Is it the long awaited re-release of a super rare and mysterious demo from the early 1970s or is it just a fake? Stephen David Heitkotter, former drummer of a band called »Road Runners« who lost touch with reality and succumbed to madness, has supposedly come up with these 12 rough and ecstatic psychedelic-jam-rock-tracks. The alleged finder of the rarity is Eothen »Egon« Alapatt of Now-Again Records. And while Heitkotter is said to have been too far off the scale to jam together with other musicians, these pretty shredded recordings sound as if they’ve been made by a classical psychedelic-rockblues combo, consisting of drums, bass, guitar and lyrics. The bass is – in accordance to the supposed time of recording – almost without any highs and lows, but heavily distorted, the guitars sound cuttingly thin and are just as blurred, while the drummer and his equipment sit a little further away. And still, »Black Orckid« doesn’t sound bad or even unbearable, instead it’s clever and fascinatingly retro. The individual tracks are based on more or less free blues-schemes and appear to be fully improvised. Vocals and lyrics, partially distorted in a spacy way, remind us of Malcom Mooney and Damo Suzuji of Can. Some tracks go on for almost 15 minutes, others are sketches of a minute and a half, until they end abruptly through the sound of a low-class recording-device being turned off. It’s a great and atmospheric record – and who gives a damn if it’s real or fake?
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Sub Pop