Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.

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4...according to our Dave on Wed 14 Sep, 2011.

When you get an AMT LP in your grubby little hands you can almost guess what's about to unfold. Long, mesmeric jams, bonged out atmospherics and a touch of heaviness (well...not so much a touch...more like some breathy groping). This is a lost album of sorts, it hadn't been heard for mebbe ten years or so. It has one of the more classic AMT lineups, with Cotton Casino's angelic warblings complementing some of the lighter moments, and also making the more hellish, pounding heavy bits more textured. This collection of jams and songs first reared its ugly, psychedelic head in 1999, back when the world was a more innocent place, the Tories were considered to be elitist, pompous and uncaring, gangs of hoodies were roaming the streets and council estates and the economy was looking rather precarious. Fast forward to 2011 and...oh. Anyway these cuts were being played all over the USA and Europe, and many an acid casualty and stoned hippie were being basked in the monstrous, yet strangely soothing sound of the AMT. This live album sounds great, really dense and heavy as you can care to imagine. The standout moment for me has to be the epic "Pink Lady Lemonade" which is a pummeling assault on your senses. But don't think that this awesome track is the be all and end all. All the tracks are like mini explosions in space and time. It might feel like the walls of reality are tumbling down when you listen to them, but these slappy happy Jappys* wouldn't have it any other way. Come and drown in the sea of psychedelia that is another Acid Mothers Temple album.

* Thanks to TV's Craig Charles for that comment...feel free to remove it but I'll consider such actions censorship...

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When we first approached the band about this classic album, our first question was: why does the recording is so flat on the vinyl? Kawabata promptly explained: “I remember we were very disappointed when we first listened to this double LP back then. The American mastering engineer, who works for many famous companies in LA said that it was impossible to master it for the vinyl format because the sounds were too heavy… When I and Tsuyama listened to our master last night (for the first time in nearly 10 years!) we were blown away and totally surprised! The music is really good, much better than we remembered and imagined.”.

We couldn’t agree more. The original master sounds like a completely different recording and perfectly captured the cosmic and incredibly powerful sounds emanated by the band at the time. Listening to a classic early version of “Pink Lady Lemonade”, weird free jazz jams like “Rising From the Cool Fool Inferno” or the obscure super heavy, doomy and haunting sounds of “Blue Velvet Blues” is something that we thought should be fully experienced and appreciated the way it was meant to be.

Recorded during many live dates in 1999, Live In Occident is the first AMT live album and features the classic freak out emsemble with Kawabata Makoto, Cotton Casino, Higashi Hiroshi, Tsuyama Atsushi and Koizumi Hajime crossing the US, France and the UK.

“The highlight is the sublime and beautiful “Astrological Overdrive”. Cotton’s vocals may be the most missed aspect of modern AMT and this performance gives a solid reason why. Her vocals mix perfectly with Tsuyama’s, especially when he gets demonic and she remains angelic. It is one of the great lost Acid Mothers songs, appearing no where else to the best of my knowledge, but it is 18 minutes of swirling but simple psych, foreshadowing jams like “La Novia” and “Soleil de Cristal et Lune d’Argent” and even “Cometary Orbital Drive”. Another mandatory jam on this one is another kinda lost song, “Blue Velvet Blues”. This one didn’t survive the AMT set list much after the first two tours it seems, but such a great song, again, another showcase for Cotton’s vocals. While the ultimate version of the song is on the 2LP reissue of “Pataphisical Freak Out Mu!!”, this version is heavy and deep, featuring a weird clapping jam with the audience not to far into the song. Hazy and totally strange, almost like the “Chanting” on this Dead show. The super pretty main riff is colored by very light guitar playing and then crushing synth noise blasts. Totally incredible.” (Nice Pooper Zine)

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