Live in Berlin 1 [Limited Edition, Live, Import]

Psychic TV | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 23, 2003)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Limited Edition, Live, Import
• Label: Temple Records UK
• ASIN: B0000CABK7
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #940,591 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Infinite Mix

2. Infinite Beat

3. Chemical Surpise

4. Your Body

5. Not a Godstar, An Oddstar

6. Blue Hot Two Handle

7. Serious Noise

8. A Simple Story

9. Be Cooler Than Thou

10. B.L.I.S.S.

11. Ever Experienced?

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Spaced out acid rock techno which works very well., August 2, 2006

By 

J.S.M. "socializer" (Seattle USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Live in Berlin 1 (Audio CD)

Psychic TV is a little hard to describe. They're a dance band that combines heavy electronics, programming, and beats with bass guitar, regular guitar, percussion, and the interesting and eccentric vocals of the front man, Genesis P-Orridge.

They played a key role in forming what we now know as techno. Coming from an Industrial music background they transitioned to dance oriented music, then discovered the Detroit scene and the House scene from Chicago and incorporated those sounds into their music, THEN added a heavily psychedelic inspired vibe/sound to all of this.

The combination, played over both electronic and conventional instruments at the same time is something to be wondered at. Not only are the songs interesting as a form of fusion but they mostly have very specific points that they want to make, supplied by P-Orridge, the frontman and vocalist, having topics that range from self liberation to enjoyment to confronting war to mysticism, but mostly having to do with countercultural memes having their ultimate root in the hippie culture....fast forwarded through twenty years of progress and change. Because of this there's an intellectual component to Psychic TV's output which isn't found in many techno bands.

The Berlin performance, at the Berlin Wall no less in the late '80s when the wall was coming down, is exemplary in that all of these trends are in full force, executed well, and sounding great, from Genesis' banter with the audience and rapping, which is well planned and not spontaneous (and which has a point), to the mixture of samples, that are different from the album versions of the songs, to the percussion.

In fact, there's really no way to compare the studio works to the live works, not because one is good and one isn't, they're both great, but the live stuff is so different from the studio stuff as to be a species all its own.

"A chemical surprise in every other pair of eyes, I think I realize why we mystify..." so starts out a rap of P-Orridge's done over a repeating sample. "Do you play around in black and only pose?" Another section of it.

These people break all the rules of both electronic music and conventional music; if you want to hear people who go to the stratosphere with experimentation check out this CD and Psychic TV in general.