01	Steep						03:10
	02	Space Out						08:28
	03	Pyoing						04:30
	04	Far Dreaming						05:24
	05	Waldorfdub						06:13
	06	Kick 98						06:03
	07	Yoy Mandala						11:52

Ozric Tentacles - Swirly Termination

Released: 2000
Label: Mad Fish
Cat. No.:
Total Time: 45:01


Reviewed by: Keith "Muzikman" Hannaleck, April 2002
There is a shroud of mystery surrounding Ozric Tentacles' Swirly Termination album. From the research I conducted I found that the group considered this as an incomplete recording and an obligatory release to satisfy their commitment to the label. Another oddity was that it was listed in the massive AMG database without a review. The group does not list the CD on their site either. Its too bad they aren't recognizing this fine achievement of instrumental progressive space rock. There are also no credits listed on the CD inner sleeve. I found a listing of past and present group members on the group's site, so I am assuming it was the present members that performed on this year 2000 release. Well, I hope this is the lineup that played on this album. I am sure someone will let me know if its incorrect. I had no way of finding out through the usual methods.

Regardless of the inconsistencies and incompleteness of this release in other areas besides the music itself, I found it to be a fantastic listening experience that left me wanting to hear more of the same. Ed Wynne plays a key role with his authoritarian guitar playing pushing Seaweed (keyboards), John Egan (flute), Zee Geelani (bass), and RAD (drums) into instrumental warp drive. Some Middle Eastern influences are detected from time to time along with whirling dervish keyboard playing and fat power chords that make this group a difficult one to classify. They border on techno at times then jump right back to the prog sound very quickly. That's what keeps everything interesting while listening to Ozric Tentacles. I look forward to hearing more.

More about Swirly Termination:

Track Listing: Steep (3:12) / Space Out (8:28) / Pyoing (4:29) / Far Dreaming (5:24) / Waldorfdub (6:13) / Kick 98 (6:03) / Voy Mandala (11:52)

Musicians:
Ed Wynne - guitar, keyboards
John Egan Flute - vocals
Zia Geelani - bass
Seaweed - keyboards
Rad - drums, percussion

Previous Members :
Roly Wynne - bass
Nick Van Gelder -drums, percussion
Gavin Griffiths - guitar
Joie Hinton - keyboards, samplers
Tom Brookes keyboards
Paul Hankin - percussion
Merv Pepler - drums, percussion
Marcus
Generator John

Contact:

Website: www.ozrics.com
Note: will open new browser window

Email: simon@ozrics.com

Discography

Pungent Effulgent (1989)
Erpland (1990)
(Double Lp, Single Cd)
Pungent Effulgent (1990) (Cd Has Extra Track)
Strangeitude (1991)
(Cd Has Extra Track)
Afterswish (1991)
Live Underslunky (1992)
(Double Album, Single Cd)
Jurassic Shift (1993/1998)
(Cd Has Extra Track)
Vitamin Enhanced Ozric Tentacles (6 CDs) (1994)
Erpsongs (1994)
Tantric Obstacles (1994)
Live Ethereal Cereal (1994)
There Is Nothing (1994)
Sliding Gliding Worlds (1994)
The Bits Between The Bits (1994)
Arborescence (1994)
(Three Sided Lp With Extra Track/Cd)
Become The Other (1995)
Curious Corn (1998)
Spice Doubt (1998)
(Ltd Ed Webcast Live Cd)
Floating Seeds (1999)
(Remix Album)
Waterfall Cities (1999)
Nodens Ictus (2000)
The Hidden Step (2000)
Swirly Termination (2000)





Ozric Tentacles formed in 1982 when Joie Hinton met up with Ed, Roly, Tig (Nick Van Gelder) and Gavin. After a session discussing imaginary breakfast cereals around a Stonehenge festival campfire, the band became Ozric Tentacles (good job too, since some of the alternatives were Desmond Whisps, Gilbert Chunks and Malcolm Segments). The samples and general ethnic vibes that Joie had gathered on his visits to India became a major part of the band's sound.
1985 finally saw the band's first cassette release, Erpsongs which covered material from 1984/85. The mixture of alien, spacey sounds in a floating soundscape, which has been a characteristic feature of the band throughout their career was already evident on tracks such as Thyroid while others such as Dots Thots and Velmwend showed the Ozrics' harder rocking tendencies with a solid rhythm section underpinning soaring guitar and synthesiser passages. Tom Brookes left the band around this time leaving Ed to double up on synthesisers as he continues to do to this day. Tom later joined Global. 1986 was a very productive year for the band with three cassette releases. The first Live Ethereal Cereal showed the band to be a very hot psychedelic property indeed, particularly in the blistering Obstacular Explosion. Tantric Obstacles opens with the superb Og Ha Be and continues with plenty of other very fine material such as the eerie Shards Of Ice and the floating Atmosphear. There was also reggae in the form of Oddhamshaw Style and Sorry Style. A fourth cassette release, There Is Nothing followed quickly. This featured plenty of more ethnic elements particularly on The Sacred Turf and O-I (rhymes with "dotty") as well as dub on Kola B'pep. Other tracks such as Invisible Carpet showed that the band remembered how to rock. The following year saw no further releases by Ozric Tentacles, but this did not mean that the band were not busy. Too Much Gristle In The Blancmange by Evil Edna's Horror Toilet was a sort of freaks' Blows Against The Empire featuring all manner of underground luminaries from the likes of Webcore, The Magic Mushroom Band, The Ullulators and of course the Ozrics. The project was assembled by Joie and Jane Reaction of The Ullulators. Joie, then as now, was an in-demand keyboardist, playing in The Oroonies and The Ullulators: a very busy man indeed. Another significant release from this time was The Grove Of Selves by Nodens Ictus; this was Ozric Tentacles without the bass guitar or percussion and because of this Ed decided that they should release the results under a different name.
1988 saw the band's best cassette release to date. Sliding Gliding Worlds was little short of a masterpiece and highlights include Omnidirectional Bhadra the ridiculously titled Fetch Me The Pongmaster, Sliding And Gliding and a personal favourite, Mae Hong Song. They were one of many festival bands to support Hawkwind that year, and two of their live performances, an excellent Even The Air Is Dreaming and a less essential To Do With Circles were released on the Travellers' Aid Trust compilation.
Ozric Tentacles were getting ready to release their debut album and closed the tape only period of the band with a collection of odds and ends from the period 1985 - 89. Featuring all the diverse styles that make the Ozrics' so rewarding, this made a good introduction to the band and gave one the feeling that it must be nice to be so good that you could afford to relegate such fine music as Symetricum, the rainforest ambience of Eye Of Adia and the almost rave Secret Names to a collection of oddments. Quite a bit of the cassette material was reissued in 1991 on Afterswish a very reasonably priced double CD compilation containing two hours of music and three tracks unavailable elsewhere. In 1994, all the tapes were reissued on CD at budget price, initially in a very nice set, Vitamin Enhanced which featured a design similar to a Rice Crispies packet on the box. There are a number of other Ozrics' tapes in existence which are not mentioned in the above discography due to their very limited releases and uncertain identities. The band have masses of unreleased material and at one time Ed would make up a tape for anyone who sent him a blank cassette (note that this is no longer the case; you'll just waste a cassette) so the number of different releases available somewhere in a quantity of one or two is very large indeed.
1989 saw two firsts for the band: a vinyl album and (very occasional) vocals. By this time the band had added John Egan to their ranks, playing flute, leaping about on stage and uttering the occasional vocalisation on record. The debut album was recorded in Dave Anderson's Foel studios in North Wales. Something about the setting of these studios, or perhaps the prolific Welsh fungi, brings out the best in the bands who work there and without a doubt Pungent Effulgent was one of the very best floating, alien, ethnic space-outs ever committed to vinyl. Beginning with the wondrously hypnotic Dissolution the album continued with a resurrection of O-I from the There Is Nothing tape. This in turn is followed by the Asian sounding Phalarn Dawn and the very fine reggae work out The Domes Of G'Bal. Ayurvedic builds up from a gentle intro into something of a freakout while further Asian sounds were explored in Kick Muck a track that had previously appeared on Sliding Gliding Worlds The album closes in fine tribal style with Agog In the Ether: a truly essential release. In its original form on the Demi Monde label, the album has become hard to find, but it was reissued in 1990, the CD featuring an extra track, Wreltch. If Pungent Effulgent had been good, then the follow up, Erpland was even better. It oozed class from the sleeve, a superb psychedelic landscape by regular cover artist Blim, inwards and still represents the band at their very best. It opens with the deliciously floating Eternal Wheel which develops into a powerful rocker. The standard throughout is so high that it is almost impossible to pick out highlights apart from the title track, a whorl of frantic sounds as hard rocking as the band gets. Other stand out titles include the dub track Iscence featuring the only vocals on the album, and the middle eastern workout Valley Of A Thousand Thoughts but in reality every track is a winner and Erpland is probably the stand out album of the nineties, and possibly of all time.
The third album was also a very fine album indeed, particularly the exceedingly psychedelic and other worldly title track Strangeitude and the middle eastern workouts Saucers and Bizarre Bazaar. The stand out piece, however, was the powerful dance track Sploosh. This was used in an advertising campaign for BMW (of all the inappropriate companies) and presumably to coincide with this the band released it as their only single to date. It was backed with an excellent, pulsating live performance of The Throbbe, the extra track on the CD album.
Strangeitude was the last studio album for two years. In the interim, the band filled in by releasing the 11 track live double album / single CD Live Underslunky, which featured classic tracks such as Erpland and Snakepit. The sound quality and musicianship are both of which were excellent.
The band's next studio release, 1993's Jurassic Shift was the first Ozrics' album to chart. The limited edition version featured sleeves made out of reduced THC hemp paper. Once again there was plenty of very good material, including the awesome "Stretchy" and the rather unpredictable "Feng Shui" which starts with a blissed out flute passage, morphs into a chilled dub before exploding near the finish into a thrash work-out!! Sometime during the recording of the album, Roly Wynne, who had spent periods away from the band previously, left the band, his place being taken by Zia Geelani. Roly went on to form the punk band Damidge and also played with Divine Soma Experience.
If Ozric Tentacles had seemed to be musically in long term decline, any fears were dispelled with Arborescence. Not only was this the best album in years, but it had the best artwork since Erpland. It starts in fine style with the hard rocking Astro Cortex and there is an excellent eastern sounding track Al-Salooq, a mental dance piece Dance Of The Loomi and more laid back textures in There's A Planet Here. Joie Hinton and Merv Pepler left the band after the release of the album to concentrate on Eat Static. Their replacements were the bizarrely named Seaweed and Rad from Damidge. Seaweed had also previously played keyboards in Thunderdogs. This revamped line-up toured heavily prior to releasing the superb Become The Other album, the finest Ozrics' album since Erpland and features a very wide variety of music, from the hard rocking Cat DNA with its conjunction of funky guitar and waspish flute to the Spanish styled Vibuthi which combines delicately picked acoustic guitar with the sounds of bells and sampled nature, building up into a hard rocking piece towards the end. Ghedengi is a bewitching piece, all snaking bass lines and sampled strings while Neurochasm the best track on the album, blows you away with its solid, hard rocking foundations and awesome soloing. The furious percussion comes courtesy of Rad and guest musician Jim Walker of The Cheapsuit Oroonies. The following track, Become The Other is the perfect foil to this, very chilled and deeply relaxing.
After horrendous management problems the band signed to Snapper Records in 1997 and released their thirteenth studio album "Curious Corn" featuring 7 tracks including electronic opener "Spyroid" and the flavoursome "Afroclonk" The band followed this with a world tour, their first for three years. The following year the band were invited the USA to record a live gig which was streamed across the internet. The results can be heard on the album released a month later entitled "Spice Doubt". The limited edition release came in a limited liquid filled sleeve complete with floating fish!
The remix album "Floating Seeds" released in 1999 had some interesting moments, particularly from Steve Hillage, Eat Static and Zion Train but was an overall disappointment,especially the sleeve, which missed the colourful talents of regular artist Blim.
More problems forced the band to launch their own record label "Stretchy Records" early in 1999 and later that year they released the awe-inspiring "Waterfall Cities", the bands' most progressive album to date featuring a wide range of electronica inspired lunacy including the spiralling title track which explodes into a strobing acid-squelch fest.Other highlights include the awesome dub work-out "Sultana Detrii", a recent addition to the live set, and Aura Borealis, a section of which can be heard throughout the web-site.
The first Nodens Ictus CD should be released by the time you read this, and the band are currently busy recording the follow up to Waterfall Cities for release later this year.
Ozric Tentacles by Chris Williams, updated by Simon Baker

Personell:
ED WYNNE gtr, keyb'ds
JOHN EGAN flute, vcls
ZIA GEELANI bs
SEAWEED keyb'ds
RAD drms, perc

Previous Members :
ROLY WYNNE bs
NICK VAN GELDER drms, perc
GAVIN GRIFFITHS gtr
JOIE HINTON keyb'ds, samplers
TOM BROOKES keyb'ds
PAUL HANKIN perc
MERV PEPLER drms, perc
MARCUS
GENERATOR JOHN