September Gurls Rec.
Fit & Limo : A Garland of Flowers (LP) (D,2006)****'
+ Fit & Limo : A Bunch of Herbs (D,2006)****
It’s been a while since we heard from Fit & Limo, so it is wonderful to hear of this double release, an LP with CD, mostly of now hard to find mostly previously released material with some exceptions.
Most songs on the LP were published before on their now sold out pre-September Gurls records releases, and were taken mostly from their wonderful Angel Gopher Lp, 1993. In that way I’m very happy to hear the great version of Incredible String Band’s “Three is a green crown” which includes fuzz, acoustic guitar, sitar, tabla, organ, or “Come with me”, and many other fantastic tracks from Fit & Limo’s early period. The album starts with “September 13th” which is a very nice 12 string instrumental which I forgot about. Most of the time this period will recall Incredible String Band at their best, but with a unique flavour which is typical for Fit & Limo. Their sound on these songs is absolutely gorgeous, charming, beautiful and unique, even when they stay often close in inspiration to The Incredible String Band. Besides ISB, “The Life and Times of Pan”, just like “Nutshell” for me also recall the ‘Parsival’ period of Elly & Rikkert. And let’s not forget a middle eastern/eastern hypnotic feel too to some of the tracks, like in “The Carpet”. “Goddess” is a more free ride on exotic sounds, followed by a sitar improvisation in a song, “Gopher Hat” next to the more hypnotic exotic (middle eastern/eastern) feeling in the next song, “Mystery”. This mix of exotic instruments, the attractive voice of Limo or Fit, all contribute beautifully to make a perfect psychedelic folk mix. Definitely a classic, which is not to miss if you missed the ISB tribute single, Angel Gopher or the double CD “Folly Is An Endless Maze” which contained most of these songs.
To make the purchase even more attractive, an extra CD of archived material comes with it, including many of the tracks which were published on various, now mostly sold out, compilations. From the 11 tracks on the CD, 5 were previously unreleased, one is an alternate version, and another one is an extended version. One of the instrumentals had a simple cello improvisation of Myriam Goldberg (Black Forest/Black Sea) over it. There has been caretaken that the tracks sound a bit different in the compilation. The new track, “The Lizard and the dragonfly” for instance, has acoustic strings as fundament, then some mellotron. The instrumentation in general always adds some dreamy happiness to the music, a flavour which I still find very unique for Germany of today ; but perhaps I must say it is possible that this flavour, sadly enough, even might be rare for this world, and in this way the music I think can work as cure for all the conspiracies and other focuses on selfishness. Most of the tracks on the CD are instrumentally just a bit simpler, with a certain essence of effective slightly dreamy beauty. Included is also a very fine Syd Barrett cover, “She took a long cold look” with some sitar (previously released in 1995), a version which gives an idea of how Syd Barrett could have been truly accompanied, I can imagine. Also their charming Pearls Before Swine cover from the Tom Rapp/PBS tribute album is included. A bit different and interesting is the one before last track of over 15 minutes, “Humpty Dumpty”, starting with some mellotron-like sounds recalling for me a bit the Steve Hillage-like echoing guitar (?). It is a track in several different sections of arrangements, building up, from an almost medieval flavour to pure improvisation, with, in fact, many different kind of instrumental inspirations of accompaniment, a track which is alone worth the purchase to find out about it. A nice closer is the German lullaby, “Wer hat die schönsten Schäfchen?”.
LP+CD : 319 printed only on silkscreened covers.
