And then my mind split open...
‘’White Light/White Heat was a real frustration”, Sterling Morrison, the underrated Velvet Underground guitar player, told me in 1985. “We wanted to do something electronic and energetic. We had the energy and we had the electronics, what we didn’t take into account was whether it could be recorded. If we went into a studio now, it would work, because they have the equipment; then they didn’t, so there’s incredible leakage from track to track. We could have done it if we had all played individually, but we didn’t like to, we liked to play simultaneously. We didn’t know the album was doomed until we actually mixed it down”.
Three years before, Lou Reed had made a similar statement when I pointed out that his song «The Blue Mask» sounded like that distorted 1968 album, like «I Heard Her Call My Name». “Yeah, I know that”, he said. “This is far better. More complex, better lyrics. I wanted to have a song like this recorded well for a change, so you could hear it. It always bothered me that in «Sister Ray» you couldn’t hear the lyrics. I wanted to be able to have the power but have it recorded well and yet still not have it be sterile just because it’s recorded well, so that was the goal”.
Let's jump four decades ahead and behold how those sonic venoms, compositions that propelled the rock’n’roll heritage into uncharted, cathartic, intoxicating and perverse territory, have survived dormant, alien eggs now deep fried by the intrepid band The Ostriches. Yes, like that first recording of commercial ambition by a young Lou before he met Cale. In the boy from Brooklyn via Long Island’s murky rebel stance, «The Ostrich» intended to join the hit songs that invented a fashionable dance, only this one seemed dangerous and dislocated (“You put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it”).
The Ostriches are Juancar Parlange and Alvaro Segovia. With only their electric guitars, the duo brings White Light/White Heat back to life. And it’s not artificial life, but proof that a music launched into the future -perhaps without the Velvets themselves being aware of it- continues to bear fruit as long as it is approached by creators with the intention of extending its legacy, not simple replicators of what is already known. The Ostriches’ take on White Light/White Heat is not a celebratory or reverential reading, which it also is, but a refoundation of a unique and historic act, lived in some New York studios at the end of the Sixties, that seemed unrepeatable but it turns out it wasn’t.
The mercurial recreation of that obnoxious album by The Ostriches is entirely instrumental; we only hear guitars. Percussion, organ, some voices, everything unfolds in perfect simulation invoked by guitars.
“Electricity comes from other planets”, Lou Reed sang on another Velvet Undeground song. Well, after listening to this, maybe not: we carry it deep inside, in the neuronal synapses, in the unconscious. It is life itself.
Ignacio Julià
Video ""Weg zum Nachbarn" by Lutz Mommartz 1968
I Heard Her Call My Name (Music: Lou Reed)
Texas Forever Records & Management