Live Albums: You Weren't There, Me Neither - Part 1/3

1) Agitation Free: Live At The Cliffs Of River Rhine (also called Live '74)

2008, Revisited Records

Mentioned in an earlier post, Agitation Free's Live At The Cliffs Of River Rhine (recorded live during a radio-concert at the WDR in Cologne, February 2, 1974) has a number of qualities that make it essential if you are at all interested in improvised or instrumental music. 

First of all, Agitation Free is a west-German outfit formed in 1967. According to Allmusic, "Agitation Free were a fixture of Berlin's art-rock scene, performing with like-minded bands such as Tangerine Dream, Amon Duul and Guru Guru". I'm not sure I approve of the "art-rock" term, but they definitely were part of an extremely active and productive scene that mostly took what the Anglophone world was doing at that time and made it... hmm... better. 

Have you ever listened to the Grateful Dead and thought... "this could be so much better if they just decided to not sing" or "that guitar solo was great... until it went farther than it should have" ? 

Well, there isn't a note on this record will not melt through your brain like butter on a warm toast. Where Led Zeppelin's "How The West Was Won" live sounds so good because they cranked the amps a tad and every song sounds approximately seventeen times more powerful than the studio version, Agitation Free stick to their clean studio sounds (if not turn the drive down a notch) and take you along a wordless ride from the German countryside to the Orion nebula. When they do, like my friend JB would say, "kick it into overdrive", such as on "Laila", you gain a new appreciation of what creamy saturation brings you. Some people use it on every song, its when you only use it from time to time that you realize how good it is.

"Throughout The Moods", the first song off this record, is a thirteen and a half minutes long jam that will not be found on any other Agitation Free record. Just for that, this album is worth hunting down (try Revisited Records) . Swirling keyboards, long bass notes, cymbal rattles... taking their time to introduce the mood their set is going to have, the Agitation slowly focuses over a slow drum groove, swirling oscillations on a synthesizer transforming this bucolic improvisation into an otherwordly combination (with every instrument progressively joining in on the smooth spaciness). Agitation Free is one of the few German bands from that era that truely deserved to be called Kosmische.

Orexis' review of this album

Agitation Free Allmusic page (no review for this album) 

JNCT

...