Sensations' Fix

Franco Falsini's Sensations' Fix are one of the most mysterious and enthralling entities to come out of the rich italian 70's prog rock scene. Unless many of their contemporaries such as PFM, Le Orme or Osanna, which leaned heavily on the British sound of prog giants Emerson Lake & Palmer, Genesis or Soft Machine, Sensations'Fix music was always more akin to the experimental tendencies of German krautrock bands like Neu!, Can, Amon Duul II or the more adventurous directions those musicians took with later projects such as Cluster or L.A. Düsseldorf. The emphasis on keyboards and synths, the spaced-out instrumentals and hazy melodies paint a psychedelic picture that is more about the texture of the sound and the images it conveys in the mind's eye of the listener than about technical prowess and complex suites.

Originally recorded in Virginia in 1977, where the band had relocated after spending the better part of the 70's isolated in the Tuscany countryside, the album (their sixth full-lenght) was originally released on the small Californian imprint All Ears in a year which saw the musical landscape changing dramatically with the explosion of punk and new wave, seemingly doing away with the excesses of prog and arena rock. "Vision's Fugitives" is already projected in the future, ushering the legacy of that decade in some new territories - a track like "Barnhaus Effect N.2" follows the same path that Television was treading at the time on their "Marquee Moon" and the drum intro has a groovy, dance-y quality that didn't get lost on none other than DJ Shadow, who sampled it two decades later - and even predicts the musical evolution of Mr. Falsini, who ended up working at the beginning of the 80's in New York as sound engineer for a dance label and had a dancefloor hit with "Feels Good" under the Electra alias, inspiring people like Frankie Knuckles in the process and thus having a hand in the next musical revolution which led straight to the house and techno of the next two decades.

True to a very indipendent and ever forward-looking work ethic, Falsini remixed the entire album for this re-release upon coming across unreleased bits and tracks in the original tapes: to him, the exciting chance of updating the music and reaching a new, different audience through it is worth the price of disappointing a few purists - thus making his endeavour truly worth of the term "progressive" in its purest meaning.