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Reviews

Escapade — Due to a Faulty Premonition
(Mother West MW011299, 1999, CD)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2000-05-01

Due to a Faulty Premonition Cover art

First the correction. Despite the 1999 date on the backtray, I’m reasonably certain that this disc was not available until the early weeks of 2000. And why is that a big deal? This one would have been a candidate for this writer’s best of ’99 list had it been available before year’s end. Let’s face it, with a handful of releases under their collective belt, Escapade is getting pretty damn good at what they do. For this type of improvised Kraut-jam space rock, the make-or-break is determined by what percentage of the time the project is airborne, with the standards to meet set by the early masters like Annexus Quam, early Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers, and so on; with this latest release Escapade is in the air at least 75% of the time, which compared to some of the vintage German stuff is a pretty remarkable flight record. Unlike their 1998 spawling two-disc live set Citrus Cloud Cover, the material here is far more concise and doesn’t wear the listener out, the six tracks herein being edited down from three recent studio sessions into one long continuum. Like all great improvisations, what happens here is really beyond description — it must be experienced to be understood. We all know that sounds like the reviewer taking the easy way out, but the truth is that the best words that could be commited to the page wouldn’t come anywhere close to describing the magic happening here.

Filed under: New releases, Issue 19, 1999 releases

Related artist(s): Escapade, Hadley Kahn

 

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