LPCDreissues: Looking forward to the past

After Mirthrandir, Lift and Easter Island, we continue bringing you the cream of the crop from U.S. Prog Classics, with the reissue of ID’s 1977 album Where Are We Going. In this case, you can guess the music from the band’s name, a regression into the depths of the unconscious (Freud’s antecedent term for ID in the structure of the cunning invention called ‘psyche’) via an interminable sonic evocation. The highlights of the album are the 2 long parts of the homonymous track covering most of the 2 sides. Although the prog progression at the beginning of Where Are We Going foregrounds more constrained expectations, it is very far from the ensuing impulsive excretions from the unconscious that deliver the ego from its neurotic constraints. Alternating between a kraut-isch bass-driven funeral march that might be effortlessly tagged as the precursor of Krautrock from Hell by Electric Orange and fuzzed-out mayhemic guitar soloing, reminiscent of the best moments from Terry Brooks & Strange’s debut, while intricately interwoven with keyboards and lifted to SFX heaven via echo and delay, this condensed and displaced (in line with the operations that are responsible for transforming the presumed and retroactively causative latent text of the unconscious to a manifest one) far cry of existential despair sits comfortably next to psychedelic classics such as C.A Quintet’s Trip Thru Hell and Kimio Mizutani’s Path Through Haze.

This edition is available in 200 splatter and 100 black vinyl copies, with a 2-page insert and a mini-library of books and papers on the psychoanalysis of culture with an emphasis on the unconscious that will appear ‘regressively’ as a countdown to the album’s release.

Track listing:

• Sunrise (A New Day) 4:16
• (Part One) Where Are We Going... 16:02
• (Part Two) Where Are We Going... 13:44
• Solar Wind 9:46