La Otracina - Hallucinations from the Big Apple

"Building songs out of confusion, subliminally, and then deconstructing them once they're already clear in your mind." That's how Adam Kriney, the band's drummer, introduces me to Otracina in the brief interview he grants me after their Rome show at Sinister Noise. A love for 70s kraut-rock, psychedelia, Blue Cheer, and a (un)healthy dose of madness. Basically, the Other Scene!

The story of Otracina, a collective always open to new members, begins at the behest of drummer Adam Kriney (Owl Xounds), a veteran of countless bands and side projects, including Ninni Morgia's Quivers. Owner of the Color Sound Records label, Kriney is firmly embedded in Brooklyn's free-jazz world. The band takes shape and immediately makes its mark with a seemingly endless stream of self-released CD-Rs, a catalogue that appears truly boundless, especially when paired with this tireless figure's string of collaborations.

After a long string of line-up changes (involving Dan "California" Bates on bass, and guitarists Joshua Anzano, later replaced by Tyler Nolan and then almost immediately by Matt Levelle, who also left in 2006), Adam once again finds himself alone and decides the band no longer has any reason to exist.

Tired and disillusioned by these constant defections, Kriney gets an email from Holy Mountain, who want to produce the album Love, Love, Love.

After a series of discussions with the label, the drummer convinces them to produce Tonal Ellipse Of The One instead, an album he had been working on with Tyler between 2005 and 2006.

From 2006 onward, reinvigorated by this opportunity, Adam re-forms his band, giving it a more or less stable line-up: he asks Italian musician Ninni Morgia (Right Moves, Wizard Trio) — already a familiar face in New York, where he collaborates with several well-known names on the scene — to join as a permanent member; the line-up is rounded out by Evan Sobel on bass, replacing the departed Jordon Schranz.

Actually, Adam had already worked with Morgia in Quivers, another local free-jazz outfit. He got in touch with Ninni for a few shows that were really just a means of scouting for La Otracina's new guitarist, and that led to a union that is simply the natural meeting of two minds already in sync with each other.

The choice of the moniker La Otracina is a curious one: Adam explains that it all comes from a Spanish mangling of the words "The Other Scene."

The first self-produced cd-r by the pre-Morgia lineup is Fauna & Animated Floral Arrangments (November 2003). It contains a single track and was pressed in just 50 copies, but sold out in a flash. Running over 43 minutes, the sound is nothing less than a massive experiment, a collage fusing kraut-rock, psychedelia, electronics and a visceral love of improvisation, which still seems to be the band's strong suit to this day.

Trinomy (July 2004) was recorded live straight to tape in Brooklyn and captures a band infatuated with late-60s free-jazz combined with a heavy-stoner sound studded with drones. This is the band's first outing as a trio, with Nick Chapman on synths/rhodes and Dan Bates on electric bass. (19 copies, sold out)

Spatial (September 29, 2004), while still true to its love of the psych-prog sound, branches out into new sonic territory, skilfully shaped by Nick Chapman. The three space-themed compositions amount to a study in how to play the synth, merging drones with experiments in frequency. (30 copies, sold out)

Aren't It Spectral, from 2005, came out with no fewer than three different covers, continuing the path laid out on the previous "Spatial". The group, having sharpened its sound over the previous two years, became a two-man band, with Tyler Nelson on guitars. The cd-r contains two guitar solos and an 11-minute track that sounds like pure madness, as incomprehensible as the birth of the universe, a derailing sonic big bang, followed by another track written purely for the love of experimenting with one's own mind. Psychedelic folk, acoustic guitars, organ and vibraphone in a psych-lysergic heavy-folk blend. Minds indoctrinated to follow only classic rock need not apply.

Love, Love, Love (March 17, 2006) significantly shifts the path La Otracina had taken up to that point. A mammoth double cd-r, produced in an extremely limited run (100 copies for the first, 79 for the second), the album in part condenses and absorbs the best of the band's past, across more than two and a half hours of sonic flow. The music winds between clear guitar nods to auteur kraut-rock, sounds recalling Neu! and Amon Duul, and space-prog-rock indebted to King Crimson's "Red" period (Kriney's favorite).

Among the highlights of the first disc we can mention the dreamy, yet never saccharine, "Californian Orange Sunshine" (Creation), which quickly gives way to much wilder compositions, such as "Acid Cervau", and to others that are complex and imposing, such as "Hazy Mazes", which, with its grueling length, moves between the band's beloved free-jazz, ambient atmospheres, background noise and the occasional rambling piano flourish.

The band's love of the suite comes to the fore in the labyrinthine "Sky Journey", which, at over 25 minutes and split into no fewer than six movements, shows how La Otracina can play with and bind together, like master alchemists, many genres that would seem impossible to connect. Kriney & co. don't forget to pay tribute to the mighty Hawkwind and to Blue Cheer, the fabulous inventors of the "wall of sound", with two heavy-psych-space-rock tracks: "Neon Nova" and "Blue Magnetic Time". These last two are breathtaking rides, lysergic and feverish, powerful and delirious, as stunning as a desert sun beating down on a thirsty man. "California Orange Sunshine (Prism)" picks up the thread right where its namesake on the first disc left off.

Love, Love, Love is a collection of unreleased recordings, demos, secret sessions, cut-ups and collages. The whole thing carries the power of the tides and the beauty of a rainbow with its entire range of colored frequencies.

While Love, Love, Love had forced and trained listeners never to "sit still", to keep their ears pricked for the constant shifts looming on the horizon, the band's new album arrives with a genuinely high risk of overindulgence.

Tonal Ellipse Of The One (June 2007), released by the near-infallible Holy Mountain, a label specializing in American cosmic-space productions, shows a clear change of skin. Shorter, more structured tracks mark the new path being followed. The free space-rock jams are now a thing of the past, relegated (so to speak) solely to the live dimension. Even though the group seems to favor this new way of structuring its songs, Morgia (guitarist) states that, even in the studio, the band never rules out the possibility of improvising or editing. It's precisely on this record that his hand is felt much more strongly, with occasional echoes of Jesus Lizard and Sonny Sharrock.

Calling Otracina a psych-rock trio is reductive and merely technical, something useful only as a provisional label; we could say instead that the group roams, never in a conventional or predictable way, through tracks and structures that often catch the listener off guard, upending the architecture of the classic song format. Morgia's addition to the lineup has certainly marked a new turning point in how the songs are built, often anchored to Blue Cheer and Blue Oyster Cult. On "Beyond The Dusty Hill", Ninni moves between jazz territory and the visionary accents of Hawkwind. What results is an energetic tug-of-war between the guitar and Adam's immensely powerful, at times broken, drumming, which lays down heart-pounding rhythmic carpets.

"Nine Time The Color Red Explodes Like Blood Heated Head" boasts a tremendous intro, one of the album's finest moments, and packs in so many shifts that you can get lost in it, as if in a maze, where you can also catch echoes of King Crimson, led by the razor-sharp guitar that opens the track. "Sailor Of The Salvian Seas" seems built from the most "classic" — a term to use with caution — seventies hard-rock, though in truth it only redefines its outlines, before acting as a launchpad for "Ode To Amanthea". The latter is a plunge into non-genre territory, the complete deconstruction and destruction of song form: free-jazz improvisation is on.

Otracina's true essence is a rich blend of mixed styles, brought together with mastery into an almost perfect harmony, giving rise to a truly unique mixture. Thanks in part to this album, Kriney's band has managed to forge the prototype of a new psycho-heavy-spacey-jazz rock movement.

A record that induces a trance-like state, with no need for shamanic concoctions. The journey is guaranteed by the stardust trapped in the grooves of a work that seems to act as a trait d'union between different worlds.

The Silence Dimension, a chronicle of the summer tour, comes out in June 2007 and contains three tracks ("The Silent Dementia", "Hand On Sun", "Pear-Born Ticket"), packed with new material following the arrival of Evan Sobel on bass. A potent, lysergic mix of rock explosions blended with improvisations, drones, and new electronic solutions, still very much of a kraut nature. Something new peeks through in these grooves, but it's only a promising, barely sketched-out beginning.

Having replaced Ninni Morgia with new guitarist Philippe Ortanez, La Otracina's The Risk Of Gravitation surpasses the intensity of their previous psychedelic-space excursions, infusing their sound with even more massive doses of Hawkwind, High Rise, and also Comets On Fire (their new calling card is called "Raze The Sky"), with bursts of vocal parts that lend themselves well to colluding with the new hardelic script.

To cut it short, though, things have become less interesting compared to the past, and the band seems to be venturing down a less-than-promising path, risking collapse sooner or later, just like the many revival bands going for "hard, acid, and a little out of their minds".

After listening to "Crystal Wizards Of The Cosmic Weird", the impression that remains is that our heroes are, perhaps, aiming to lose the plot amid rather uncontrolled digressions. And so, they're better when they're pumping away, however half-heartedly, like just another bored Black Mountain ("Fight For The Night"), amid galactic lines of feedback. The boredom sets in, and in the end all that's left to lift our spirits is the free-form evaporation of "Behind The Ocular Curtain" (a fine bacchanal built from a genuine taste for decadent electrification) and the free-jazz storm of "An Ancient Confusion".

Otherwise, this new incarnation of the trio led by Adam Kriney seems, for now, rather confused about what to do next.

The last record made with guitarist Ninni Morgia, Blood Moon Riders is a return to the roots for the New York band, after their recent hardelic infatuation. In any case, for those left disappointed by the lack of expressive substance on The Risk Of Gravitation, this record could be a good reason to reconnect with the band's fortunes, here rounded out by Adam Kriney (drums, percussion) and Evan Sobel (bass, electric piano).

Blood Moon Riders is a decent compendium of heavy-psychedelic/prog that, as has become customary, takes us on a tour of the '70s, pointing straight toward certain sounds from the Land of the Rising Sun too (Flower Travellin' Band, why not?). Confirming this, alongside the intergalactic anthems "Zunblazer" and "A Drifted Memory", are the two parts of "Ballad Of The Hot Ghost Mama", with the six-string painting an ordinary night of an ordinary season in shades of the absolute. With this vertical lyricism, Ninni proves tremendously at ease, backed by a rhythm section that's just tight enough. It's a shame, though, that the partnership ended shortly after.

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