Terje Visnes and Espen Haslene
Audio By Carbonatix
It took some time before Motorpsycho and Theo Buhara found each other again.
The Italian director first collaborated with the Hans Magnus “Snah” Ryan/Bent Sæther nucleus to score neo-Western “The Tussler” back in ’94. Why he chased young bucks notorious for feral stalkers with bass quakes dense enough to kill elephants from the inside (that “How Was I to Know,” son, yow) is anyone’s guess.
But it worked. The assignment seemed to center them. Off went the fuzzbox for a C&W kick some yonks before the Supersuckers or Ween’s attempts.
Thirty years later, the band’s still around, older, seasoned, refined. Buhara’s with us, too: at 74, a fistful of hourglass dust examining his legacy in countdown. Of course, he’s achieved more than “The Tussler,” and a recent dive through his archives exhumed a long-assumed-immolated touchstone, the peculiarly titled “Ahsol Caravan” (vulgar pun? Punchline of unknown origin?), to bookend his filmic latitude.
If in middle age he served two Sergios, Leone or Corbucci, back in ’76, shortly after completing debut project “Echi Nel Vuoto” (“Echoes in the Void”), he was Michelangelo Antonioni, viewfinder ’round turtlenecked throat, or a Barbet Schroeder seeking truths from lost tribes. And what better way to contrast the sagacious thirst of youth’s empty glass than through a group appreciative of growth, having undergone its own, prolifically, since 1989.
The X-rated “Caravan” remains unseen. Its viewability in any form is miraculous, as the cannistered footage somehow survived a Naples fire to emerge 48 years later at some garage sale near Livorno. Buhara reclaimed these raw tangles, then ordered them into belated vivification. At this date, all we have is a 24-second trailer, along with posters: translucent visages in vacant skies, nondescript figures hiking toward peaks.
Terje Visnes and Espen Haslene
Despite the discovery, little regarding “Caravan’s” production has come to light. As per materials, Holger Herzog and Klaus Lyzsky are its listed stars. Both are long forgotten, impervious to research, jettisoned from the auteur conscience for Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, partly for the men’s contentious and at times violent dynamic while filming the former’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972). They skin-walked this plane to jog Holger and Lyzsky from Snah and Bent’s vivid imaginations.
In other words, the story above is bullshit. (Don’t look at me; I didn’t make it up.) There are no films titled “The Tussler” or “Ahsol Caravan,” as Theo Buhara never existed to make them. Luckily, Motorpsycho — manufacturer of legends, builder of worlds — did and does, thereby rendering these ventures real, movies of fluid mind just awaiting solid colors. They’ve created, quite frankly, the album of the year: mirrors on mirrors, revealing artful artifice in compelling depth.
Released in October, the “Caravan” soundtrack is stunningly multidimensional, a concept album liberated from tangible script. That’s too confining. Although front-to-back fantastic, Genesis’ “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” (1974) surely tortured Peter Gabriel as he struggled to cohere a story through music. Stripped of words, “Caravan” doesn’t have that problem. Its jacket boasts an outline, but it makes no sense. Why should it, as it embodies the head-trip/ego-death ’70s with characters represented in moods.
Besides, though fabulated, this is an exercise in postpsychedelic surrealism, soundscapes reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s giallo scores and cinematic liaisons between straight composers and era tunesmiths. See Bob Crewe and Charles Fox’s “Barbarella,” Dave Grusin’s “Candy,” Stu Phillips’ “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” or, better yet, Pink Floyd’s multiple soundtrack forays.
Floyd’s the easiest parallel, as visually “Caravan” resembles Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” (1970), with its frames of Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin navigating Death Valley, California’s parched, imposing vistas. Though if any scene’s stuck with me, it’s the final sequence of random items — refrigerator and TV, too — exploding to “Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up,” the quartet’s “Careful with That Axe, Eugene” revisited.
The opening-track title, “Have You Got It Yet (Theme from ‘Ahsol Caravan’)”, references a hopelessly complicated, evasively evolving song that ex-frontman Syd Barrett presented to bandmates before his 1968 ouster. As for plot, “Caravan” embraces the stranger-lured-to-mysterious-lands draw of Barbet Schroeder’s “More” (1969) and “La Vallée” (1972), which, strangely, yielded two Floyd LPs better remembered as standalone statements than for any association with film.
That aspect works in Motorpsycho’s favor, as internal cinematography outdoes anything an actual movie, restricted by limited vision, conjures. Minds can travel anywhere: a prologue at Kathmandu’s airport, where protagonist Florian (he of the atmospheric “Florian’s Final Flowering”; last breaths, spiritual rebirth or haunted memory, you be the judge) floats through sideburns and low hemlines, a nattily dressed mass in a Kodak 100T 5247 conundrum.
Imagine “Prince Rupert’s Holy Mountain” unbound by budget, a tower of insistent hum —perpetual in its presence — and Vangelis-reminiscent keys. “The Sicle Girls”: exotica, squalls and pondering curves. “Kailash Ascended (Death in the Ice)” crawls up cold Tibetan summits, air tanks audibly feeding drained lungs. Phantoms plague German mountaineer Christian Block in veering rhythms and malevolent incantations.
Neither Block nor Florian speaks; the sole voices, gibberish entirely, belong to a witch, Yeni the Yeti and the Lonely Droner (throat singer Morten Abildsnes), every last one incomprehensible yet with the thrum-tattered warmth of a William Basinski clinch. The only break is an actual “Intermission,” 30 seconds of recuperative silence. Motorpsycho’s presence looms throughout; though it fits here thematically, “Edgar’s Bathtub” appeared in an earlier form on 2024’s “Neigh!!,” companion, natch, to 2023’s “Yay!”
The guys have done stuff like this before, beyond “Tussler” and “Caravan.” Eight years ago, they gave heft to novelist Carl Frode Tiller’s “Begynnelser” (“Beginnings”) onstage. Aided by the Trondheim Soloists and Jazz Orchestra, they supported Ståle Storløkken (Supersilent) on “The Death Defying Unicorn: A Fanciful and Fairly Far-Out Musical Fable” in 2012. (If you’re wondering, Tiller and Storløkken are actual people.)
Without fiction or film, in fact, we may not even have a Motorpsycho. For that, we thank Russ Meyer, the anointed “King of the Nudies.” Did he grok how many of his tits-and-spatter flicks launched bands? Originally released in 1965, “Motorpsycho” shared a 1980s Meyer triple bill at some Norwegian cinema with “Mudhoney” and “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” Since Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat had manifested as groups already, Snah and Bent snatched the last title for themselves.
Then, in myriad permutations, these bongwater-guzzling prodigies, swerving past Hüsker Dü and every “grunge”-era gadabout conceivable, strapped the stoner-rock toddler into its carrier and, from the git-go of 1990’s “Maiden Voyage” and the following year’s “Lobotomizer” (“Hogwash” and “T.F.C.” warp their own grooves), stomped the fucking gas.
However, like the Melvins, Earth or infinite Hawkwind, they, too, exhaled in calmer dimensions, prowling genres and avant-garde freakouts with ease, exposing the rigorous architects beneath the brute force. They could’ve flogged that Man’s Ruin thud forever, but why not hang with proggers further down the dial, where classical, chamber, noise and jazz smash against everything else? After all, artistes can’t subsist on gut-rutting thunder alone. Gimme flutes. Gimme strings. Let’s mine everything under this rock.
Fair warning to anyone curious about this catalog: You may not finish in your lifetime. We’re talking some 70 releases over three and a half decades, two this year in addition to a “Child of the Future” (2009) remaster and November single, “Fanny Again, Or?” So, get to work.
What’s most incredible about this colossal oeuvre is that neither virgin listeners nor repeat travelers have a clue — album to album, song to song, even minute to minute — what’s coming next. For example, 2025 began with an eponymous two-disc release swelling in the Motorpsycho sprawl, but “Ahsol Caravan’s” a perfect sideslip trained on stylistic focus. Their commitment is total.
Tell you what: Here’s the Bandcamp page. Give it a listen, then click back to anything. Anything. If all goes well, you won’t find your way out.
