Adventure

Released in 1980 but apparently recorded at some point in the mid-'70s, before Brainticket disbanded, Adventure sounds like the results of an all-night jam session caught on tape and sliced somewhat arbitrarily into songs. All the tunes have very similar instrumental textures, with a distinctively gurgling synthesizer twiddling along at the center of most of them. The opening "Adventure, Pt. 1" is probably the most interesting segment, a 19-minute combination of electronics with tuned percussion played by group leader Joel Vandroogenbroeck that sounds very much like a traditional Indonesian gamelan. The middle track, "Machinery (Analog)," is as cacophonous as an overloaded factory line and by far the noisiest track of the lot, while the fifth and final track, the negligible three-minute throwaway "Robotika," sounds like a spliced-out fragment of some lost detour from the two-part title track. Neither as tiresome as early Amon Düül records could often be, nor as sublime as some of Brainticket's earlier work, Adventure is of interest to experimentally minded Krautrock fans, but those disinterested in 20-minute instrumental improvisations should steer clear. ~ Stewart Mason