Cromagnon - Primordial Ultra-Psychedelia

Cromagnon (not to be confused with the house/downtempo electronic act Cro-Magnon active in recent years, nor with the devastating crust-punk outfit of the same name) were founded in the second half of the Sixties by Austin Grasmere — the true mastermind of the group, who composed and coherently structured the various improvisations and musique concrète pieces — a multi-instrumentalist, together with Brian Elliot, both members of a hippie commune. Their story is shrouded in almost total mystery, including the period in which the band was founded; their goal, presumably, was to express absolute moral freedom and communism, which pushed them toward unexplored musical horizons.

The name is an obvious and deliberate reference to a species of early man, Cro-Magnon man, named after the site where the first remains were found.

The duo, utterly unknown not only to the general public but also to most fans of the music of that era, proved capable of producing some of the most sacrilegious, noisy, experimental, deranged, visionary and sadistic pages of avant-garde psychedelic folk, constantly and deliberately pushing past its limits, revealing the most visceral and unconscious side of desire — violent and without compromise or inhibition, the emblem of a primal passion sustained well beyond physical limits (those of the listener, of the available instruments, of the pleasure one normally draws from an artistic creation under the influence of LSD, the dominant inspiration of the era).

In 1968 they entered the studio to record an album titled Orgasm, later reissued under the band's name or as “Cave Rock”, the title under which, since 2000 and with a different cover, it can be found.

The record represents the complementary noise side — morbid and aggressive — to the joyful, imaginative and colorful free-psychedelic trip of Red Crayola (“Parable Of Arable Land” from 1967, Red Crayola); their music was a hymn to noise as the language of torture, sadomasochism, extreme sex, and the primordial instinct that assumes, lives through, consumes and destroys everything.

Cromagnon's animal-technological fury leaves no doubt right from the cover art — a (presumably anal) coupling between two skeletons set against the usual hallucinatory psychedelic backdrop — and from the song titles (“Ritual Feast of the Libido”, “Organic Sundown”, “Genitalia”).

“Caledonia”, covered in the 2000s by the Japanese band Ghost, and cited by Pitchfork Media as one of the 200 most important and best tracks of the Sixties, is already the group's essence distilled: a primordial industrial-folk track with vocals delivered ad libitum in scream (25 years before the genre's “officially documented” birth usually cited) that foreshadows the hordes of Norwegian black-metal satanists, in its instinctive intent, in the setup of its vocal timbre and in how it's used (the repetition toward a trance-like ending). A track that introduces a new way of singing and making music with an ante litteram harshness, aesthetic elements of tribal, noisy rhythms and folkloric horns that magnetize through an effect that is at once epic and primeval (the anxiety and fear of death proper to the warrior, typical of viking metal, minus the metal); a pagan prayer for a hypnotic dance of annihilation (the industrial of Einsturzende Neubauten, and the noise, contemporaneous with Velvet Underground, 20 years before their formation, besides the no-wave of Pere Ubu, Teenage Jesus, DNA and the like, and certain works by John Zorn and Glenn Branca, 10 years earlier).

Without drawing up rankings of influence, we're talking here about a group with such a pronounced creative streak that it cooked up a blend of futurist madness, inventing on its own genres and styles that only years later, thanks to the efforts of various other bands, would manage to develop into distinct, separate movements and modes of musical and artistic expression, critically codified as such.

“Ritual Feast of the Libido” is one of the essential recordings for expressing torture, which can be represented in two ways: the first adopts the point of view of the one inflicting it, thereby glorifying every act aimed at mutilation; the second consists of highlighting the suffering of the one enduring the punishment. The group chooses the latter. The screams of the unfortunate victim pile onto the clangs of a purpose-built machine, lasting over three minutes, sealing a vision that immediately recalls the most spectacular and horrific moment of Franz Kafka's novella “In the Penal Colony”, though it preserves above all a surrealism that is, first and foremost, mentally damned and coercive: the death of the machine's creator, crushed by its own clamps, which stamp it with the date of execution and the crime — with the difference that the Mitteleuropean writer was able to inject an inevitably paradoxical, mocking component, which in Cromagnon is limited to the grotesque and the Rabelaisian, elements closer to an intelligent tomfoolery than to the writer's incisive, fatalistic analysis. Perhaps not even Marduk's “Panzer Division Marduk” will sound scarier in 1998, with the same vocal style found in “Caledonia”, the bleakest heavy-metal guitars and the frenzied rhythms (the intro to one of that album's songs will present, albeit in the context of World War II, a soldier's wails and bomb blasts, very similar to the sounds that dominate “Ritual Feast”).

“Organic Sundown” is a bloody orgy worthy of Elizabeth Bathory (who, in this scenario, tortured her victims while simultaneously engaging in sexual acts with them), a meeting point between deep-rooted sadism and sexual voracity, a sadism enjoyed in the flesh: a lopsided rhythm of randomly alternating percussion and screams of every timbre, a banquet of wolves unleashed. “Fantasy” opens with a vocal harmony typical of the period and continues into drunken chants, absurd lines mumbled with hands over the mouth and without, a malicious, continuous, maniacal laugh — the peak of Orgasm's madness. A siren bursts in to literally halt the initial maniacal voices, gradually being covered by various concrete sound references thrown in at random to build a brief, confusing collage. The final musical section instead features a cluster of assorted voices invoking “freedom” in every conceivable timbre and tone, harmonizing and acting as mutual counterpoint; the track closes with a typical orchestral outro of a gentle tone, “dragged out” by the imperfections of a faulty recording (or turntable).

“Crow of the Back Tree” is an extremely fast, simple acoustic guitar riff, repeated continuously, underpinned by a weary or heartbroken choir (always descending) from the two members, whose voices are altered “with helium” until they're turned into mischievous children — screaming by the two-minute mark, then both delirious and disappointed at once, also harmonizing satanic screams and chants that evoke the bogeyman. “Genitalia” is an art-lullaby struck by distorted wails resembling the cries of seagulls, probably an infant's screams electronically altered. “Toth, Scribe I” is a storm of noise echoing a timbre similar to that of bagpipes, though more metallic, sketching an elegy suspended in midair in a desolate sense of timelessness — one of the most powerful emotions folk music can offer (the sense of vast spaces and of dissolving into them, the conviction of the cosmos's immutability, except for the fragile human figure).

Distortions and accelerations of Hendrix-style electric guitar, but much faster (guitar-hero virtuosity anticipated, once again, by two decades), achieved through mixing techniques rather than played by hand, are the dominant effect on "First World of Bronze", complete with a choir of boy-soprano or female voices worthy of Hal 9000 (the main computer in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey") or Mother (the computer that runs the ship in Ridley Scott's "Alien").

Able to reproduce, in the same spirit, the sonic effects of a whole host of later genres and styles – not necessarily connected to one another in terms of their respective scenes, except for the aggression underpinning them all – scream-style satanism, harsh-noise storms and distortion, industrial timbres, spoken word, anguished screams, obsessive use of mixers and tape for sampling purposes, Celtic horns… – Cromagnon produced some of the most extreme, futuristic and revolutionary tracks of the 60s (if not of all time); unfortunately their artistic vein isn't always properly focused or built, hiding too much behind experimental ambitions that would have been better served by a more conscious, more targeted approach.

Perhaps Cromagnon were seminal and inventive, but not truly creative, except on a few occasions; as the record goes on, in fact, after the first two astonishing statements (especially the opening track), the organization and expressive quality steadily decline.

Even so, countless bands and genres owe their existence to the past experiments of this obscure American "psychedelic" group.

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