Printed on the back of this sleeve, where most bands would list a studio, is a line stating that the whole thing was recorded and mixed on a Teac four-track. Not an apology — a boast. Fragments of Light, released a few months earlier the same year, had been a demo tape that Polydor pressed by accident of enthusiasm. Portable Madness is the first record Sensations’ Fix made deliberately, as a band, and the cover tells you so: the lunar landscapes have moved to the back and the front is the three of them, looking at you.

The short version

Their second album of 1974, on Polydor, in a textured sleeve designed by Mario Convertino. Franco Falsini plays guitars, keyboards and synthesizers and engineered it; Richard Ursillo plays bass and devices; Keith Edwards plays drums and vibraphone. Every composition is Falsini’s, but the arrangements are credited to the band, and that distinction is the whole point of the record. Filippo Milani produced. The tracks run into each other with no gaps, so the album plays as one continuous piece rather than a sequence — which the previous one, for all its drift, did not.

The one they made on purpose

Fragments of Light had been Falsini alone in a basement in Virginia with a Minimoog, with Ursillo and Edwards adding the occasional part. This is three men in a room, and it changes everything. The division of labour is audible from the first bar: guitar and keyboards take the long solos, the rhythm section binds them together, and Ursillo’s bass refuses to just keep time — he phrases, he wanders, he behaves like an underground player rather than a support act. Edwards brings a vibraphone. The Eminent string organ and the Minimoog stay where they were, holding the beds underneath, so the band still sounds like themselves. It is more structured than the debut and less tied to the German cosmic experiment, and depending on who you ask that is either the record growing up or the record losing its nerve.

The sound

Fuzzier, heavier and more physical than Fragments of Light. Falsini plays a lot more guitar here and puts a lot more dirt on it, and the influence of Robert Fripp is much closer to the surface, with a generous helping of Terry Riley underneath the repetition. The synth work is as lush as ever. The complaint, and it is a real one, is that the harmonic ground barely moves: the solos reel off blues scales and spatial digressions for long stretches, and a listener who is not in the right frame of mind will hear an exercise in style rather than a journey. One Italian critic put it memorably — imagine the closing ninety seconds of a Formula Tre song stretched out over half an hour. If that sounds like heaven to you, this album is heaven. If it sounds like a threat, start elsewhere.

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The songs

Smooth and Round opens on Ursillo’s bass with Falsini playing something spacious on the Eminent over the top, and it is the best introduction this band ever wrote. Strange About Your Hands is here in its original form — the version most people know is the one with words that Falsini rebuilt two years later for Finest Finger, and this is where it came from. Next Place of Nowhere, Leave My Chemistry Alone and Pasty Day Resistance carry the rest, and because everything segues you tend to stop noticing where one ends. That is by design. This is an album to put on rather than to navigate.

Reception and legacy

Italy was not kind. A good part of the movement at the time dismissed the band outright, with the judgment going round that Sensations’ Fix were barely up to the standard of the worst English pop — which, given what they were actually attempting in 1974, now reads as one of the great misfires of Italian criticism. Nobody was listening for this. Polydor was not promoting it. The band made four more records and then became Sheriff and disappeared into Virginia. And then the reissues arrived, first on CD and then, in 2012, the RVNG anthology, and the verdict reversed: the consensus among people who have done the work is that the best of Sensations’ Fix is Fragments of Light, Portable Madness and Finest Finger, and that this is the one where the band existed.

The verdict

For the curious, and the best entry point if the murk of the debut defeated you. It is better recorded, better played and more of a group record; it is also less otherworldly, which is the trade. Play Smooth and Round and Strange About Your Hands, then go and hear what the latter became on Finest Finger. Then Fragments of Light for the ghost version of the same band, and Ash Ra Tempel or Popol Vuh for the company they should have been keeping. Two albums in one year, both made at home, one on a four-track they were proud enough to print on the sleeve.

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