So Close Yet So Far Out
(Beta Lactam Ring) Used 2xLP $22.00
De Kleer’s initial solo offering from 2002 outside the chemical playschool of The Legendary Pink Dots reveals the depth and profundity of his own visions, obsessions and flashbacks. Nods to psychedelia, krautrock, industrial and electronica are all evident. And de Kleer’s fuzz-driven guitar is at the heart of it all. ‘Once upon a Guitar’ is an acid freak-out worthy of Ash Ra Tempel and early Neu. ‘You Are…’ roils with the submerged psychosis of Barrett-era Floyd welded to the manic axe-grinding of Helios Creed. ‘Jet Lag,” with its organ-driven trancescape is a blissful, mind-numbing anthem for psychonauts everywhere. The utterly bizarre ‘What Happened to a Young Man in a Place Where He Turned to Water’ is the kind of Zen parable one might expect a cyber acidhead to put to music, or in this case sound decomposed and reconstituted as music. But the album’s centerpiece is clearly the epic length ‘The Apple Crumble Trail,’ a nearly 30-minute voyage through the inner spaces of Eastern-tinged psychedelia to the outer limits of kosmische rock. Evolving out of a primal drone, waves of shimmering organ rise and fall in a mantra of coalescing exotica, from Tibetan chants and natural sounds to metallic percussion and looping bass. Moving through successive cycles of stasis, hypnosis and pathos, it climaxes with de Kleer’s mutated guitar soaring raga-like over an ocean of sound, before decelerating into a terrestrial orbit filled with the echoing remnants of what has turned out to be a phantasmagoric astral trip.” 220-gram vinyl. Edition 500.