CARDINAL FUZZ / ROOSTER 28th August 2020
A great slab of kosmische rock, recorded live at The Thekla in Bristol on the 6th December 2001 at a festival dedicated to gnostic exploration. Gnosticism puts personal spiritual experience above official teachings and this performance allows you to take your own journey, unmediated by meaning or the sung or spoken word. Playing in front of films, strobes and smoke, what emerges is the purest form of jamming. Played at home, it is more than a documented gig, it is an immersive soup of sounds.
Spacey burbles and oscillator twiddling lets us know what we are in for. A bit of crafted feedback and some deep throbbing progress things. By the time the Keith Levene-type sounds arrive, my legs are bouncing, head nodding as whiplash rhythms propel the spacey guitar sonics. Howling noodles and ribbons of wah-wah pedalled guitar circle the air. Just before the quarter-hour mark, things shift and change gear into a repetetive lockstep which slowly builds and shifts. Increasingly intense by half an hour in and the beat keeps pushing and a rising riff drives towards the close where things inevitably fall apart back into primal chaos.
One forty-minute slice of sound, split over two tracks on vinyl but barely differentiated, this burns with energy of the best type.