Connecticut's Wayne Rogers is self-made psychedelic genius who has been
working on parallel tracks to fullfil his transcendental musical mission.
The records made under the moniker Crystalized Movements are simply pretexts
for shimmering guitar shows. Rogers is a little Hendrix of the American
small-town milieu. He can tap into the guitar's wildest effects to paint
his simple songs all sorts of colors.
Mind Disaster (Twisted Village, 1983) is basically a set of improvised
lysergic jams with drummer Ed Boyden.
The intensity of the unreleased
Damaged Lights (Twisted Village, 1991) is such
that one would agree with the song
I Am The Only Guitarist In The World And I'm Bleeding.
While Rogers doesn't know the meaning of the world "focus", his sincerity
and dexterity accomplish something that goes beyond Bevin Frond's holeographic
reenactments.
Rogers put a real band together to record
Dog Tree Satellite Seers (Twisted Village, 1987), and the result is
a mixed bag: on one hand the partners force Rogers to think, not
just hallucinate, but on the other one the Crystalized Movements
tend to sound too often as yet another New York revival combo.
This Wideness Comes (No 6, 1990) came to dispel any doubts.
Third Half (nine minuts) is virtually a parade of extreme sounds of
the guitar over a martial beat, not unlike Hendrix' live jams with the
Experience.
The noisy and tense ballads The Second A Siren and
Rearranged paint Rogers as an alienated
folksinger, a Syd Barrett of the garage-punk generation.
The lengthy title-track is reminiscent of maudit rockers such as
Steve Wynn and
Jeffrey Lee Pierce, but its extended jamming
sounds like a cross between Sonic Youth and Velvet Underground.
Unlike his masters, Rogers continuously derails his stories
to masturbate his guitar.
By perfecting that idea, the dissonant power-ballads on
Revelations From Pandemonium (Twisted Village, 1993) approach
Sonic Youth form.
The new tour de force, Good Evening Silence, showcases a
mystical quality (and lets guitarist Kate Biggar take a leading role).
Eric Arn, who had played guitar next to Rogers,
later formed Primordial Undermind.
Rogers then started a prolific solo career to expand on
Crystalized Movements' wildest sonic excursions.
Ego River (Twisted Village, 1992),
The Seven Arms of The Sun (Twisted Village, 1993),
Absent Sounds (Twisted Village, 1993),
All Good Works (Twisted Village, 1995)
and Constant Displacement (Twisted Village, 1997), which
basically offers the same space jams of the Crystalized Movements,
except that the production is more amateurish:
collections of oblique and dissonant ballads in the vein of
Syd Barrett, Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope and other neurotic troubadours.
More than anything else, they display his mastery of the guitar,
a diligent pupil of Helios Creed.
At the same time Rogers was active in two bands:
Vermonster and Bongloads Of Righteous Boo (BORB).
Vermonster's Spirit Of Yma (Twisted Village, 1990) and
Instinctively Inhuman (Twisted Village, 1991)
are all-guitar assaults that leave very little room
for melody.
The double album
The Holy Sound Of American Pipe (Twisted Village, 1992)
experiments with drones and eastern meditation.
BORB is Rogers and Biggar doing their extended mind-warping space-rock
jamming with no constraints on
Trailer Full Of Smoke (Twisted Village, 1992),
Blast Off (Twisted Village, 1993), that is almost entirely taken by
I Was A Beautiful Swan, and
In Orbit (Twisted Village, 1993).
Rogers found his true voice with Magic Hour. The band is half Crystalized
Movements and half Galaxie 500. Rogers and Biggar
are joined by the deluxe rhythm section of Naomi Yang and Damon Krukowski.
The single Heads Down (Twisted Village, 1994)
hinted at a personal revision of slo-core cliches, but the following single
After Tomorrow (Che, 1994), a ten-minute suite reminiscent of Pink
Floyd and Hawkwind, upped the ante.
No Excess Is Absurd (Twisted Village, 1994) picks up from there,
and achives nirvana with the eight-minute noise raga Isn't A Way.
(The longest piece is actually a version of British folksinger Cyril Tawney's
Sally Free And Easy).
Always Leaving Never is a tender melody, halfway between early Pink
Floyd and early Velvet Underground, but still drenched in guitar noise.
That is the pattern repeated in the other tracks, with mixed results,
till the closing Heads Down #2.
As impressive as it was, the debut album looks pathetically shy compared with
Will They Turn You On (Twisted Village, 1995).
Something Else and Chance Was are
slow-motion Velvet Underground-ian litanies, but the 20-minute jam
Passing Word is an epic tour de force of schizoid psychedelia, drenched
in Hendrix's delirium tremens, in raga-like crescendos, in mind-expanding
distorted drones and in hammering space-rock riffs.
The live Secession '96 (Twisted Village, 1996) contains four instrumental
jams that rank among Rogers' most conceptual works.
Sunset One opens the proceedings with drones, rattles, bells and
abstract guitar strumming.
The mammoth (20 minutes) guitar poem of Rosebud falls prey to a
delirious, spiritual frenzy. The first six minutes are frantic, dervish-like,
the guitar quoting from Terry Riley, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Hawkwind (a
virtually impossible task). The "quiet" movement that follows is even more
melodramatic and emphatic, except that rhythm is replaced by colossal
distortions. The last seven minutes recover the spiritual premises, first from
the vantage point of zen meditation and then, again, indulging in sufi fervor.
Sunrise (thirteen minutes) open a calmer, gentler psalm to the universe,
but, again, Rogers' guitar cannot resist launching an all-out attack that is
meant to reproduce the brightness of the sun but more carefully reproduces
the inferno burning inside Rogers' soul.
Sunset Two closes the album with seven minutes of delicate notes
and solemn mantras.
Magic Hour's guitarists Wayne Rogers and Kate "Village" Biggars started
a psychedelic hard-rock project called Major Stars
(Tom Leonard on bass, Dave Lynch on drums), that released
The Rock Revival (Twisted Village, 1997), containing just four extended jams reminiscent of Blue Cheer and Jimi Hendrix, and
Space/Time (Twisted Village, 1999), containing the 14-minute Apples To Grapes.
Distant Effects (Squealer, 2002) offers a mature mixture of
stoner-rock (Higher Meaning, Are We) and
acid-rock freakouts (Hardly Mention).
Like the previous albums, 4 (Twisted Village, 2005) contains a couple
of melodic ditties and two instrumental space jams, Phantom #1 and
Song For Turner. Better production and tighter playing account for
an overall grander listening experience. While not original by any stretch
of the imagination, Rogers' excursions into mind expansion are getting more
effective and less redundant, almost surgical.
Syntoptikon (2006), featuring a third guitarist next to the two founding
guitarists, was less impressive.
Wayne Rogers' solo album Blues-Ul Alb TW (2006) was an American version
of Bevis Frond.
The Major Stars hired rowdy vocalist Sandra Barrett for
Mirror Messenger (2008), that contains the lengthy
My People and especially Mirror Messenger, in which the three-guitar workouts have time to solidify. The shorter songs
are rather trivial though, a problem that got worse on
Return To Form (2010).
