MICK MAGIC – The Bridge – review – experimental / synthedelic

MICK MAGIC – The Bridge – review
Klappstuhl Records

Twenty years now
Where’d they go?
Twenty years
I don’t know
I sit and I wonder sometimes
Where they’ve gone

Well, it’s actually a tad more than that, but that’s how long I’ve known Michaelmas Magickian, to give him his full name. The good news for me is, I missed an early chunk of his 40 years in underground music.

But to commemorate / rub the naysayers noses in it, he’s put together “The Bridge”, a collection that brings together all of his major projects across those four decades. Magic Moments At Twilight Times, Magic Bullet, etc, etc. Now, hands up, I have contributed the odd bit to some of his latter day shenanigans so can’t be 100% objective about the Sort of Things he gets up to.

For reasons best known to others, he’s allowed on the internet radio these days, so in a shameless act of self-promotion he kicks things off with ‘Opening Theme From Mick Magic’s Radioshow To The Stars / Kronophobia’. That title should a) be a clue to the experimental / synthedelic sounds you’ll be exposed to, and b) a reminder that I have appeared on said radiogram broadcast. This will not be a surprise to those who remember me from such landmark roles as ‘surly, hairy, Scotch giant’ in Outlander, ‘surly, hairy, Scotch giant’ in Highlander, ‘surly, hairy, non-specific giant’ in Game of Thrones, and many others.

After that, it takes in Miss Minimagic contributing to the nine minutes plus of ‘Zen Sequent / Jesus Is Dead (Let’s Eat Chocolate!)’, shoots back to the Magic Bullet “Curiositas” with ‘Dance, Freak’, a tune I’m very fond of, in its crushing, industrialised, zombified form, a sixteen minute mash up of ‘The Electric Age Cometh / The Electric Age (Five Years On)’ which, if I were still taking drugs, would spur me on to take more drugs and a nod back to when he was a lad, in them black & white days, with a 33rd Anniversary remix of ‘We At Grain Festival’.

Everything has been rejigged and repokeried for the modern world, and he even throws in a couple of PDFs, with details of all the album tracks on one, and all 244 pages of the ‘lost time journal’ from the 2016 Magic Moments At Twilight Time 30th anniversary online event, “Down The Rabbit Hole”.

It’s an aural adventure, full of experimental bells and whistle, harder psych and synths, some of that electroacoustic music, going all the way back to the heady days of cassette culture, then bringing it into the future. And in a final nod back, there’s a limited edition cassette version coming soon.

The download thing is on the Bandcamp.

And Mr Magics net goings ons are on the, um, Magic Net.

Yours faithfully, Lieutenant Commander Scotty MacLeod.

An old video;