don’t think I could sum up the album any better myself. From the skewed spoken parts that open the proceedings, this is one fucked up acid trip supreme; all 74:03 minutes of it leading you through a continual journey into the psyche as you pass through a jungle of colour swirls that surround a central world of warped reality. The sirenesque synths that taint the ambience of ‘Cocaine’ merge with a darkwave drum beat, projecting a 70’s kind of vibe that fizzles out into a bleak lacuna that re-builds itself into a dark serenity filled out with some drum and bass rhythms that work splendidly. ‘Kill Me’ succeeds it with much more of a low-fi projection that unleashes layers of fuzz at you from all corners. There is an underlying volatility that lays largely dormant throughout this album, that spews up ephemeral and sporadic eruptions that vaguely crack through the surface.
‘The Gentle Rain’ kind of does what it says on the tin really, providing a gentle interlude before the full on ravaging of ‘Plastiktashen’ (why does this name cause me to envision a plastic moustache? Oh, the joys of foreign song titles!). The rain falls against the metallic ground, scraping and creating a strange, eerie ambience that really I think would be sure to freak me the fuck out if I were actually tripping. In fact, it seems to drag me through a dark and dreary forest in the thick of night, as I squelch my way through the rain-drenched mud running from the shadows that stalk the night as they creep up from behind. As if to confirm my thoughts that very little on this album actually makes any sense, ‘Fish, Smoke and Satan’ comes drifting in with its schizophrenic aura of introspective voices that monotonously maunder through the tripped out transcendental trance that provides a mellow aural sponge that seeks to soak you into its ambience. This comes across so much like the series of voices that lurk at the back of your mind telling you to do things that you really shouldn’t…or maybe it is the distant voices seeping through from people who are presently on some far away planet.
The dynamics of this album see us taken truly on a journey through disparate terrains; in fact, most of these 15 tracks offer something totally different to the last one; from the harsh discordancy of ‘Insex Infect’ and ‘Fleisch’ which certainly strips you of all of yours, to the desolate yet warmly embracing synth-pop of ‘Pulse Blood Pulse’ or the volcanic crackling of ‘Vacuum Era Gelid Atmosphere’ (or V.E.G.A. in case you were wondering), which finishes off the album with what seems to take you right back to where we began with the strangely warped ‘Wilkommen’, only with a much more forlorn sensibility. The gradient build up and subsequent collapse of this track certainly carries a doom-laden flavour, before the dispersed white noise of the bonus track ‘Alienforest’ literally makes me feel as though my mind is being tapped into by aliens and my head is about to explode at any moment. This outro ebbs and flows for a good ten minutes, offering little more than sporadic noises that seem at times unsettling, at others rather foreboding and towards the end we are taken out with what sounds to me like birds twittering as the dawn breaks.
As I make my return to the tangible world, I return also to my initial uncharacteristic curiosity towards acid, where I made my point that this album has me wondering what it is like to be “off my head.’ Now that reality has once again sunk in, sagacity prevails and tells me that if an album can have such a tripped out effect on my psyche, then why should one need to go to the trouble of hassling some back alley dealer-cum-pimp, parting with hard earned cash (strike the hard earned part) to fund criminal activity, all before dropping a tab of LSD? It makes very little sense. The best part about this kind of trip is that there is no comedown!
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