Posted on by General Manager

Mushroom Meets Krautrock Meets Canterbury Scene Meets ……

Call it a collision of rock and jazz as the Dec. 4 edition of Greasy Tracks featured the San Francisco collective Mushroom as well as an array of Krautrock-meets-Canterbury Scene-type music, genres usually linked to Mushroom, a band that cannot be labeled.

Check out this adventuresome and exploratory aural escape by clicking here for an archive, while a playlist is here. 

Formed in 1996 by drummer Pat Thomas — who remains the band’s music director — Mushroom, which has boasted more than 30 different members over the years and countless artists have sat in with the band, eschews comparisons to Krautrock, free jazz, progressive rock, ambient, space rock (think Hawkwind) or electronic. Quite simply, they’re a hybrid.

Thomas, interviewed as part of the feature, credit’s Ginger Baker’s Air Force has an influence and inspiration to him personally.

The band recently released a live offering, Songs of Dissent – Live At The Make Out Room 8/9/19 (Alchemikal Artz), its first album in a decade.

Just one of many incarnations of Mushroom.

Mushroom hasn’t gone unnoticed by musicians linked to the exciting birth of Krautrock and some prog stalwarts, while remaining relevant to bands active today. Faust had Mushroom as openers in San Francisco. Their paths crossed with Kevin Ayers — guitarist and founding member of Soft Machine — and Gong’s founding guitarist Daevid Allen, and would soon collaborate with the duo. They have shared the stage with Porcupine Tree.

The experimental/improvisational-meets-avant-garde approach Mushroom takes to a recording session or a more-favored live concert setting, has obvious links to Krautrock, a highly experimental music, fueled by late-1960s radicalism in West Germany. The unique style — which emerged in the late 1960s and enjoyed an exciting decade, but would largely fade out by the early 1980s – was also known as Kosmische Musik (Cosmic Music).