Keith Hill - Oceanfire EP2009

Keith Hill (Citizen Zen, and sometime Vert:X collaborator) has sent over this EP of music intended for his solo CD project Oceanfire, a work-in-progress sampler of tracks that will in the future be re-recorded along with guest musicians for an album proper. Keith describes the music as “a kind of space-rock, ambient, psychedelic and eclectic” mix, but goes on to qualify that with “don’t you just hate musical pigeonholing.” The seven tracks were recorded in June, 2009 and are available to listen to on-line via Keith’s Myspace page.

What, then, do we glean about Keith’s intended album by these extracts and impressions? Well, first off, that there’s a most interesting and enjoyable work-in-progress going on here. It opens with one of those short and sparkling fx tracks, this one called ‘New Lands’, before moving onto the darkly-laden ‘Antimatter’, another most effective short piece that is followed by a heavier space-rock track, ‘Accelerator’ that sounds like a great basis for a really rocking number when it’s fully worked-up. ‘Waves (Magnetic)’ has spoken-word laid over fx backdrops, and I know a lot of people like this sort of idea though I find them a bit overdone at times.

‘Waves (Hidden)’ is a floating, spacey, bliss-out, with the only guest appearance of the EP going to some absorbing saxophone by Chris Swift, a really good work, leading into a very effective tribal drums juxtaposed with aquatic synths and voice fx piece entitled ‘The Sixth Helix’. The EP plays out with a quietly understated synthesiser wash, ‘Dreamtime’, its notes lingering in the air like an atmospheric undersea walk-through. It’s certainly the case that Keith has some great concepts here to build upon for the album proper, and I’m really looking forward to hearing the fully realised results.

Keith Hill Myspace Page

Stovepony Records

Stovepony Records are an East London-based label who describe themselves as specialising in “alt.country, Americana, Blues, Garage, Folk, etc” but who go on to say, “We also like Psych, Metal, Prog, etc... just like any normal person, but not in an ironic way like.” Hmm, not entirely sure what that means, but I’ve received a couple of their latest releases, Waiting On The Outside by Walking Wounded and The Chronicles Of Solomon Quick by The Lucky Strikes. Neither are space-rock, but one I liked very much indeed, and the other I think plenty of blog readers here will enjoy...

Walking Wounded have, it seems, been playing their riotous brand of inner-city gypsy-punk for something like thirty years and have released eight previous albums, though Waiting On The Outside is their first to be commercially distributed. Their frontman, Dr Hugh Poulton, is a human rights activist who has worked in the Balkans and who for some twenty years was Amnesty International’s senior researcher there. That’s informed much of his songwriting here, but the over-riding tone of the songs comes from day-to-day living in Hackney and that’s the real flavour of the album because this is a quintessentially urban, specifically East London, work.

So, whilst Walking Wounded mix a multitude of styles in their raucous and totally catchy music, tumbling gypsy-sounds peppered with country, blues and a healthy pinch of punk attitude, their anchor is in the multi-cultural melting-pot of the East End and they have within them that honesty and camaraderie, so that this record has a real heart beating in it. It’s like party time with a social conscience, and in that sense perhaps this is an album that has some relationship to this blog in the way that Walking Wounded seem to possess a lot of that free festival ethos that’s often written about here.

Picking a few highlights (though most of this album is just really great, infectious, stuff), the opening ‘Vino Ulje Rakija’, the wine for the cheer, though it talks of the scars of war in the Balkans, is still delivered with a gloriously upbeat groove. ‘Pictures’ talks of help for someone who has slipped outside of mainstream society’, ‘when your back slides down the wall / I’ll try and soften your fall,’ and seems to encapsulate in these words a lot of what this record is all about. And the characters of ‘Betwixt & Between/Saturday Night Down The Balls Pond Road’ are sharply drawn, whilst the knowing and playful nudge and wink in the refrain of ‘and it’s a bit of this, a lot of that, you know what I mean,’ absolutely sums up this album.

And, lest this posting becomes a love-in to a really great release, let me just say, ‘Evolution’ (which talks of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and their work on the theory of evolution), ‘No thanks.’ Not because of the subject matter, just because it sounds like one of those songs performed by a Year Six Junior School class and written by their music teacher. Sorry! The rest is just terrific, though...

The Lucky Strikes come from Essex and the concept album The Chronicles Of Solomon Quick is their second album, though their first for Stovepony. It’s a moody trawl through the gothic Americana of 1930s Mississippi, a fictionalised account of the death of real-life Delta blues legend Robert Johnson, a humid and taut retelling of Johnson’s murder, in legend, if maybe not in fact, derived from drinking Strychnine-laced whisky.

This one’s a bit of a grower, somewhat washing over me on its first play and then starting to get some hooks in on the second time around, though I do think its garage-country-blues-psych-rock will appeal to people here in any case. It’s an album loaded with period imagery that captures its time and place so well that it’s beholden on me to double check, and, yes, this band does still hail out of Essex. As slow and as dense and concentrated as a shot of Southern Comfort in some places, and hard rocking and as coarse as rough whisky in others. I loved the way they’ve captured the seedy atmosphere and, again, how they’ve drawn their characters and pinned-down that whole scene of poverty and desperation, outlaws and chain-gangs. So whilst I didn’t get moved by this release in quite the way I enjoyed the immediacy of Walking Wounded’s album, I heard a lot of stuff within it that worked really very well.

Walking Wounded Official Website

Walking Wounded Myspace

The Lucky Strikes Official Website

The Lucky Strikes Myspace

Stovepony Myspace

Exeter - Grey Noise, White Lies

See, I got really excited here. A release from Exeter! I love Exeter, it’s a city that thinks it’s a village, full of interesting little shops and big department stores, two Waterstones bookstores in the same High Street (or, at least last time I was there they were both surviving, though I believe the city centre has more recently been remodelled so perhaps now only one survives). There’s the Phoenix Arts Centre, a great venue where I’ve enjoyed everything from Hawkwind gigs to comic book conventions, and what at least used to be (and I hope still is) an excellent wine bar and eatery, Chaucer’s. What’s that you say? Not *that* Exeter?

Well, still plenty to be really excited about anyway, as this is a debut album filled with enormous promise and potential, from a four-piece spacerock outfit hailing out of Austin, Texas, described as being ‘four years, 30 songs and a hundred shows into its mission of leaving Earth without ever leaving the ground.’ They’ve released an EP, Intra Venus, and contributed to a couple of compilation albums, whilst 25th August sees this full-length calling card unleashed.

Exeter are spacerock in a similar vein to some other American bands I’ve written about here, most particularly The Upsidedown, in the sense that they are space-rock in the way that the term has become a substitute for shoegazer rather than a straight-forward Sci-Fi Hawkwind type thing. Then again, this is still really hard-driving, no-nonsense wall-of-sound stuff full of gritty guitars and hammering rhythms that can turn into ambient meditation on the proverbial sixpence and absolutely in the right territory for blog readers here.

There’s a real urgency and immediacy to their sound that grabs you as soon as ‘Bittersweet Vanity’ bursts out of the speakers to kick start this record as a blisteringly and furious dynamic salvo that possesses almighty verve and delivers an immense mission statement for what comes after. That’s not to say they’re a one note act, because there’s a powerful range in their work, so that ‘The Romantic’ can lean towards melodic power-pop one minute and drive straight back into a mighty cacophony the next, or ‘Red Dress’ can be swamped in dark mood whilst slowly moving from introspection to anthemic expansion and back again.

The title-track itself is a haunting and hazy instrumental drift, repetitive yet meandering and weighed-heavy with a brooding air. It’s an exceptionally well-realised, spot-on, mid-album track, setting up a second half that, in songs like the tightly-coiled ‘Window’, builds on that pensively hanging atmosphere that works towards the epic eight-minute play-out of ‘Planet X’. Dark yet blissful, swapping elegant and even life-affirming sounds with aural shock-force assaults; this record really is the business.

Exeter are Ky Williams (Drums), Rocky Reyna (Bass), Mike Parker (Guitar/Vocals) and Cameron Creamer (Guitar). Grey Noise, White Lies is released on Pop Up/Engineer Records.

Exeter Myspace Page
Pop Up Records

Engineer Records

The Movements - For Sardines Space Is No Problem

On 10th December 2006, Arne Christer Fuglesang, physicist and astronaut, became the first Nordic person in space as part of the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery, awakening interest in space travel back home in his native Sweden and inspiring this tribute/concept album by Swedish spacerock band The Movements. In fact, Fuglesang had trained as an astronaut as early as 1992, joining the Cologne-based European Space Agency, being selected as a member of the back-up crew for the Euromir 95 mission, working out of the Russian Mission Control Centre in Kaliningrad and later qualifying as a ‘Mission Specialist’ for the NASA Space Shuttle. All of these achievements, and others, earned him the sobriquet ‘The astronaut who never gets to leave Earth’, one that Fuglesang was no doubt happy to be relieved of through his involvement on mission STS-116. For Sardines Space is No Problem is the motto of Fuglesang’s astronaut class at NASA.

Describing their music as a mix of spacerock noise, krautrock and Swedish folk music, The Movements recorded this album at their Parkeringshuset Studio during 2008 and into this year and the result is very approachable blend of styles, leaning towards progressive rock but having a rather nice lightness of touch. Is it a biographical album? I don’t know enough about Fuglesang to tell, but the track-titles certainly indicate that this is a linear walk through his life story. ‘A Birth Under the Northern Sky’ opens with solemn cathedral keyboards as though relating something quietly momentous before leading into a very spacerock ‘Mother, Someday I’m, Going to be an Astronaut’, all busy drumming, special effects and improvisational lead-guitar that has a riveting pace to it. ‘In the Footsteps of Gagarin’ moves them more into a progressive vein with Pink Floyd overtones and treated vocals, imaginative and spacey.

‘Trapped on Earth’ is a more gentle and reflective piece, a nicely realised piece of introspection that changes tempo mid-stream and tightly builds into a rocking coda with keyboards reminiscent of Dave Greenfield’s work with The Stranglers, whilst the overall style of thoughtful rumination changing into a driving instrumental seems to take something from Hawkwind’s ‘Space is Deep’. ‘Go Now My Friend’ takes the disc right back into introspection, a slow, studied progression that opens with a hint of Joy Division but quickly establishes itself as predominately a vocal chant that develops its own ‘lift-off’ dramatics before giving way to a short number entitled ‘That’s the Wrong Bolt Christer, Standby’, featuring sampled dialogue which appears to be derived from the Discovery mission and possibly relates to one Fuglesang’s two space walks.

The terrific nine-minute ‘Ministers of Space’ has one-tone Krautrock bass-lines overlaid with electronic effects and a background note of Turner-esque flute before the disc plays out with the upbeat, inquisitive and optimistic ‘The Grasp of the King’s Hand is Not Enough’. I understand that The Movements enquired about the possibility of Christer Fuglesang being involved with these recordings, which didn’t unfortunately happen, but there’s a promise of the music being taken up on Fuglesang’s next Shuttle mission, during this August.

Released on the Austrian Sulatron label, For Sardines Space is No Problem is a highly enjoyable concept album that makes effective use of its variety of styles and changing moods to deliver a really rather dynamic flow that’s accessible and enjoyable.

The Movements Myspace Page

The Movements Website

Sulatron Records

Christer Fuglesang Wikipedia Entry

Paradise 9 - Nothing For Tomorrow EP

Paradise 9 have been around in one form or another for over a decade, originally formed by guitarist Gregg McKella under the name ‘Flowers from a Strange Land’ way back in 1998 and releasing their debut album, Showtime, the following year. The original band split in 2002, a revised line-up reformed in 2005 and they’ve continued ever since, picking up new members along the way (including Alternative TV’s Tyrone Thomas on lead guitar) and enjoying a spot opening for Nik Turner’s Inner City Unit at last year’s ICU gig at the Inn On The Green. McKella had previously guested with ICU when they reformed in 2007 and has also worked with long time Damned/Dr Spacetoad keyboardist Monty Oxymoron.

This four-track EP hopefully sets the current well on the road to a full LP, with further tracks already recorded Gregg tells me. Judging from the contents of Nothing For Tomorrow it’ll be well-worth waiting for because what they’ve got here is an excellent starting-point in the quest to bring their feisty punk-space rock to a wider audience. There’s bags of righteous attitude going on in the title track, a cracking diatribe about modern greed which sharply sets up this excellent taster of what the band are all about. They move the pace right down from the spiky opener to the lazily rolling ‘Crystalized Moments’, a gorgeously realised trance and drifting romantic soundtrack still delivered with a vocal edge and some lovely guitar.

‘Broken Promises’ is something of a ‘what if’ scenario... what if the Levellers played spacerock? (The band themselves make a comparison to New Model Army for this one so I’m hearing it in a similar way I think!). Again though, it’s smart and acute stuff with a good line in melody that’s a key element of the Paradise 9 sound – it’s always engaging and just highly listenable. They play out the EP with the eleven-minute ‘Points of View’, another terrific psychedelic-punk collision that has something of the extended Hawkwind improvisation about it, driven on by some really focused yet swinging drumming. They’ll have this CD available from MyChoonz and CDBaby as well as iTunes and Amazon downloads (I notice their first album is also available as an Amazon MP3 download).

Paradise9 are Gregg McKella ( vox / guitar / gliss / clarinet / fx), Carl Sampson (drums / backing vox), Neil Matthars (bass), Tyrone Thomas (lead guitar), and Steve Teers (jembe / keyboards and backing vox), with guest backing vocalist Jeanette Murphy. They play the Sonic World Festival at Lumb Farm in Ripley, Derbyshire on the 5th of September and in the meantime their EP is highly recommended.

Paradise 9 Myspace Page
Paradise 9 at CD Baby

Hawkwind - The Chronicle of the Black Sword

I’ve blogged before on how the reissue programme for the Hawkwind back catalogue has provided a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate the band’s historical output, particularly in light of, generally, not having heard many of these records since Sonic Assassins was written back in 2002/2003. It’s a little like the classic Doctor Who DVD releases, having ditched or sold-on the videos years ago, each new release is an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the original stories (and to delight in the quality of the restorations, another thing in common with Atomhenge’s Hawkwind discs) and to revisit earlier assessments, for good or for bad. In the latter respect then, much disappointment in the recent release of ‘Battlefield’, which I’d previously considered much maligned for little reason, in the former, the quite stunning 3-disc set of ‘The War Games’, once considered a ten episode plod-fest and now seen as a totally engaging epic. I guess as we move through life our tastes and outlooks change and that reflects in the things we’ve loved and cared about over the years in a creative sense.

So, The Chronicle of the Black Sword, for which I’ve already had a few people taking me, nicely, to task for rating this studio version of Hawkwind’s Elric adaptations in contrast to the popular convention of its live counterpart, Live Chronicles being the better realisation of Mike Moorcock’s stories. And, you know, there is a valid point in the general consensus to be honest, even though I’m not going to revise my previous opinions, because there is something a little over-produced, a little too studio about this record. It has a sheen to it that wasn’t previously present in 1980s Hawkwind, something of a shiny surface to the sound quality or the mix that, compared to the live recording, leaves it a touch too clinical in a way.

That said, I still hold this album to be at the pinnacle of 80s Hawkwind. They might have been drifting a bit in the previous couple or three years (really from the point at which Choose Your Masques didn’t come up to the standard set by Sonic Attack and they’d released the rather pointless ‘Silver Machine’ reworking as a single in preference to Langton’s LP highlight ‘Solitary Mind Games’) but this, along with Sonic Attack, is as close to a top-drawer album as they’d come up with for the whole of the 1980s. The entire first side is of uniformly high standard, the band mainstays all getting a crack of the whip on contributing to the writing of the album, Langton’s lead guitar complementing rather than dominating and Bainbridge’s keyboards really setting the atmosphere very nicely. ‘Song of the Swords’ opens up the LP at a good pace, a real strong opener, ‘The Pulsing Cavern’ has a lovely ambience to it, and I love the opening part of ‘Elric The Enchanter’ with its ‘frozen in a time trap’ imagery.

Side two is where it starts to unfold, however. I’ve always liked ‘Needle Gun’ in and of itself, it’s sharp and pokey and you can see why it’s there, it’s ideal 7” fodder and perhaps with a different label that could have promoted it a bit more sharply it could have been a contributor to a full-blown renaissance for the band in a chart sense. But it’s out of place in the run of the album and the, excuse me, chronicling of the Elric saga is rather compromised by its inclusion even though it’s thematically part of the ‘Eternal Champion’ mythology in general (why not have stuck it on the end as a ‘bonus’ track to tie-in with the single release, perhaps?). ‘Zarozinia’ misses the mark despite being a lovely song with well-chosen and constructed lyrics simply because it’s that type of slow, moody, song that Dave Brock doesn’t deliver terribly well vocally, to my ears, though its equally difficult to see who else in that line-up would have been suited to it either. Then we’re into ‘The Demise’ and ‘Chaos Army’, which really are nothing tracks and ‘Sleep of a Thousand Tears’ which starts strongly but goes nowhere, before things coalesce back into side one standard with the closing ‘Horn of Destiny’.

Perhaps where this LP also misses out is in its budgetary constraints and the restrictions of the single LP format. We know that Langton had two more cracking songs available, ‘Moonglum’ and ‘The Dreaming City’ (this release leaves me curious as to whether they were never laid down in the studio at all, given that not even demo versions surface here as extras) and of course what’s also lost to the vagaries of the Hawkwind line-up is what Nik Turner, who has previously noted that he’d been writing material for the concept at the time of his sacking from the band, would have contributed had his membership continued. It’s still a classic Hawkwind album, pretty cohesive and largely well thought-out, but one that just drifts off the boil mid-way through.

Additional material included here: ‘Arioch’, an instrumental previously available as the b-side to the ‘Needle Gun’ single, and pre-dating the Chronicles line-up, what’s often (mainly by me, I guess) been described as the last throw of the dice for the previous incarnation of the band, the ‘Earth Ritual Preview’ EP. Those are tracks that I’m fairly ambivalent about, honestly. Discounting ‘Dream Dancers’ which, again, is one of those something of nothing FX Hawkwind tracks, there’s three very good numbers here: ‘Night of the Hawks’, ‘Green Finned Demon’ and ‘Dragons and Fables’. What’s disappointing, in hindsight, about all three is that the original versions have been absolutely superseded by subsequent outings. Perhaps that’s natural as songs develop through being reworked and played live, but you’d absolutely hope that Lemmy guesting on a 1980s Hawkwind track would turn up something definitive. It’s difficult, though, not to feel that his presence on ‘Night of the Hawks’ was somewhat wasted in the final mix, where even the ensuing Radio One session version was superior, not to mention how good this song became played on the ‘Bedrock’ TV show and even by the stripped-down three-piece band in 1991. ‘Green Finned Demon’, a rather nice, understated number, was completely improved on by the ‘trio’, whilst ‘Dragons and Fables’, which to be fair hung around the Hawkwind set rather too long, improved soon after the release of ‘Earth Ritual Preview’ when Huw ever so slightly quickened the pace of the song at concerts, turning it into something of fan-favourite.

Again though, another cracking release from Atomhenge, roll on the recently announced 3-disc version of Levitation.

21st Century Space Adventure

Alisa Coral, of Space Mirrors and Psi Corps fame, dropped me a note to tell me about Russian label RAIG's latest project, a spacerock compilation series in free-to-download MP3 format. Closer inspection of RAIG's website brings up the following link and details:

"21st CENTURY SPACE ADVENTURE is a series of digital albums Alisa Coral and the RAIG’s Accessory Takes net-label compile and release for the purpose of exposing our listeners to modern exciting music of so-called Space Rock genre. Today, Space Rock refers to a new generation of independent bands that draw from psychedelic and progressive rock / trance, acid, dub and ambient electronica / alternative metal /world music / experimental & avant-garde influences. It typically favors otherworldly, hypnotic, space-out and mind-bending sonic explorations over conventional song structures with vocals sometimes playing second fiddle to the shimmering instrumental textures. The main goal of the series is to challenge music lovers to try and hopefully support this kind of music as well as to function as a platform that brings underground musicians and listeners from various countries together.

21st CENTURY SPACE ADVENTURE releases are available for free download to all visitors via our web-site under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license, which allows the music and artwork to be freely distributed and shared around in varying formats as long as no profit is made, but not to be used without permission for any TV, Radio, Film, etc. purposes and not to be used to produce any further works e.g. remixes, sampled, general plagiarism. Since Accessory Takes does not charge for its releases, we can offer no compensation to musicians for their work, but they keep all rights over the material for future use. Although we don't require exclusive material to be submitted, we do give preference to unreleased tracks, which gets listeners excited over the compilation and maximizes its potential audience. Also, musicians are welcome to contribute tracks to upcoming albums or from their newest albums, which gives listeners a taste of things to come without having to contribute an unreleased track. We think of the series as another promotional tool, and musicians can expect to have their tracks heard by hundreds of individuals."

Serpentina Satelite - The Last Drop

From the CD 'Nothing To Say' (Trip in Time)

Serpentina Satelite Myspace Page

Spacerock in the Music Press - July 2009

The latest issue of R2 (the renamed Rock N Reel) arrived this week. I'm reviewing the new album by Sendelica, The Girl From The Future Who Lit Up The Sky With Golden Worlds in this one, issue 16, the Cropredy Festival edition. I've also got a review of SAF Publishing's compilaton of writings by Gong's Gilli Smyth, Nitrogen Dreams, and in non-spacerock related releases I'm casting a eye over the highly recommended Dengue Fever DVD Sleepwalking Through The Mekong, the delicious jazz-cafe sounds of Tallulah Rendall, reissues of Procol Harum, and a new album of Smiths-esque guitar indie-op from The Parish Music Box.

And over at Record Collector this month, my spacerock related in-put includes the new album from Earthling Society, Esoteric's reissues of The Deviants and the premiere on DVD of Nic Roeg's film of Glastonbury Fayre. I'm also reviewing Jarvis Hammond's excellent music book meets travelogue, A Year of Festivals, a four-CD set of Killing Joke's recent London shows and Esoteric's Gilgamesh reissue.

Strange Daze '97

It’s a curious thing, but this double disc of bands from the original Strange Daze spacerock festival, held in Sherman, New York is a historic representation of a seminal moment in the development of the US spacerock scene and yet fails in its endeavour to chronicle that event through a total lack of information on its in-lay and liner notes. For though it contains some of the key bands of the era (Red Giant, Quarkspace, F/i, ST37, and Alien Planetscapes amongst them), their inclusion on the first disc seems to be treated as little more than hors d’eouvres for the inevitable appearance of Hawkwind (whose appearance at Strange Daze that weekend marked their first ever open-air festival show in America). Browsing the accompanying booklet, I find that “Disc Two Features Hawkwind” and how “Disc 2 was conceived as a sort of “Cosmic Trip” through the Strange Daze spacerock festival.” But I looked and I looked again, and nowhere did I see a proper running order for the first disc, or more than the scantest of detail (band names and song titles, not in any particular sequence) of the artists included. A visit to distributor Voiceprint’s web page suggests that it “presents the bands on disc one in chronological order as they appeared at the festival.” Which is not much more help than the booklet itself, frankly. I just see that as a huge shame, since some of the bands included are still recording and releasing material today and others have previous CDs still available. Compilations like this are a part of the oxygen of publicity that the scene needs and warrants, and to reissue this previously out-of-print collection without taking the chance to deliver a modest boost to those bands with a bit of biographical data and links, and to not even detail track-by-track which bands you are listening to at which point, is a real pity.

Anyway, I dug around on the Internet and turned up this track listing for disc one:

1.Awakening (Gaia Avatara)
2.Rooms Of Shord (Red Giant)
3.Green Acid (Nucleon)
4.New Arrival (ST 37)
5.Holographic Caves (Architectural Metaphor)
6.Evanwalker P.I.M (FI)
7.Laminate My Organ Donor Card (Bionaut)
8.Pre Millennium Transmissions (Freak Element)
9.Harbour Of Infinity (Melting Euthoria)
10.Burning Inside (Born To Go)
11.Faerienot Space(Quarkspace)
12.Soft Martian (Alien Planetscapes)
13.The Stream (Drumplay)

Now, to be fair, like any developing scene it’s a mix of enthusiasm over ability combined with genuine talent so there’s some roughness around the edges but it is great to see this set getting a reissue because the festival itself is rightly looked back on as a cornerstone of the US-arm of spacerock. It was a real coming together of the like-minded and a chance for those bands involved to take confidence from elevating themselves to the same bill as Hawkwind and Nik Turner, pivotal figures in the genre’s creation, and those that had already reached a certain level, most notably Far Flung.

Disc Two then is described, as I note someone doing on Amazon, as a ‘stream of consciousness’ with cut-ups, extracts and further tracks. Here again, the listener is left to do some detective work as to who is playing and what is actually being played, and my Windows Media Player came up with an incorrect listing (I was amused to see the Hawkwind tracks falling over completely as being by ‘Unknown Artist’, though it has to be said that the Nik Turner & Far Flung tracks were assigned to the wrong artists as well). I dipped in to what WMP reckoned was ‘Burning Inside’ by Born to Go, for example, to discover a really good number by Nick Riff’s Freak Element called ‘Vagabond’, at least if this Internet listing is correct:

1. Intro 0:20

2. (Gaia Avatara) Sunrise 1:22

3. (Nucleon) Green Acid 2:15

4. (ST37) Translunar Injection 3:47

5. (F/i) Evan Walker P.I.M. 1:09

6. (Red Giant) Rooms of Shord 0:43

7. (Far Flung with Nik Turner) 25,000 Feet Per Second 5:16

8. (Far Flung with Nik Turner) /Soul Herder 1:05

9. (Far Flung with Nik Turner) /Opa Loka 3:33

10. (Bionaut) Re-Laminate my organ donor card (longer re-edit) 4:05

11. (Nick Riff's Freak Element) Vagabond 5:58

12. (Born To Go) Burning inside 0:39

13. (Quarkspace) Faerienot Space 3:49

14. (Drumplay) The stream 1:42

15. (Architectural Metaphor) Kairds 1:50

16. (Alien Planetscapes)Radiation King 3:44

17. (Melting Euphoria) Celestial Hysteria 1:07

18. (Hawkwind) Kauai 1:30

19. (Hawkwind) /Assassins Of Allah 9:14

20. (Hawkwind) Brainstorm / In Your Area 12:39

The class of the field here is Nik Turner’s collaboration with Far Flung, being very indicative of the quality of his work across his American tours during the 1990s, the reinvention and updating of ‘Opa Loka’ a particular highlight. Hawkwind’s selections here are predictable choices of familiar standards (the beautiful Kauai is simply a backdrop for extended acknowledgments and gratitudes from the organisers) with two acts of Brainstorm (featuring a guest appearance from Turner) sandwiching the quite dreadful, who on Earth thought this was a good idea, ‘Hawkwind In Your Area’ cod-reggae disaster.

Look, the re-availability of this set is a good thing and welcome exposure to a melting-pot of imaginative artists all set on taking a similar set of inspirational starting-points in a myriad of different directions. But what would have served this better as an archive representation of that weekend might have been to have torn-up what had previously been put together and release a single disc of highlights with a more explanatory booklet placing the whole thing in its proper perspective, telling the listener a bit more about the featured acts and, radical thinking here, actually telling you what you are listening to.

Get it though, because it’s an important snapshot of this scene.

Strange Trips
Voiceprint Records - Strange Daze 97