Artist Detailed Info: Gnostic Algae

What a difference a few years makes. In 1966, the Godz could release a radically terrible album featuring a song called "White Cat Heat" featuring nothing but meows, and go on to become Paul McCartney-cosigned underground legends with a respectable discography. Gnostic Algae's original seven inch of "Spiders" was recorded in 1967, but it didn't get a wide release until 1970. By the time their debut "On Bugs" came out in 1971, ESP-DIsk was buckling under the weight of so many unprofitable avant garde acts, and the Algaes' planned second album, recorded simultaneously during their four year incubation on the NYC scene, never got a chance to see the light of day before ESP closed altogether, surfacing only in '74 in a private pressing.

Hence, what once was a respectable psychedelic force in the late sixties East Village scene has been more or less forgotten by time. The band Tuli Kupferberg once called "the realest cats we ever played with, the ones who seemed the most serious while having the best time," whose albums were famed for their improvisational immediacy while packing more structure and big-pedal innovation than anybody this side of Zappa. Today they sound like mystics, with little of the Fugs' dated politics or the simplistic formulas of the folk scene. The lyrics are heartfelt and abstract in a way that still sounds spooky and unfamiliar, nearing some kind of Cromagnon-esque conceptualism (the songs are all allegedly about bugs, bugs and mermaids), while maintaining a thrilling unevenness in the self-production, with levels all over the place, like a true garage document.

Future Phillips engineer Onno Scholze produced the two single tracks, "Spiders" and "Rebirth of the Bugs" (nee "Meets A Mermaid"), and the lush pop and proto-punk of those songs are the standouts here. But the anti-war "Mermaids Versus The Bugs" is a stream of consciousness freakout up there with weirdest late-sixties nuggets, Afterglow included, complete with a testy Godz shout-out at the end. "Ants" is an incredible spoken word slice of NYC life, and fragments "Caterpillars" and "Paranormal Parasite" hint at the legendary, mostly improvised shows that the Algaes would put on, opening for ESP groups, and famously, the Velvet Underground at Max's.

"On Bugs," perhaps due to its apocryphal nature at the end of the first ESP era, never got the CD reissue that their major releases received in the '90's. But with their second, self-released record "All People's Liberation Album," surfacing online to no small buzz, hopefully the time has come for a wide release, the kind of respect the Algaes never got while they were alive...

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