The Electric Family, led by singer and songwriter Tom "The Perc" Redecker, is not a group; it is a tribe of singers and players drawn from more than three decades of German space music. Previous records featured members of Thirsty Moon, Embryo, Amon Düül II and Grobschnitt as well as kindred spirits from the Tav Falco and Jimmy Page/Robert Plant bands. "Ice Cream Phoenix" (2003) is a true unity project. Part of the album was recorded in the old Studio of the DDR in the former East Berlin and brings together musicians from both sides of the fallen Wall and beyond, including pianist Rainer Kirchmann of the band Pankow, Agitation Free drummer Burghard Rausch and pedal steel guitarist Hermann Lammers-Meyer, a veteran of stone country sessions in Nashville and Austin, Texas…
It goes without saying that 1968 doesn't have the same kind of cachet as 1967 - a year that, in musical terms, will always be indelibly associated with the Summer of Love, Sgt Pepper and the emergence of psychedelia. But although the major players turned away from the excesses of the previous year in favour of a back-to-basics musical approach, there were arguably a greater number of psychedelic records made in 1968 than during the preceding twelve months. Vital, lysergically-inclined 45s emerged from a whole host of younger groups, with The Factory, Mike Stuart Span, Fleur de Lys, The Fire, The Barrier, Boeing Duveen, Rupert's People and numerous others all releasing singles that have long been widely regarded by psychedelic collectors as genre classics.