Outstanding album recorded in Barcelona, Spain in 1970 by Musica Dispersa member Jaume Sisa. More song-oriented than the improvised sounding Musica Dispersa album from that same year, it ends up sounding like a strange mixture between Bob Dylan and Os Mutantes. An absolutely brilliant record from start to finish!
The first song “Carrer” starts with stoned laughter and kicks with thick super-compressed bass, layered percussion, harmonica, Jaume’s totally original vocals, and swirling wild backing vocals. On the next song, “Joc De Boles (Simfonia Atomica)”, Jaume really starts to do crazy things with his voice in a sort of Robert Wyatt-style manner, winding in and out of a slippery acid bent guitar line. The track ends with a great layered kazoo section with lots of little percussions. The third track “Comiendo Pollo” is a great short track with floating organ and clicking typewriters providing the rhythmic accompaniment. “En El Castell” is a very Spanish acoustic folkish tune with more harmonica, reverbed out whip-crack percussion, and cameos from a lovely female vocalist. “Relliscant” is a thirty second dada snippet, followed by “Paisatge”, a Beatle-esqe piano-based song with a beautiful string and horn arrangement. “Cap a la Roda” is one of the strangest of the lot, an acoustic song with stereo hand drums, a dimension-opening break with crowd noise, and wierd spoken bits popping out on top of the mix. “Els Reis Del Pais Deshabitat” is a haunting number with ghostly female backing vocals. So moving. The song builds gradually — an accordion/piano section, and eventually chord organs and group vocals. “El Casament” is another Spanish psychedelic masterpiece, the Morricone-esq slide guitar! — I’m in a black and white spagetti western desert and hallucinating vividly from the heat and peyote. I stumble towards the visage of a crystal palace during the instrumental, “L’Amor A Les Rodes De La Preso”, and am greeted warmly by brass cascades on the epic, “Pasqua Florida A L’illa D’Enlloc”. This leads into the last track, “Pasqua Florida A L’illa D’Enlloc”, with closure provided by an angelic choir of friends and bandmates. The cover art is surreal and the reissue comes in a nice digipak. The lyrics are in the Catalan language, which was at one time banned in Spain as an effort to suppress the identity of their population whose roots stretch back to the Middle Ages. There are unfortunately no translations provided, but this is still one of my favorite recent reissues.