Gila

This is a roiler and broiler, a rock album smack dab in the middle between kosmische freakouts and the good steady backbeat of the Anglo-American gang like Sabbath and Funkadelic. As much as people talk about synths and krautrock, the organ is central to so many albums and before the mid-Seventies, synths weren’t nearly that common. This is sort of a freaked out boogie music, well-played and suitably echo-soaked.

Originally called Gila Fuck, this quartet from Stuttgart are perhaps best known for their place in the Popol Vuh story: they gifted the world with guitarist Conny Veit. They formed in the late ‘60s, caught up in counter-cultural life and critique and leftist-anarchist politics, living in communes, and performing improvised music at festivals. Ftiz Scheyhing, their organ and Mellotron player, recalls a deep drive to play “free music, ecstatic music, improvising together and getting carried away by our music together with the audience”. Gila, sometimes known as Free Electric Sound, is imbued with the simplicity and innocence of its times – the quartet tend to use a simple motif, a see-sawing riff or simple chord progression, as a motif from which to build, and they never really stray too far from that format, though Veit’s singing and acoustic guitar on “Kommunikation” is a lovely moment of folk-ish melancholy, and the side-long suite on the album’s flipside suggests a capacity for deeper experimentation. Really, the star here is Veit’s guitar, which hints at the quicksilver liquidity of his playing with Popol Vuh, though within the boundaries of psych-rock.