Listening to this is akin to being in the middle of a really powerful Midwest summer storm with jagged dangerous-looking streaks of lightning flashing and booming thunder crashing like a giant's bass drum, literally illuminating and shaking my apartment and sending every dog within a mile under the bed for cover.
Like the force of nature, the music is awe inspiring and unsettling at the same time. You don't dance to it or tap your foot, but it makes my hair stand on end.
I also think of it as a very accomplished and logical extension of late Coltrane, his larger band works like Ascension, for instance. If Albert Ayler had ever found enough like-minded and like-skilled players for a group as large as an octet it might have sounded this way as well.
In short Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Peter Kowald, Sven-Ake Johansson, et al created a near-perfect work of free jazz in 1968 that sounds fresh, and unrelentingly cool, to me almost 40 years later. What a wonderful reissue.
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