Fit & Limo - The Serpent Unrolled (1998)

“With apologies to the sons and daughters of La Monte Young, I reckon that linearity will only get you so far. The practitioners of acid-folk tend to draw wiggly lines off into mysterious woods, and I thought I´d follow a few to see where they lead. Fit&Limo are an acoustic duo from Bavaria comprising Stefan Limo Lienemann (previously in the Shiny Gnomes) and his female compatriot, who is known to the world only as Mrs. Fit. Ill-advised monikers aside, The Serpent Unrolled is their first full-length release since Autre Monde in 1995, and it was worth the wait. In fact if you have that previous outing, the serpent is probably already unrolling around your turntable or inside your disc player and your are consequently probably in some far off place and not reading this at all. You always hear folks bemoaning the lack of current music that can stand up in the company of visionary works by The Incredible String Band, Pearls Before Swine, Third Ear Band, COB, Caedmon, Mellow Candle and the like. Fit&Limo create acid folk masterpieces that set the controls for the heart of the genre and end up with it glowing in their hands. The 14 tracks are a riot of pan-psychedelic instrumentation with Fit doing mostly keys and percussion duty (glockenspiel, autoharp, harmonium, metallophone, xylophone, toy piano and many more) and Limo doing the string-driven stuff (guitar, sitar, mandolin and so on). Plenty of swapping around of duties goes on though, with instruments flying between the two like enchanted emissaries. But what matters more than the musicology of it is the extraordinarily beautiful sonic spells that are cast with these tools. Twelve near-perfect originals are delivered, exquisite as the moment when a droplet of water on a leaf decides to fall to earth. You could pick anything, but allow me to direct you to the courtly medieval beauty of Born In The Eleventh Month, or the Byzantine ISB complexity Walking The Labyrinth for supporting evidence of greatness. Based on what they have achieved with their originals, no-one has more right to weigh in with covers of the Grateful Dead´s Dark Star and Tom Rapp´s Images Of April, and the versions here are illuminated with grace, easily matching their excellent cover of Rapp´s Surrealist Waltz on the For The Dead In Space tribute album.” (Ptolemaic Terrascope, UK)