
Spacerock, Psych and beyond... the former Spacerock Reviews, from the author of 'Hawkwind: Sonic Assassins'. Items for review welcome!
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
R2 Rock'n'Reel 20

Monday, 15 March 2010
Carol Clerk
Sunday, 14 March 2010
Oresund Space Collective - Dead Man In Space

Sunday, 7 March 2010
Pete Bingham - Sendelica Interview & EP

Glen’s a bit of a veteran of festival bands and the like...
That’s right, he’s had an illustrious past as a travelling circus man / musician,

Were you both coming from the same area of musical love? Because you can hear a bit of the Floyd in your stuff, and a lot of Krautrock and in that respect Neu! are obviously an influence?
When we first got together I’d made a few really rough demos, bits of ideas that I had in my head, and he was, “Oh yes, a bit of Neu! there, a bit of Faust, a bit of Pink Floyd,” so we were singing off the same hymn sheet, but we also love a lot of modern stuff. I was really into a lot of dance music, was a huge fan of people like Massive Attack and Orb and Underworld and all that stuff was being thrown into the melting pot as well. So we had that historical stuff we were pulling from, but we also brought a lot of other things in as well.
The next stage was that Colin had been nagging me for ages to get a MySpace page, so I did a Sendelica MySpace and discovered this vast psychedelic community out in the big wide world. We became friends with this guy called Niko, who is the guitarist in a band called Seven That Spells, who did a lot of stuff with Acid Mothers Temple and was signed to a Russian label called RAIG Records and through him we e-mailed the label manager, Igor, who was really into the band and we ended up signing to them. That was quite bizarre really, because it came from something we had no ambitions for, or preconceptions of, that just took on a life of its own.
I’ve had a few e-mails with Igor and he’s got a really nice little label that puts out quite an eclectic mix of stuff.
I love it, it’s kind of like a psychedelic version of Factory Records, he has this vision of the whole label, not just from the point of view of the music he releases, which is mostly psychedelic or improvisational music, that’s what the label is all about, but he also has this vision of the artwork and this consistency of what the label puts out which is fantastic. We felt immediately at home being on the label. Fortuitously at the time, there was another label, a Welsh label called TidyLike who were interested in working with us as well and part of the deal we did with them was to record albums for both labels using equipment they had. So we recorded Spaceman Bubblegum And Other Weird Tales From The Mercury Mind for RAIG Records at the same time as doing a very ambient album, SleepWalker Fever, which eventually came out on TidyLike and of which we ended making a movie of.
Yeah, that’s going back to seeing those bands like Pink Floyd all those years ago with the lights and the projectors and stuff, but also I’ve always been a huge Velvet Underground fan and interested in the Warhol EPI shows where they were bringing, oh, maybe a touch of theatre, but a touch of something else to the music. So when I got to know Igor and we got to talking, he really sees that as the future of music, releasing things with DVDs so that there’s a visual aspect to go with the music. It’s a double-edged sword, our music is very visual and very soundscape and landscape and puts images in people’s heads, so there’s a bit of me that’s concerned about givin

It’s a very striking end result.
What’s strange about it is that we never sat to discuss what we thought the end visuals should be. We’d originally approached Grant with the idea of making some loops that could be projected onto the band as we played, as we did some shows in big cinemas. At the time I was putting the finishing touches to the album SleepWalker Fever and sent him a copy, and he said he loved it so much he’d like to turn it into a movie. We had no discussion about what he would do visually, so when he came back it was fantastic, a great marriage.
Let’s talk about the releases that you’ve put out...
We’d put out a few things on our own, before getting involved with TidyLike and RAIG, we did an EP with a singer called Chris Gibbs, ‘The Owls Have Eyes’ and then we recorded an album called Entering The Rainbow Light which again featured vocalists though we did have a lot of instrumental stuff on it. But from that point on the direction of being an instrumental band took shape and we moved on from there and released the ambient SleepWalker Fever and our first RAIG album Spaceman Bubblegum... which again was an instrumental album. We do use vocalists, but we use them as instruments for texture, choir-like sounds that we have singers in doing.
We touched on it being very improvisational, does everything come from just sitting around and seeing what comes out of jamming together?
How does that translate into a live environment?
Well, we play a lot live but not necessarily in front of audiences [laughs]. There’s been a few gigs where we’ve just made up a track and it just kind of happens in encores and stuff. Tracks from albums do change a lot when we play live, there’s a track called ‘Manhole Of The Universe’ from the Girl From The Future... album, and there’s a live version of that on the new EP from when we played in America last year. It’s recognisable as the same track and has the same elements, but the live version is about twice as long, so we have certain starting points and middle points, and points we come to at the end but in-between those we do explore the songs, interpret them and move them around.
Okay, so we’re moving on to last’s The Girl From The Future Who Lit Up The Sky With Golden Worlds, which I reviewed for R2 and really enjoyed, so let’s talk a bit about that one?
That was recorded in America. After Spaceman Bubblegum... came out we got a lot of good press, especially from America and ended up making friends with a few people over there. I was

Based in Wales, recording in America, released in Russia... very cosmopolitan then! But how do you go about getting the word out and getting people’s attention?
Myspace has been fantastic, and the prog-rock psychedelic community in itself has been very supportive in spreading the word. I mean, we have no huge advertising budget it’s just word of mouth. But we are a real Myspace phenomenal success, really!
So let’s talk about the new EP. I loved the really evocative saxophone going on there...
We started thinking about a new album in the middle of last year, we did do some work with a UK label but that didn’t work out for various reasons but out of the frustration of that I wrote a track called ‘Screaming and Streaming’ and Lee Relfe, the sax player, was in the studio with us and it just really came together as a track. So that’s on the new album, but we thought it would be good to do a free download before the album appears and RAIG have a download label where they release stuff that hasn’t been on albums and so we talked with them about doing the download EP.
So that’s the immediate future, but what are the ambitions?
We’ve just made a second movie but I don’t want to go too much into that because even with the visuals we want people to make up their own story and take what they want from the images and the music. There’ll be a limited-edition DVD with the CD of the new album, and in fact we’ve just started a storyboarding a third movie which we’ll hopefully film and record this summer. It’s amazing... we had less than £1,000 in the summer and from that we recorded the album, did a movie and a soundtrack for it, did a promo video for the EP...
You make it go a long way! Very impressive!
That’s the thing; technology now is fantastic – we can do things on budgets now that we could never even have imagined 10 or 15 years ago. When I became a musician, you were looking at ten grand just to record a basic album; now, if you’re prepared to work with the technology, and have the technology work for you, some really good stuff can come out of it. But Sendelica has attracted this really amazing team of people around us and we have the ability to really put a package together. It keeps us all quite excited... and makes it a joy to play!
Sendelica MySpace Page
Sendelica at RAIG Records
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Rockburn - Night On Fire

It's been a busy week of interviews and the like, kicking off with a conversation last Sunday morning with Pete from Sendelica, who I've enthused about a few times on this blog and in print and that'll be posted here sometime over this weekend with the appropriate links to their free to download EP which aptly demonstrates the multiple facets to their music, in advance of their next album which should be appearing in the Spring. Mind you, nice sunny day down here in Cornwall and perhaps Spring is actually on the way already - so scratch that and let's say that we'll expect the new Sendelica sometime in the next few months. I also had the great opportunity of talking to one of the good guys of the music scene yesterday when I interviewed Ian McNabb about his wonderful new solo album, Great Things. Ian's a fascinating interview subject, very easy going and chatty and although his new CD is far removed from this blog's usual subject matter, if you've encountered his work before you'll love this even though it's a bit of a departure from his usual style. Perhaps I was a bit gushy as regards to this record when I spoke to him, but it was from the heart anyway... a bit like today, when I was out shopping in Sainsburys with the family and spotted my old English teacher from 1978/79 and, having probably not spoken to him in some thirty years, took the opportunity to approach him and tell him what a great teacher he had been and how influential on my wanting to be a writer he'd been. To my delight, he did remember my name and seemed thrilled to have been told how one of his long ago pupils appreciated what he'd imparted all those years back.
Anyway, none of that has anything to do with this entry but as my own blog rests in cyberspace neglected and unposted to in a couple of years it's useful to put down some things here from time to time!
Rockburn, who hail from Bellshill in Scotland have really got the press pack thing sorted (see my point on this in a previous post!) and sent over a two-track CD, a couple of photos, a biography and a selection of review quotes. That's what I call organisation - good stuff! As are the two tracks in question: 'Night On Fire' and 'Wishing Well'. Now, both of these are, again, somewhat outside of the original stomping ground of this blog, but actually I'm really happy that it's become less about a narrow framework of genre and is now a more wideranging and expansive collection of reviews and interviews - and that I get to hear a lot of stuff that might not have otherwise got onto my radar. So that's where I am with these songs, which are essentially no nonsense classic rock numbers that are blessed with great hooks, booming drums, grinding guitars and upfront vocals.
What they seem to be is one of those well-kept secrets that make you feel like they must have a dedicated core audience who relish in following them for just an old-fashioned damned good night out, since what I'm hearing here is so completely made for playing in the live environment with the beer flowing and the girls looking hot. That's very unreconstructed of me to say, but Rockburn own their share of what's missing in rock these days and that's the ability to put across simple but infectious hard rock 'n' roll and more power to their elbow for doing it.
In fact, they suggest that what they do is actually "born out of the frustration of seeing a lack of bands having the balls to play 'all out' rock 'n' roll," and that does make you wonder where all that passion and energy has disappeared, really. Rockburn, though, seem to be making real headway, with 'Night On Fire' being chosen by Celtic FC to be played at their home games, win Rock Radio's 'future classics' competition on 96.3FM and recently working through recording sessions at Lanarkshire's Foundry Music Lab with producers Sandy Jones and Graeme Duffin and just working their nuts off in the live environment at home and in Europe. They've got the sound and the ambition to do well.