Location: Zagreb / Moćvara / Croatia
Date: Sunday, October 20, 2013
Ozric Tentacles are back in Zagreb! They already played in Pula in mid-August this year, so that’s two Croatian shows in 2013 alone. With ticket sales looking sluggish in the run-up to the tour, there were even serious hints on the band’s official website that the whole new European tour might get canceled. The great turnout in Zagreb shot all that talk down in an instant. Plenty of people came from Slovenia too, which was a surprise as you walked along the path by the Trnje embankment, where it wasn’t hard to spot a whole row of parked cars with Slovenian plates (even ones from the Gorizia area!). So the show by the British veterans of avant-psychedelic space rock, who are marking their 30th anniversary on this new autumn tour, was a sweet obligation in Zagreb!
Ozric Tentacles, or “The Ozrics” for short, formed in 1983 in Somerset, England, and by 2011 had put out a full 20 studio albums, the latest of them also in 2011, titled “Paper Monkeys”. Thirty years have rolled around, and the setlist was tailored to match: a nice bundle of tracks from the days when their albums still came out on cassettes. The eighties, that is.
The band, which over time earned a cult reputation thanks to its stubborn aversion to self-promotion, has actually pulled off quite a feat, selling over a million albums to date. The only original member left in the lineup today is guitarist Ed Wynne. The crew arrived in Zagreb in the following lineup: Ed Wynne (guitar, keyboards, synthesizer, programming), Ed’s wife Brandi Wynne (bass guitar), their son, whom you simply can’t “miss,” Silas Wynne (keyboards, programming), Paul Hankin (percussion) and newcomer Balázs Szende (drums). So, the Wynne family and “two friends”! That’s Ozrics Tentacles today. Remember the legendary show in Ljubljana in 2004, when Ozrics Tentacles still had John Egan in the lineup? Back then the band was taking the first steps of a drastic transformation. For the Ljubljana show they promised all sorts of things: from Hal Waters and Steve Hillage appearing as special guests, to the fact that we never got to see Seaweed because he’d fallen out with Ed before the tour, and Brandi helped the band out on stage on keyboards and programming for the very first time on tour.
At Močvara, DJ Mantismash warmed up the crowd for the first hour. Trance lovers, your ears just perked up! Definitely a fitting choice, but the venue still radiated a whole lot of hollowness. Nobody was overly interested in sonic manipulation by “Apple-tethered electronics.”
The Ozrics took the stage at ten o’clock and played a full two hours and 20 minutes, no kidding. The crowd packed the place wall to wall. The air smelled of every imaginable mind-tickling concoction, and the crowd was flying. High, high above the clouds. Together with the band. Honestly, there’s no other way. You’ve got to “smoke” something before an Ozric Tentacles gig. Anything. That’s just how it goes when you face Ozric Tentacles live. Even the opening was dreamlike, with the prehistoric creations Dots Thots and Invisible Carpet. A launch straight into the eighties. The sound? Excellent. No crackling. No burying Ed’s guitar under the rest of the tech, especially the programmed loops (and the extra recorded rhythms and sound effects). Only percussionist Paul was extremely hard to hear. Which raises the question of whether it makes sense to add extra percussion at shows where the sound is already saturated with the basic drum rhythm and a combination of additional “sub-rhythms” from manipulated rhythmic loops. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and son Silas is clearly the ideal solution for Ed. He listens to him. And he gets him. Father and son, after all. And one more thing. He just looks born to be in Ozric Tentacles.
With all the intoxication and the air heavy with the contagious fumes of juicy, fragrant substances, it’s downright shocking how “so sober” the band manages to play its whole repertoire on stage. Precisely and without any serious flubs. At the same time, they themselves provocatively nudge the crowd to light up green rollies, spliffs and other homemade “hefty firecrackers of sweet leaf.” The Wynne family romantically passed a cigarette around on stage. Like in a movie. It traveled from right to left, and father Ed finished it off.
Ozric Tentalces today are, of course, a distant entity from the one that created their live peaks in the years between 1991 and 2002/03. Still, on stage they remain an outstanding and unforgettable experience even now. Intergalactic visuals, giant projections on the screen, a perfect “Gong” derivative of psychedelia. A ride on jet-propelled teapots. This is a concert of total instrumental improvisation and the experience of a unique experiment, which with its homegrown aesthetic is shockingly fascinating in how it challenges its own creative genius, and in showing what can be achieved in the universal language of artistry called music. The ambient music the band cultivates has, on one side, a fierce, chaotically frenetic character, constantly balanced out by the many simple, relaxing and melodically compact synth lines added to its vocabulary, which ease the electrified atmosphere in the backdrop of the soundscape. Many of the band’s tracks are built on unusual rhythmic textures and an atypical creation of Eastern atmosphere. The band loves to build complex arrangements, a mix of constant rhythmic and thematic shifts, a familiar element of complexity as found in progressive rock. The band also likes to throw in elements of “funk groove” and touches of jazz rock fusion (Myriapod), as well as dub and reggae (Mooncalf)! Programmed sampling and sound loops are also typical of the band, creating a psychotic trance mood, while the synths often flirt sonically with elements of techno. The band has a whole bunch of pedals on stage for creating synthesized bass lines, and often reinforces the basic rhythmic figures with extra programmed rhythmic patterns. That’s why Ozric Tentacles’ music counts as music of a strong ambient paradigm, sailing through the weave of the most unusual mood states. And the colorful contortion of human voices through sound effects, or special ornaments such as the imitation of a didgeridoo (the intro to Disdots), were not missing from the show either.
During the show there was a noticeable attrition among those present. Especially on the right side up front. Evidently the “fuses” blew in some heads. It often happens that facing the Ozric Tentacles live experience “psyches you out” and even sends you running claustrophobically from the venue. Lots of people were cooling their heads outside during the show, breathing in fresh air. I’ve heard plenty of stories about what Ozric Tentacles’ music does to the heads of people at their gigs. Given how battered the crowd was by the end of the show, when Močvara turned into a hatchery of staggering zombies, or let’s say rather soaked blackboard sponges, I believe those stories without hesitation.
The band covered its output in the setlist very vividly. Something like Pteranodon or the title track of the album “Jurassic Shift” was missing (they didn’t play a single tune from that album). Tracks from “Curious Corn” (1997) or “Become the Other” (1995) were missing too, but the heavy load of songs written in the eighties, like the opener mentioned above, plus Og-Ha-Be and Sniffing Dog, more than makes up for it!
Ozric Tentacles are a band that’s impossible to pin down by genre, marked by an absolutely unique musical form, an unburdened drifting through the freedom of sonic experimentation, a strong touch of spontaneous and unpredictable development, and a magic touch of singular enchantment that the band conjures up on stage and sucks you into a parallel world with. That is precisely the greatest artistic strength of the band’s expressive reach and the element of its huge appeal, which even the most demanding music gourmets find hard to resist time and again! That conclusion applies to Zagreb too. A great show! So only one more sentence is worth saying. The next time they show up anywhere near us, we’re going to see the Ozrics again!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. Dots Thots
2. Invisible Carpet
3. Paper Monkeys
4. Xingu
5. Og-Ha-Be
6. Sniffing Dog
7. Sploosh!
8. Disdots
9. Mooncalf
10. Sultana Detrii
11. Lost in the Sky
12. The Sacred Turf
13. Myriapod
14. Eternal Wheel
—encore—
15. The Throbbe
