The Spacerock Continuum

The Best of 2011 List! Finally!

2012-02-01T07:59:00.000-08:00

Here it is, spacerockers! My Top Ten Albums of 2011 list, along with the runners-up:

1. Opeth - Heritage
2. Megafaun s/t
3. Jesse Sykes And The Sweet Hereafter - Marble Son
4. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
5. Pterodactyl - Spills Out
6. Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will
7. Grails - Deep Politics
8. Woodsman - Rare Forms
9. White Hills - HP-1
10. Unknown Mortal Orchestra s/t

Reissues:
Supreme Dicks - Breathing And Not Breathing
Disco Inferno - The 5 EPs

Honorable mention:
Zs - Arms
The Psychic Paramount - II
Chris Forsyth - Paranoid Cat
Russian Circles - Empros
Battles - Gloss Drop
The Oscillation - Veils
Yuck s/t
The Rangers - Pan Am Stories
Woods - Sun & Shade
The War On Drugs - Slave Ambient
Quilt s/t
Paul Weller - Wake Up The Nation

Opeth are the surprise sleeper of the year: a band who in the past were known for full-on BLACK METAL, replete with the growled Cookie Monster vocals and manic downtuned fretboard shredding. But apparently a deep appreciation for classic prog rock was lying under their dark veneer and on this album, my favorite of the year, it has been exposed, shined up for all to witness, and it WORKS! Brilliantly. Also residing in the near-metal realm are instrumental post-rockers Russian Circles, who leap so far out in front of the post-metal genre they helped create with this new album they're impossible to pigeonhole - another totally surprising album. Helms Alee continue their metal-gaze explorations on their sophomore effort, every bit as uncompromisingly heavy yet melodic as their first. Speaking of surprises, Yamantaka/Sonic Titan are a complete left field head scratcher: a female Japanese-Canadian face-melting prog metal duo, or as they cheekily dub it "noh-wave," referencing no wave and noh, the classical form of Japanese musical drama. Woah. Dig it.

Not surprisingly, White Hills return with a new collection of lengthy acid/prog/krautrock epics, all designed to fry your mind. Wooden Shjips also return and make no new leaps forward, not that any are necessary - their heavy trance guitar workouts reside firmly in the "if it ain't broke" camp. The Drift, who in the past trafficked in fairly lightweight instrumental post rock, have beefed up their sound on this recent release, much to our benefit. Cave continue to put the motor in motorik, zooming down the autobahn and off into outer space. And The Psychic Paramount slams the motorik throttle wide open, and careens wildly all over the spaceways, injecting high-octane free jazz flailing to the mix.

Now, Boris... what can be said about a band like Boris? Devilish Japanese sludge-metal monsters, this trio has always enjoyed confusing their audience, constantly reinventing themselves and expanding on older efforts, recombining, repackaging and remixing, as well as collaborating with the likes of SunnO)))), Merzbow, Ghost's Michio Kurihara and The Cult's Ian Astbury. And this year they've gone even farther than diehard fans may have ever anticipated, releasing not one, not two, but three new albums in one year. And by "new" I mean mostly new. Heavy Rocks shares the name of an obscure out of print Japanese release they put out early in their career, but none of the same material - the title succinctly describes the colossal sonics contained within. Attention Please shifts attention to female singer Wata and a lighter, dreamier poppier sound, if you can believe that, expanding on the quasi-shoegaze direction they've been dabbling with here and there. And a third release, simply (and bafflingly) titled New Album, takes material from both those albums along with a handful of other tracks and experiments by reworking them with a mainstream dance/pop producer to a fine-glossed crispy crunchy sheen, to mixed yet interesting results. I mean, Boris will never be a mainstream band... or will they? What's next for these illusive yet prolific tricksters? Seemingly anything's possible.

The mighty Mogwai return with yet another departure/deviation on their theme of crushing instruMENTAL musix. Dropping a bit of the head-exploding dynamcis for more subtle shifts and ethereal textures, this album is their most expansive yet. It's nice to see they can continue to reinvent themselves without losing integrity or intensity. And yes, there ARE vocals, but in their more recently tried-and-true vocoder style... just another instrument. Woodsman never disappoint with their continued exploration of Reichian guitars, chanted mantras and transcendent polyrhythms, as illustrated by this track from their fourth album. Esoteric postrockers Collections Of Colonies Of Bees popped out a stop-gap EP in 2011, but the four similarly-titled instrumentals (this from a band whose Fa.ce (a album included seven instrumental tracks and an eighth called "Mu_rder", and their Customer release contained nine tracks all called "Fun" and a tenth titled "Funeral") are more than just something to tide us over until the next full-length. In fact this collection may their most cohesive set yet, as they explore a lighter more exultant style, uplifting more than confounding. Brooklyn warehouse collective free-jazzbo-hippies Zs are a wondrous discovery for me; often erroneously filed under noise, they're anything but (if that makes you think of Black Dice or Wolf Eyes or the like). More like latter day Coltrane attending the Branca/Chatham/Riley/Reich school and jamming at recess with Fela Kuti and a mega-tight drum circle. Whew! And Battles seems like they're having more fun than ever with their herky-jerky math rock, full of bizarre time signatures and unsettling rhythmic riffs, despite retaining its complexity coming off totally light-hearted and playful. Losing their arguably most experimental member, Tyondai Braxton, has allowed the now-trio to collaborate with a host of vocalists to mix things up a bit (witness last month's installment featuring their track with Gary Numan!).

The Modfather Paul Weller put out his most expansive release yet with a sublime potpourri of slippery Northern Soul, barnburning calls-to-arms, prog mini-suites and not a little bit of psychedelia, as evidenced by this track. Very impressive, especially at this point in his long and illustrious career. Pterodactyl were previously a spazzy postpunk/mathrock unit with psychedelic tendencies but have recently been indulging a proclivity for classic prog (and not a little Beach Boys and Elephant 6 bands, especially The Olivia Tremor Control) on this new album, to monumental effect. The album's a real grower (and way underappreciated in the press), as the longest-lasting ones usually are.

A little bit softer now... Quilt conjure the Haight-Ashbury of Slicks and Garcias, tie-dyes and moonbeams, but manage to make the old new again with faithful reinventions of a bygone era, with angelic harmonies to boot. Speaking of era-specific, Grails have lately mined a wealth of a few years later and an ocean away, with raw material culled from vintage krautrock and Turkish psych, and finally melded a composite entirely their own, but with obvious touchpoints. The always patient low-and-slow Barn Owl anchor their minimal repetitive mantras with a bit more solid rhythmic ground with their latest, yet somehow still achieve completely airborne transcendency.

Plaid, normally a free-flowing and upbeat 'n' groovy psych-tronica duo, have a track here that fits right in with the current theme of gauzy fever dreams. Dark. And so krautronic that one would never know it's not Cluster. And 15 years after their last album, Seefeel make a majestic comeback with their oddest set yet, further stripping all analog instruments beyond recognition (except for their trademark dub bass in places), distorting guitars and feedback loops into electronica-sounding washes of sound augmented by fractured drum programs. This song is aptly titled, with a nudge and a wink. Welcome back!

The Horrors, as mentioned in previous installments, have morphed from gothy-glamsters worshiping at the altar of Nick Cave and Robert Smith to post-shoegazers who remember the early works of Ride, Chapterhouse, Slowdive et al., despite probably being toddlers when that music was prevalent. Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) has moved even farther away from his Animal Collective toward the simultaneously sunny and shadowy beachscapes of Brian Wilson. If he's not careful he'll drown in a sea of reverb. Ganglians hail from Sacramento, yet come off like the elfen brethren that inhabit Syd Barrett's Cambridge garden, equal parts mischievous and mystical. Gauntlet Hair seem to come from similar climes as Animal Collective and the current crop of echo-tastic warehouse culture indie freakshows. The album is uneven but has hints at future brilliance. Another hair band (no, not hair metal), Wet Hair also borrow from the mystick origins of 60s schlockadelica, yet make it compelling and, dare I say it, fun? Groovy, baby.

Yuck's debut was a real sleeper, coming from seemingly nowhere but as immediately familiar as classic 90s American indie rock - it's an album chock full of spot-the-influence, from Archers Of Loaf's pristine noise pop to Yo La Tengo's blazing guitar rave-ups to walls of shoegazing guitars almost as monstrous as Dinosaur Jr.'s. Dang kids - they do it perfectly. Les Savy Fav came back with another post-punk ripper, perfectly melding the aforementioned 90s indie with herky-jerky Fugazi post-hardcore (but with a better sense of humor) and full-on psychedelic anthems. And the supreme sleeper of the year Unknown Mortal Orchestra aren't nearly space rock, but their lo-fi psychedelic soul and mutant R&B is so left field and exciting they fit into my top ten releases this year, despite averaging three minutes a song instead of thirteen. Psychotically catchy.

Possibly more than ANY band I've ever heard (and that's saying a lot), Supreme Dicks must be the most enigmatic and puzzlingly captivating thing I've stumbled across. Maybe because I came to them after the fact (with the help of this recently-released 4-disc compilation of pretty much their entire output), or maybe because of their amalgam of obtuse, seemingly extemporaneously-composed, guitar work a la Jandek (the mysterious yet prolific loner who has self-released dozens of albums - feeding a select and rabid underground fan base - featuring a guitar he either could not tune, refused to tune, or following an idiot-savant doctrine only he could fathom he may have intentionally de-tuned to challenge yet embrace the dedicated listener), addled vocal mumblings a la David Baker from early Mercury Rev, fractured, disjointed and nonlinear arrangements that make "bands" like U.S. Maple, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Tower Recordings, or No-Neck Blues Band sound tight and controlled, and with meandering instrumentals reminiscent of early Hood or a more restrained Swell Maps, and spoken-sung impressionistic storytelling of a totally unique bent. This track is especially fun in how it morphs from quietly amorphous falling-apart freakout to Stonesy blooz jam (is it "Gimme Shelter"?) at the end. And this is just one example of how this band exemplifies the WTF? genre of spacey musix. Epic yet understated, and an important part of the lexicon of outsider art.

Speaking of confounding, the ironically-named Disco Inferno is a band that started life as a Factory Records style post punk unit in the early 90s, then brought in a sampler to augment their already abstruse guitar work and rambling understated speak/sing lyricism and based every song around unusual Midi-triggered samples of everything from obscure artists' songs to found-sound musique concrete. This track is from a recent compilation of obscure EPs to flesh out their catalog on one easy disc (albeit admittedly uneasy listening). Woods have always known how to strip things down without lessening their impact, as this micro-jam illustrates perfectly, acoustic improv and pocket symphony all rolled into one, on this their fifth release. Their subtle lo-fi pastorals just never get old. So... if you're the godfather of dissonant post punk experimentation with decades of band releases behind you, where do you go next? To the acoustic realm of course, as Thurston Moore has done on his finest yet solo release, augmented by swirling discordant string arrangements from Beck, of all people. Truly inspired in his stripped-down re-imagining of the style of his electric work with Sonic Youth. Ace, from top to bottom. Another one of my top albums of 2011 finds Jesse Sykes taking it up a notch or three, with her Sweet Hereafter playing a more prominent role in extended instrumental workouts evoking the Laurel Canyon of old, and instead of their previous uber-quiet slow jams focusing on her whiskey-stained velvet voice they indulge in cathartic dynamics that transport the listener. Their best release yet.

Ms. Sykes hasn't completely jettisoned her Americana/alt-country roots but she has evolved beyond them. On the other hand, many modern artists have managed to seemlessly incorporate space rock and psychedelia into true American roots music. The underground cult of personality known as Bonnie Prince Billy (aka Will Oldham, aka Palace and its various offshoots) has pretty much always done folk music, although it has varied from somnambulant minimalism to clanking clamorous newgrass. His latest in a long line a variously-ascribed releases finds him adding spacey atmospherics to the mix. The cleverly monikered Kurt Vile got his start as a guitarist for sundry alt-country outfits (see The War On Drugs a couple songs later) but his solo work showcases layered yet non-showy guitar virtuosity, a knack for the near-hook of classic folk-pop, as well as an obvious appreciation for kraut/motorik and psych. Chris Forsyth's guitar extravaganza ranged from meditative Faheyesque pickin' 'n' drones to all-out Velvet Underground-in-a-juke-joint blowouts. Though this track is more fitting with the alt-country section of this set, seek his songs out on two other previous installments. Wilco started as a fairly straight-forward alt-country unit, but maestro Jeff Tweedy's love of Beatles-esque arrangements, experimental dissonance (thanks in part to the addition of freak-jazz guitarist Nels Cline - check the guitar break around 4:30) and, again, some motorik rhythmic devices, has taken his accomplished band into diverse realms of musical genre, defying facile categorization. The War On Drugs are a more refined version of the formula we're examining here, with a sound that evokes wild vistas - the expansiveness of open space - and the sensation of movement via textbook motorik rhythms that conjure freight trains screaming through wide open spans of the American West and guitar treatments not unlike the ones Brian Eno designed for U2. Megafaun reside at the crossroads of American roots traditionalism and Chicago-school post rock (Tortoise, Gastr Del Sol), an intersection that many people would be surprised to find exists. Love the use of backwards guitars and feedback on this track - and so uplifting - my fave song of 2011. And if they come across as an Americana band trapped on a slightly sinister HAL-helmed Battlestar Galactica, searching for an ideal world to re-inhabit, they make it seem like a trip we all should be on. And aren't we, indeed, after all? And speaking of trippy, we close with a lengthy suite from the enigmatically-named Rangers, a ramshackle lo-fi contingent exploring Americana/roots and well as stuttering psychedelic soul and mangled Motown mayhem, a heady brew for the new year to come.

This here's a nearly FOUR HOUR SET, in two parts, so make some time, set the mood, relax, listen and enjoy.

The following tracks should appear in the first player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
The Devil's Orchard - Opeth - Heritage
Mlàdek - Russian Circles - Empros
Speed Sk8ter - Helms Alee - Weatherhead
A Star Over Pureland - Yamantaka // Sonic Titan - Yt // St
Upon Arrival - White Hills - H-P1
Lazy Bones - Wooden Shjips - West
Horizon - The Drift - Blue Hour
WUJ - Cave - Neverendless
Sp - The Psychic Paramount- II
Spoon- Boris - Attention Please
George Square Thatcher Death Party - Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Tone Cloak - Woodsman - Mystic Places
Lawn - Collections Of Colonies Of Bees - Giving
Ice Cream - Battles - Gloss Drop
Nobody Wants To Be Had - Zs - Arms
Whatever Next/7 & 3 Is The Striker's Name - Paul Weller - Wake Up The Nation
Allergy Shots - Pterodactyl - Spills Out
Milo - Quilt - s/t
Future Primitive - Grails - Deep Politics
Turiya - Barn Owl - Lost In The Glare
Eye Robot - Plaid - Scintilli
Dead Guitars - Seefeel - s/t

The following tracks should appear in the next player below:

Moving Further Away - The Horrors - Skying
After Burner- Panda Bear - Tomboy
Sleep - Ganglians - Still Living
Overkill - Gauntlet Hair - s/t
Radiant Lines - Wet Hair - Radiant Lines
Ffunny Ffriends - Unknown Mortal Orchestra - s/t
Holing Out - Yuck - s/t
Clear Spirits - Les Savy Fav - Root For Ruin
Ffunny Ffriends - Unknown Mortal Orchestra- s/t
Columnated Ruins/Seeing Distant Chimneys - Supreme Dicks - Breathing And Not Breathing (The Emotional Plague)
Second Language - Disco Inferno - The 5 EPs
White Out - Woods - Sun And Shade
Circulation - Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
Your Own Kind - Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter - Marble Son
New Whaling - Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Wolfroy Goes To Town
Baby's Arms - Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo
Anniversary Day - Chris Forsyth - Paranoid Cat
Art Of Almost - Wilco - The Whole Love
Best Night - The War On Drugs - Slave Ambient
Get Right - Megafaun - s/t
Zeke's Dream - The Rangers - Pan Am Stories

Testing... testing...

2012-01-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

So sorry. If you've been looking for the long-awaited Best of 2011 list, you'd have noticed that I've been having problems uploading the player. But I think I have it fixed! Here, try the player below. If I've been successful you'll have a mix (chronological to boot!) of the spacier side of the Indian-British dance rock hybrid known as Cornershop, led by the inimitable proud "wog" himself, Tjinder Sing. If all you've heard from them is the "Brimfull of Asha" stuff (which is great, actually) this should surprise you. It takes more than sitars and tablas to make it psychedelic - check those spacerock guitars!

You Always Said My Language Would Get Me Into Trouble - from Hold On It Hurts (1994)
7:20am Jullander Shere - from Woman's Gotta Have It (1995)
It's Indian Tobacco My Friend - from When I Was Born The 7th Time (1997)
Spectral Mornings - from Handcream For A Generation (2002)
The Turned On Truth - from Judy Sucks A Lemon For Breakfast (2009)

Come On A Trip With Us!

2011-12-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

We begin with a trio of bands representing swinging sixties London and the psychedelic "happenings" at the U.F.O. Club and other venues, pre-dating raves by more than a generation. The most important band, or at least the one with the most longevity, to arise from this loosely-connected scene was, of course, Pink Floyd (or THE Pink Floyd as they were known then, under Syd Barrett's leadership). This track, improvised live nightly for the heads to trip and somehow dance to, needs no introduction. Supposedly this version, appearing on their debut album, was edited together from multiple studio takes as Syd was falling aprt mentally by the time of the recording sessions. A mostly overlooked peer of theirs, except in underground circles, was The Soft Machine. Though they could hardly be called "rock" - and indeed they took their cues from jazz, and featured keys, bass, drums, sometimes horns, and the rare electric guitar - they were truly psychedelic, as illustrated by the triptych featured here. Another band from the U.F.O. scene was Tomorrow, featuring future Yes guitarist Steve Howe and future Pretty Things/Pink Fairies drummer Twink. Their kaleidoscopic pop was less experimental than the others featured here, but typified a lot of the more "above ground" psychedelia of the time. The song featured here supposedly refers to the apocryphal tale of Dr. Albert Hoffman's famous bicycle ride, tripping his balls off upon ingesting his first dose of his new invention: LSD.

The Bicycle Ride

David Normal | Myspace Video

Fitting soundtrack to the above video, eh? Yes, that's The Floyd's "Atom Heart Mother"! Very apropo.

Moving right along we encounter a conundrum: a young British band, on their first album aping the dark, swampy, spastic mannerisms of the Birthday Party and the Cramps, who then morph into a neo-shoegazer outfit, with stunning results. This track is from The Horrors recent third album and they seem to be sticking with the latter formula - a wise choice. Seemingly unprecedented? Untrue - My Bloody Valentine started their existence as a similarly-styled psychobilly band, albeit with a different lineup than the one that produced their trendsetting output in the form of Isn't Anything and Loveless. Ganglians are all over the place, with ramshackle psych, freaky folk and a sometimes shoegazey sound as on this track. Collections Of Colonies Of Bees bring a smooth melodicism and precision to the Tortoise school of post rock. Tammar meld the best aspects of both proto-shoegaze and post rock tendencies. And, as the godfathers of quiet-loud-louder-LOUDEST post rock, Mogwai need no introduction. But this is absolutely the greatest version of "Helicon" I've heard, captured live in all its grandeur.

Opeth are a band that missed my radar in the past since their previous incarnation could be defined as black metal, but they ditched the cookie monster vocals and have taken their cues from classic prog rock, and it suits them completely. Their recent album, from which I culled this track, features some of the most inventive heavy prog I've ever encountered - a contender for album of the year, I dare say. Another track from vintage metal-worshipers W.I.T.C.H., where indie-sludge guitar god J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr.) takes a back seat on the drums... and thoroughly rocks 'em. Continuing their oeuvre of exultant post metal, Helms Alee wowed on their sophomore release this year, and I'll get to that on the Best Of 2011 installment next month. This track's another great one from their first album.

And now another segment dedicated to heavy motorik and trancey, fuzzy grooves, starting with San Francisco's illustrious one-chord wonders Wooden Shjips with a track off their latest, with yet another variation on the same theme. Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it! Then an extended journey with motorik mantra masters Cave, from their masterful 2011 release. Time to drone out on this one - the title of this track says it all. Shifting gears after that lengthy journey, Wet Hair put on the cruise control through undulating countryside and altered states. We arrive just in time to meet solo psych experiMENTAList Sun Araw for some groovy inner space astral traveling, then it's up into the stratosphere with the mighty White Hills, from their stellar recent release, destination: nirvana. Bon voyage!

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the first player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Astronomy Domine - Pink Floyd - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Hope For Happiness/Joy Of A Toy - The Soft Machine - Volume 1
My White Bicycle - Tomorrow - s/t
Dive In - The Horrors - Skying
The Toad - Ganglians - Still Living
Vorm - Collections Of Colonies Of Bees - Giving
Deep Witness - Tammar - Visits
New Paths To Helicon Part 1 - Mogwai - Special Moves
I Feel The Dark - Opeth - Heritage
Rip Van Winkle - W.I.T.C.H. - Witch
A Weirding Away - Helms Alee - Night Terror
Black Smoke Rise - Wooden Shjips - West
This Is The Best - Cave - Neverendless
Liquid Jesus - Wet Hair - In Vogue Spirit
Impluvium - Sun Araw - Ancient Romans
HP-1 - White Hills - HP-1

But don't forget, you also have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Kadoo logo instead of pushing the play button in the player below.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Cabbage rock!

2011-11-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder? The debate continues. There's some good discussion in the comment section of that article, as well as a link to a BBC documentary on kraut rock ya'll should check out.

Moving on... This month's installment is another round up of the musix I've been trippin' on all year, not just the best (the very best of the year installment comes in January, of course) but the most heavy rotation, to use an antiquated expression, and some of the acts that have been getting the most exposure right here on the SRC of late. Funny, but they mostly seem to be of the swoony, woozy, drifty, dreamy, hazy, spacey variety, as opposed to, say, more formalist structures like prog rock or post rock. Maybe this stuff is a surrogate for the hallucinogens I don't indulge in (anymore)...? This is music that takes you to a higher plane. Well, I guess that's what all spacerock is about, innit? This set also features a couple-few collaborations made in heaven for the discerning spacerocker - read on!

Barn Owl is a San Francisco "drone duo" that specializes in minimalist meditations via guitar and harmonium that manage to sound maximal, a real wall-of-sound for just two instrumentalists. The late, great Magnog took the soft-focus psych explorations of bands like Flying Saucer Attack and applied them to improvs, most of them many times more lengthy than the brief sample included here. The appropriately oblique moniker Implodes pretty well sums up their sound, all blurred lines and disorienting fuzz like a vaguely menacing acid experience.

The set takes a turn for the more linear with a couple of my recent fave neo-shoegazers, the dream-pop inflected MBV worshipers The Black Ryder, and the Madchester-ish space grooves (think mid-period Primal Scream) of The Oscillation. An obvious direction to continue in here would be some of the motorik-influenced artists I've come across recently (kosmiche is making a komeback!). Lo-fi traditionalists Wet Hair cruise down the well-traveled autobahn that defines the genre (but less robotic and more shamanic, in a Jim Morrison vein). As I've mentioned in past installments, Woods has a penchant for the random instrumental jam that nods to kraut rock and might seem incongruous with their usual oeuvre of fey freak-folk... but these jams rock! Mysterious instruMENTALists Gnod and monsters of psych White Hills both dabble in the motorik realm, and they derive an entire album's worth on this perfectly matched collaboration, apparently not their first either (although I have been unable to verify the existence of the first one). All Tiny Creatures inhabit some of the same terrain as the previous acts but they are both more experimental and texturally complex while simultaneously bringing a pop-orientation similar to their sometime compatriot, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon. Even psychedelic troubadour Kelley Stoltz seems to be enamored of the genre, at least in the case of this example of what could be called garage motorik.

And now for something completely different... I had to transition somehow, and what better than a Crazyhorse-sized psychedelic power ballad from freaky sometimes-folkies MV & EE (also technically a collaboration, between Matt Valentine and Erika Elder, but they pretty much always record as a duo)? An epic guitar barnburner works pretty much anywhere. Psychedelic in name only, but still off-kilter enough to be included here, Psychedelic Horseshit traffics in self-described "shitgaze", a spoof on the term shoegaze but obviously quite apt as well. Since we seem to be headed toward a rocktronica segment (even though the Horseshit dude is usually much more primitive garage rock than on this track), how about some 70s-soundtrack analog-synthrawk (think Moroder or latter day Tangerine Dream) from retrofuturists Zombi? Or the robot rhythms (can they possibly be human?) of avant art/spazzrockers Battles, and who better to take a turn on vocals with them than the cyborg godfather Gary Numan? Talk about an apropo collab.

Speaking of dream collaborations, look no further than ballistic Portland psych-proggers (did I say no prog in this set?) Eternal Tapestry and cosmic Long Beach guitar noodler Sun Araw. And did I say no post rock? Okay, I lied: Parlour harken back to the era of Louisville (yes, Kentucky - think Slint or Rodan) math/post rock and actually feature lesser known players from that scene. Despite what I wrote earlier, there has been some great post rock recently and I've included a couple examples of it here. Explosions In The Sky, some of the founding fathers (along with Mogwai and Mono) of the quiet-loud-LOUDER-LOUDER STILL-IMPOSSIBLY LOUD dynamics exploiters, and their kissin' cousin (they're not related but they sound a lot alike) Caspian.

Shifting gears, yet again, for the end of the set. Bark Psychosis are the band being referred to when the rock writer coined the term post rock, but I don't think it really describes them, at least not in context with the other bands within the genre. To me they come closer to Portishead's dour/noir trip hop or enigmatic undefinables like Hood. Whatever it is, it's beyond rock, so maybe they do fit. Thurston Moore (do I really have to tell you he's one quarter of the guitar mangling glory that is Sonic Youth?) has done solo albums before, but they're usually far from the utterly unique interplay the postpunkers invented 30+ years ago. But this one manages to frame the style he developed in SY within the folk-ish acoustic arrangements of his other solo work. A perfect album from start to finish. And what more can be said about O.G. psychedelphians (they're from Philly) Bardo Pond? I mean, they still have a ton to tell, but their most recent album is so rewardingly prototypical of them they named it eponymously after all these years!

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the first player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Awakening - Barn Owl - Ancestral Star
Ghost Squid - Magnog - More Weather
Marker - Implodes - Black Earth
To Never Know You - The Black Ryder - Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
Gamelan Mindscape - The Oscillation - Out Of Phase
Echo Lady - Wet Hair - In Vogue Spirit
Out Of The Eye - Woods - Sun And Shade
Run-Around - Gnod & White Hills - Gnod Drop Out With White Hills II
Plankton March - All Tiny Creatures - Harbors
Mt. Fuji - Kelley Stoltz - Antique Glow
Wandering Nomad - MV & EE - Barn Nova
Revolution Wavers - Psychedelic Horseshit - Laced
Escape Velocity - Zombi - Escape Velocity
My Machines - Battles (w/Gary Numan) - Gloss Drop
Night Gallery II - Eternal Tapestry & Sun Araw - Night Gallery
Distractor - Parlour - Googler
Trembling Hands - Explosions In The Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care
Malacoda - Caspian - Tertia
Shapeshifting - Bark Psychosis - Codename: Dustsucker
Orchard Street - Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
The Stars Behind - Bardo Pond - s/t

But don't forget, you now have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Kadoo logo instead of pushing the play button in the player below.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Spacerocktober!

2011-10-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Who's that above? Why, YES! It's the triumphant return of The Olivia Tremor Control, the planet's finest Athens, GA, psych-poppers and co-founders of the Elephant 6 collective! Both they and Seattle psych-Americana chanteuse Jesse Sykes (she of the whiskey-stained velvet voice) and her extra-rocking Sweet Hereafter put on incredible better-than-merely-return-to-form shows as they passed through my neck of the woods (when I'm not satellite-bound) last month, so I'm starting off this set in honor of the two of them.

Electronic dream-pop newcomers La Big Vic capture the essence of lysergic dance music, whether 60s "happenings" or 90s raves, updated through various analog instruments and some 21st century digital. It may seem like I can't get enough Bailterspace lately, and this, since only discovering them this year, would probably be true, especially since I'm realizing how truly diverse their back catalog is - from minimal post-punk to angular agit-prop to swirling shoegaze, and beyond - as this foray into motorik rhythms illustrates. Another recent fave of mine, Woodsman also capture a bit of that kosmische forward-momentum and combine it with somewhat more rockist tendencies.

Speaking of the RAWK, let's bring this up a notch or hundred with a new ballistic assault from White Hills, from their Thrill Jockey debut, this track validating their rightful place as leading modern psych monsters. Even acid- rock is making a comeback these days as stoner sludge power trio W.I.T.C.H. aptly demonstrate (some of that inspiration may come from their drummer, one J Mascis, moonlighting from his day job as iconic 90s-era slacker rock guitar mangler and laconically tortured vocalist/songwriter with Dinosaur Jr.). Austin alt-metallers Helms Alee's second album is an even more exploratory affair, as they push all the boundaries of the genre. Long Beach psych-balladeers Crystal Antlers tone down the histrionics just a tad on their latest release, as this ode to SoCal summers tinted through psilocybin sunglasses shows. And speaking of psychedelic ballads (a theme revisited for the last song of this set), MV & EE borrow a heaping spoonful of grinding guitar pathos from their spiritual godfather Neil Young on this epic track.

The next segment of songs is thematic in that it's informed by the tendency among some facets of spacerock to wander aimlessly to a psychedelic mantra only these jammers can feel. Woods (not to be confused with Woodsman, above) trade mostly in fey fragile folk-psych, but at least once per album they include a lengthy excursion into improvisation like the one included here. More than a little Syd Barrett informs Woods' trajectory as this meandering instruMENTAL jam from his post-Pink Floyd daze confirms. The realm of improvi-psych would not be complete without O.G. krautrockers Can, so I've chosen one of their mid-period classics which melds disorienting dub groove to acidic guitar stabs. Related to the Barrett-era Floyd, I've included some material from their contemporaries (and fellow swinging London U.F.O. Club regulars), the jazz-inflected spacerockers Soft Machine, who were somehow left off my previous space jazz installment. Pan-European (Spain, Austria, Germany) "intergalactic psychedelic space jam band" Interkosmos fit right in with this theme, although I don't know much about them really except they must have extensive krautrock collections. And back to the psych ballad concept, Japan's Boris - who released two simultaneous albums this year, one refining their "heavy rocks" side and one exhibiting a hybrid breed of post-shoegaze metal) - bring us a crashing crescendo finale with this recent magnum opus. Whew! This set packs a lot into two hours!

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the first player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Hushed By Devotion - Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter - Marble Son
Holiday Surprise Parts 1, 2 & 3 - The Olivia Tremor Control - Music From The Unrealized Film Script 'Dusk At Cubist Castle'
Mr. Broken Bird - La Big Vic - Actually
D Thing - Bailterspace - Wammo
Insects - Woodsman - Rare Forms
The Condition Of Nothing - White Hills - H-P1
Seer - W.I.T.C.H. - Witch
Epic Adventure Through The Woods (Sucker Punch) - Helms Alee - Weatherhead
Dog Days - Crystal Antlers - Two-Way Mirror
Bedroom Eyes - MV & EE - Barn Nova
Sol Y Sombra - Woods - Sun And Shade
Lanky (Part 1) - Syd Barrett - Octopus
Flow Motion - Can - Flow Motion
A Door Opens And Closes/10:30 Returns To The Bedroom - Soft Machine - Volume Two
Hypnotizer - Interkosmos - s/t
Aileron - Boris - Heavy Rocks

But don't forget, you have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Kadoo logo instead of pushing the play button in the player below.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Back To School (Again)

2011-09-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

Okay class, listen up! This month's lesson is on Progressive Rock, or as afficionados affectionately call it, "prog". This term can also be used in the derogative by its detractors. I fall squarely with one foot in each camp: while prog is definitively a subcategory of space rock, it can also be overly intellectual, cold, dry, convoluted and wanky. Therefore I have culled a set to illustrate what good prog can be, even if many of these bands would never categorize themselves as such. It is by no means meant to be comprehensive because, a) these sets almost always adhere to my self-imposed two-hour limit rule (makes for a more digestible podcast), and, b) I've left off the wanky bits, so you won't see any Yes, Rush, ELP, Moody Blues, Jethro Tull or Genesis. Besides, those acts are way too commercial/accessible for my fringe tastes.

An overview, taken with a grain of salt for a few inaccuracies, can be found here.

We begin with Akron/Family, who, in seeming tribute to krautrock collective Amon Duul II (arguably one of Germany's finest prog bands), apparently live in true hippie/rocker communal style. They're practically a cult. They combine elements of Americana, psychedelia and freak folk with their prog, not to mention some serious guitar prodigiousness. But since I've included many of their best tracks in previous sets, I let them open this set with a short burst of Eastern-tinged guitar mantra of a teasing brevity, the better to get you to explore their other work (use the search bar on the top left).

Next up I break one of my own rules again (for maybe the third time) by including a live track, Queen's epic "Brighton Rock". This is one of the rare occurrences where the live version, if not improves, greatly expands on the studio version, in this case via Brian May's guitar explorations which are not only extended, but enhanced by a triple delay effect, going one better than the double delay on the original recording, not to mention Roger Taylor's timpani section (not quite a drum solo - we wouldn't want anything that wanky).

Then we have a truly obscure piece, all but unknown except to the most dedicated Floydophiles. On the second half of Pink Floyd's 1969 double album Umma Gumma, each bandmember contributed one composition of supposedly entirely their own creation. Amid absolute stinkers by his bandmates (save only Roger Waters' pastoral soliloquy "Grantchester Meadows"), it is David Gilmour (of course) who stands heads above the rest with his triptych "The Narrow Way", a piece illustrating the genre's penchant for songs constructed of suites, or multiple parts of developing themes. Have you heard this track before? Aren't you glad you now have?

One of the bands most historians credit with leading the development of space and prog rock was Hawkwind. Despite a touch of wankiness in the guitar work and an overall comic book sci fi silliness to a lot of their material, they definitely had their moments, as this track illustrates. And of course some of the most beloved progsters spent time in King Crimson, from guitar virtuoso Robert Fripp who developed a unique fretboard style enhanced by his self-designed effects known as Frippertronics, to bassist/vocalist Greg Lake (later of ELP), to latter-day heroes drummer Bill Bruford, bassist Tony Levin, and guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew. Instead of the obvious choice of "In The Court Of The Crimson King" I went with the title track of the more obscure, and arguably superior, Lark's Tongues In Aspic album.

Then back to relatively recent times with an coincidentally named (wink wink) track from Sleeping People, an offshoot of the equally abstruse SF indie math rockers Rumah Sakit, both bands sharing a penchant for confounding time signatures and intricate guitar/rhythm section interplay. Continuing in that vein, Battles presents a point of access to such sometimes impenetrable complexity of said genre with an exuberance and zeal that are infectious. And straddling the line between "college rock" (as they once called angular and angsty indie rock artists in the 90s such as Pavement and Archers Of Loaf) and proggy guitar excursions lies Joan Of Arc, and this track (with a title riffing on Ginsberg's Howl) from their most recent release is some of the finest work they've done over their long and prolific career.

Underground circuit guitar collaborator Chris Forsyth put out an eponymous solo release which bristles with improvisational creativity, incorporating Fahey-esque finger picking, avant garde atonalism, psychedelic drone and old-timey back pork porch boogie. Phenomenal album. Portland instrumentalists Grails have dabbled in all aspects of the blanket term space rock including modern post rock and old school prog, with a soundtrack-y quality to most of their work. This track from their latest release conjures grainy 70s avant garde films and smokey vintage psych and krautrock, and amply demonstrates how far they've come over the course of their substantial output. Ostinato (named for the musical term meaning "a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm") also harken back to prog's inception with a timeless sound equal parts 60s British baroque, 70s German motorik and modern American postrock.

And I leave you with a multi-part barnburner from the latest album by the undisputed masters of prog-PUNK, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. Smashed instruments, glam and postpunk leanings, and epic ambition make this Austin Texas group the future of prog.

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the first player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Fuji I (Global Dub) - Akron/Family - s/t II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT
Brighton Rock - Queen - Live Killers
The Narrow Way Parts 1-3 - Pink Floyd - Umma Gumma
You Know You're Only Dreaming - Hawkwind - In Search Of Space
Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part 2 - King Crimson - Larks' Tongues In Aspic
Fripp For Girls - Sleeping People - s/t
White Electric - Battles - Gloss Drop
I Saw the Messed Blinds of My Generation - Joan Of Arc - Life Like
Paranoid Cat Parts 1-3 - Chris Forsyth - Paranoid Cat
Almost Grew My Hair - Grails - Deep Politics
Goal Of All Believers - Ostinato - Chasing The Form
Strange News From Another Planet - ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Tao Of The Dead

But don't forget, you now have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Kadoo logo instead of pushing the play button in the player below.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Summer Round-Up

2011-08-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

Howdy spacerockers! For the August set I've assembled some loose ends and odds 'n' sods to wrap up a lot of the material I've been listening to over the course of the summer - some bands have been featured in previous playlists but I needed to get in a second or third song by these artists cuz I dig 'em so much. Hopefully you do too.

Starting off, a lengthy journey with Stereolab from their first album in a long time that actually sounds fresh, since their last half-dozen or so releases are pretty same-y, basically the same album over and over (hey, if it ain't broke...). The appropriately titled Not Music is worth picking up, as it harkens back to their glory days of Transient Random Noise Bursts through Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Moon Duo, the Wooden Shjips spin-off, have a recent release that's easily on a par with either act's best work, as this scorcher amply illustrates. Another track from The Oscillation further shows what incredibly good taste and influences these cosmic rockers have (and sounding more like Primal Scream than Primal Scream does these days). Pocahauted mix a bit of dub and lo-fi scuzz into their brand of psych, to delicious disorienting effect. Another track from my recent faves The Black Ryder further reveals their blatant Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine worship, which is a fine thing in my book.

Implodes is a strange bird, from the active-verb moniker to the gauzy waves of blissful haze they conjure, seemingly in homage to the sadly AWOL Flying Saucer Attack. Louisville KY math/spazz/post rock vets Parlour return as well, with a more expansive and less claustrophobic track, showing off their diversity and also their more trance-inducing side. A spin-off of Collections Of Colonies Of Bees (and thus Volcano Choir), All Tiny Creatures put out a satisfying collection of low-key psych, coming off a bit like Bon Iver (whose Justin Vernon contributes to one track) jamming with Animal Collective on home-brewed laudanum, or as my friend and fellow music writer Ned Raggett puts it, "breezy, uptempo song(s) that (are) part motorik zone, part kicking it on a relaxed afternoon." Continuing the gentle narcotized state, Damon & Naomi, long ago the rhythm section for Galaxie 500, really hit their stride when they started jamming With Ghost, the namesake Japanese psych collective whose instantly recognizable lead guitarist Michio Kurihara elevates their understated bliss folk to new heights with his stratospheric solos.

Kelley Stoltz, a longtime veteran of the SF psych scene, pays homage to all his heroes from Syd Barrett to Roky Erikson to Echo & The Bunnymen on his albums, yet comes off entirely his own artist, as this tracks shows off his softer space-troubadour side. Although I dearly love his more manic side, this track fits better in the theme we're exploring here, a bit of hammock-hanging summery psychedelic. Continuing into the sea of reverb (and slowly building the mania), Crystal Stilts also wear their influences proudly on their sleeves, from Ennio Morricone to Phil Spector to sinister garage rawk drone. It seems appropriate here to exhibit the spacier side of equally manic absurdist art rocker (and desert denizen), the dear-departed Captain Beefheart and his (aptly named) Magic Band, this track long pre-dating the similarly pointillist impressionism of latterday post rock.

See where we're going now? A bit of panoramic cinematic spaghetti-western twang segues into all-out desert sprawl by way of another track from The Desert Sessions. For those of you not quite familiar with Josh Homme and cohorts' past before these supergroup sessions that I've been featuring I've included a track from his main project Queens Of The Stone Age, as well as that band's previous incarnation as Big Sky sludge metal wizards Kyuss, straight outta Palm Desert CA. Keeping it grungy, True Widow bring a minimalist shoegazing ethos to the maximalist tendencies of psych-metal. And French metalgazer Alcest finishes us off with an epic-length opus re-released from his early daze.

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the first player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Silver Sands - Stereolab - Not Music
Fallout - Moon Duo - Mazes
Liquid Memoryman - The Oscillation - Out Of Phase
You Do Voo Doo - Pocahaunted - Make It Real
Let It Go - The Black Ryder - Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
Meadowsland - Implodes - Black Earth
Sea Of Bubbly Goo - Parlour - Simulacrenfield
Glass Bubbles - All Tiny Creatures - Harbors
I Dreamed Of The Caucasus - Damon & Naomi - With Ghost
Mean Marianne - Kelley Stoltz - Antique Glow
Alien Rivers - Crystal Stilts - In Love With Oblivion
Kandy Korn - Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Mirror Man
Coward's Way Out - The Desert Sessions - The Desert Sessions, Vol. 1
Better Living Through Chemistry - Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R
The Law - Kyuss - Wretch
Doomser - True Widow - As High As The Highest Heavens And From The Center To The Circumference Of The Earth
Le Secret - Alcest - Le Secret

But don't forget, you now have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Kadoo logo instead of pushing the play button in the player below.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Summertime...

2011-07-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

...and the livin' is SPACEY!

So why not a rambling, ambling, bRambling summery set? Like lying in the hammock on the front porch at twilight watching the comets and satellites and pondering DEEP SPACE, this set should conjure the bliss of summer and space simultaneously. What better place to start than SF space-folkies The Dodos? Their poly-percussive acoustic-to-fuzz blasts and ethereal harmonies are what summer music is all about. Another stalwart on the SF psych scene, Lumerians bring the drift and sway to your myoclonic hammock, creating passage to the semiconscious state best achieved on warm summer evenings. Altered states are what The Black Ryder are all about, and this track is no exception with its wall of guitar trance and transcendence. And how about "surfgaze" (surf rock + shoegaze)? Can that be a genre? It certainly won't seem far-fetched after you hear this track from the guitar-centric gals in No Joy.

Continuing on from previous playlists, I'm still exploring the oeuvre of Bailterspace, and their unlikely melding of beauty and chaos, thus this track from what many call their finest album. Similarly, Swirlies combine dream pop jangle and sturm-und-drang metallic crunch on this track from what appears to be their career opus. Yet another track from The Psychic Paramount, more monstrous motorik for your pleasure. And the recent self-titled Bardo Pond could be called their best yet, without hypebole. Witness the grandeur of this track.

The strummin' and pickin' of that track (rather uncharacteristic for Bardo Pond, until the distortion storm hits) eases a segue into back-porch heat-lightning acoustica for the rest of the set. Blues Control is just plain WEIRD. Their modus is usually ultra lo-fi meandering with prominent piano and ubiquitous noise, but this track is more of an off-kilter folky rumination. The all-star Desert Sessions make another appearance here (see previous installments) with an aptly named twangy blooz jam. Avant guitarist Chris Forsyth shows us his hip-shakin' side. Gunn-Trusckinski Duo (on guitar and drums, respectively ) continue the theme with their take on acoustic raga. Ben Chasny's Six Organs (he's the lead guitarist for Comets On Fire) excels at such mantric explorations, as is compellingly illustrated here. The UK's answer to John Fahey, James Blackshaw fits right into this set, for obvious reasons. And why not cap it off with the epic somnambulant bliss of Japan's Acid Mother's Temple? Indeed.

Nighty-night!

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the first player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Going Under - The Dodos - No Color
Atlanta Brook - Lumerians - Transmalinnia
Gone Without Feeling - The Black Ryder - Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
Hawaii - No Joy - Ghost Blonde
Get Lost - Bailterspace - Robot World
San Cristobal De Las Casas - Swirlies - They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days In The Glittering World Of The Salons
DDB - The Psychic Paramount - II
Just Once - Bardo Pond - s/t
Glen Fandango - Blues Control - A Full Tank
Creosote - The Desert Sessions - Desert Sessions, Vol. 10
New Pharmacist Boogie (For Jack) - Chris Forsyth - Paranoid Cat
Taksim II - Gunn-Truscinski Duo - Sand City
S/Word & Leviathan - Six Organs Of Admittance - Asleep On The Floodplain
The Elk With Jade Eyes - James Blackshaw- O True Believers
Soleil De Cristal Et Lune d'Argent - Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. - Univers Zen Ou de Zero a Zero

But don't forget, you now have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Kadoo logo instead of pushing the play button in the player below.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Moona-inna-Joona...!!!

2011-06-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

I wanna sing-ah about the moon-ah in-ah June-ah...! I wanna sing-ah about the moon-ah in-ah June-ah...! Sing a tune-ah...! To La Luna...!!! Or however that lyric goes... We all love the moon in June, but after all this crappy non-springlike terrestrial weather, I think we need some SUN!

Okay! We survived the rapture, or at least the cool kids are still here on earth, so I'm providing some more space rock for your earthly pleasures. If we all succumb to flesh-eating vampire demon zombies, at least we can have a good soundtrack, eh? This installment is meant to be a soothing balm, softer textures and motorik grooves for moving on, and getting our Circadian rhythms back on track after the big debacle of almost losing a summer due to bad weather and even badder religion. This one may even appeal to some of my more weak-hearted listeners who can't take the fever-pitched intensity of a regular SRC set. This is not intentional - I just assembled this set with my usual stream-of-consciousness approach. If I ever offend anyone's delicate sensibilities you've no one but yourself to blame.

We start with the aptly named Maserati, always reliable for sleekly designed transport, maneuverable and speedy enough to blur the landscape. Parking on the tarmac, for the next part of our journey we go airborne with Pete International Airport, the side project of Dandy Warhols guitarist Peter Holstrom. Our voyage then detours into inner space and you crank up the in-flight headphones for newcomers The Oscillation, sounding like a perfect melding of Primal Scream and Spacemen 3. Then it's back in time over desolate land and psilocybin flashbacks with The Desert Sessions, the series of on-again-off-again jams hosted and recorded by Queens Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme, and featuring diverse guest stars from across the spectrum (his own band and members of Mondo Generator and The Eagles Of Death Metal, sure... but can you imagine Chris Goss, Alain Johannes, Mark Lanegan, Dean Ween, Twiggy Ramirez, Blag Dahlia and P. J. Harvey in the same room?).

The Solar Bears take us straight to the heart of the sun, the Lilys through fields of hallucinogenic pastoral beauty, Eine Kleine Nacht Musik on through a night journey, and Kenseth Thibideau (bassist for Rumah Sakit, Tarentel, Pinback, Three Mile Pilot, Sleeping People, et al., on his first solo venture) delivers us to an address on the moon. For more exotic addresses we can rely on Bailterspace and The Psychic Paramount.

O. G. krautrockers Faust remind us of the influence of Teutonic mindscapes on the psyche of space rock and Disappears continue the travels with a lengthy motorik passage. We get temporarily lost in the improvisational mind-fog of astral travelers Magnog, then are re-routed on our course at juggernaut velocity with Belong. Then The Church take us to the dark side with one of the most ominous tracks of their lengthy and illustrious career.

Swervedriver have always had an aspect of forward momentum, like driving a sooped-up 70s Camaro at reckless pace across the nation's highways. And Sonic Youth adopts this continued theme of movement which we have explored in this set with an epic improv they contributed to the soundtrack for a recent obscure French film, which turns out to be some of their finest work!

Quite a journey, eh? Now... we rest. Until next month... keep listening! This one should last you a while.

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
No More Sages - Maserati- Passages
Repeater - Pete International Airport - s/t
Telepathic Birdman - The Oscillation - Veils
Girl Boy Tom - The Desert Sessions - Desert Sessions, Vol. 1
She Was Coloured In - Lilys - She Was Coloured In
Ertrinken - Eine Kleine Nacht Musik - s/t
Moon 2 - Kenseth Thibideau - Repetition
GA9 - Bailterspace - Capsul
N6- The Psychic Paramount - II
Herbststimmung - Faust - Something Dirty
Revisiting - Disappears - Guider
Lost Landing - Magnog - s/t
Come See - Belong - Common Era
It Could Be Anyone - The Church - Magician Among the Spirits
Never Lose That Feeling/Never Learn - Swervedriver - Mezcal Head
Theme D'Alice - Sonic Youth - Simon Werner A Disparu

But don't forget, you now have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Kadoo logo instead of pushing the play button.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Apocalypse now?

2011-05-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah, by now we've all seen 'em. The Billboards across the globe naming the date of our doom... too bad for us non-believers and spacerockers... I don't know about you but I have a beer circus to go to on May 22nd. Mighty inconvenient, I must say. Aw, fuck the silly religionistas! You don't get more retarded than that. Their heads may be in the clouds but OURS are in SPACE! Where to go from here, except into the apocalyptica! I've assembled a set loosely based on this theme... whether it's the lyrics, the title, or just a general feeling of apocalyptic dread (especially in the case of instrumentals), the songs in this set should tide you over until your judgment day. As for me, I openly, unapologetically, mock all Xtian 'tards, and I will see you in June! (although if all Xtian 'tards were to be swept off the earth on May 21st I would actually THANK GOD!)

One of my favorite-ever Echo & The Bunnymen tracks (another low-quality mastering job from the early days of CDs so TURN IT UP!) is a fitting place to start - not that it's specifically on-subject, but it certainly conjures the fall of mankind for me. One of the first record reviews that I read which turned me on to the Bunnymen was a single-paragraph brief that concluded "...and there's always a guitar going berserk somewhere in the background." SOLD! And 'Heaven Up Here' is still one of my desert island classics.

The latest Kriedler album is one of their best, and it explores heavier-than-their-usual percussion and ominous atmospherics. Vessels is a new discovery for me, and I dig how they expand on formula post rock by stretching it in unique directions.. math rock, jazz, noise, etc. Caspian, Mono and Explosions In The Sky are more in the trad post rock vein... well, hell! They're also some of the originators, and nobody makes dynamic hellfire-and-damnation instrumental rock drama like they do.

Then we bounce back from that epic and tense post rock segment with a little apocalyptic boogie from SF's Lumerians from their recent full-length debut. Then we pile drive straight to hell with the mantric motorik juggernaut that is The Psychic Paramount (you might even have to turn down a hair at this point...or not - these guys record in the red). And you don't get much darker than the last track on the otherwise 90s-mining debut by the UK's Yuck, as this track delves deep into bleak shoegaze murk.

What set of apocalyptica would be complete without Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon'? Except I try to avoid the obvious whenever possible, so I've instead chosen the Flaming Lips version instead - they recorded a song-by-song interpretation of said seminal space rock album with cohorts including their sister Band Stardeath & White Dwarfs, and guest stars like Henry Rollins (?!) and Peaches (?!?!?), and it's by far the best tribute I've heard.

The set lightens up a bit here with a few tracks of acid-damaged neo-hippie post-modern psych/folk/blooz whatchamacallit it from Dead Meadow, Akron/Family and Vietnam, kindred spirits and children of the forest all. Where did they get this disposition? Why from the original krautrock fairy kings of Amon Duul II of course! Who here inject a little self-aware snark into the darkness. Another band influenced by that era of kraut-psych and experimental rock, and probably the most-often included artist here on the Continuum, is Grails, with yet another stellar track from yet another flawless album.

The new self-titled 16th album from Bardo Pond may be their best yet, and this track certainly falls into our category here. I found an appropriately titled monster of a track from one of the various offshoots of the Acid Mother's Temple collective to supply this set's crescendo, and as our denouement, a decidedly out-of-character yet on-subject little ballad from Sonic Youth.

And if on the 21st of this month you should whiff some brimstone, hear the rumble of four horsemen and see the skies rend apart... well, just remember this line from an old Flaming Lips song: "...hell's got all the good bands... anyway."

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Over The Wall - Echo & The Bunnymen- Heaven Up Here
New Earth - Kriedler - Tank
Altered Beast - Vessels - White Fields & Open Devices
Crawlspace - Caspian - The Four Walls
Gone - Mono - Travels In Constants
It's Natural To Be Afraid - Explosions In The Sky- All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
Burning Mirrors - Lumerians - Translaminnia
Para5 - The Psychic Paramount - Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural
Rubber - Yuck - s/t
Time/Breathe (Reprise)/The Great Gig In The Sky - The Flaming Lips - The Dark Side Of The Moon
'Til Kingdom Come - Dead Meadow - Old Growth
Another Sky - Akron/Family - S/T II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT
Apoc-LA-lypse - Vietnam - The Concrete's Always Grayer On The Other Side Of The Street
Apocalyptic Bore - Amon Düül II - Vive La Trance
Doomsdayer's Holiday - Grails - Doomsdayer's Holiday
Don't Know About You - Bardo Pond - s/t
Dark Side of the Apocalypse - Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno - Ominous From the Cosmic Inferno
Do You Believe In Rapture? - Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped

But don't forget, you now have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Divshare (oh, looks like it's kadoo now? WTF?!?!?) logo instead of pushing the play button.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

The Crunch and The Swoon

2011-04-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

This set is all about two great tastes that go great together: the crunch and the swoon. The Trail Of Dead are certainly known for their crunch, with swooning prog arrangements and the crunch of shattered guitars. Their new album, as represented by this track, doesn't short change. Mogwai, of course, are the undeniable masters of crunching layers of guitar and swooning dynamics, as illustrated by this track off their latest. And krautrock O.G.s Faust (who seem to have splintered into at least two Fausts with different members that are still going strong and releasing albums 40 years later) has gotten crunchier over time as this abstract jam shows.

From there we swerve into the realm where crunch and swoon were most effectively cross-bred: that of SHOEGAZE. For those of you who somehow were and remained so out of touch that you haven't heard the term before, shoegaze refers to rock and pop bands with less stage presence than effects pedals, which they would stare at while strumming innocuous looking chords that sweetly made our ears bleed and minds spin (mostly in the UK, circa late 80s/early 90s). Since I'll be veering between the vintage originators (see parentheses above) and postmodern shoegaze you lucky listeners will have the opportunity to reach for your volume controls at every song start, as the mastering of the old stuff vs. new stuff varies wildly. Have fun with that - wish I could watch (snark). Better yet - just keep the volume at maximum, eh?

Swervedriver put the crunch into a hybrid of 70s American car rock and keening British guitar blast back in the heyday of shoegaze; LA glamsters Gliss crackle with barely restrained angst in their updated take on the genre; long-defunct Curve brought a techno feel to their version of the gaze, all dark tumultuous programmed rhythms and monster guitars; the modern SF gals in No Joy aren't shy with the volume on their take on swirling new gaze; Pale Saints brought an angularity into the staid open chord fuzz of most of the old school; My Bloody Valentine is an obvious choice here, but at least I've supplied you with a somewhat obscure track from the pre-Loveless days; Airiel act like the genre never went away and manage to out-bombast the founders; the relatively obscure Lilys bring the bliss to bliss pop (another overused term along with shoegaze); and Swirlies songs sounded quite convincingly like MBV outtakes circa Feed Me With Your Kiss, but who could bemoan them for that?

Bailterspace weren't strictly shoegaze - they dabbled in everything from Wire-esque minimalism to Swell Maps style deconstructivism to the absurdity of The Fall's Mark E. Smith - but this track emphasizes a foray into both the swoony and the crunchy that we've been discussing. Their progenitors The Gordons hinted at this approach but were also heavily influenced by Sonic Youth-y dissonance and mayhem. Speaking of Sonic Youth, I recently finished the installment of the 33-1/3 series of books discussing the creation of seminal albums which concerned Daydream Nation, so I had to include one of the best songs from that classic (but so many to choose from!) here.

And to wrap up this set, a diptych tribute to the phenomenal, life-changing show I just witnessed on a recent trip to the terra firma: doom mantra duo Om (with Emil Amos from Grails on drums!), and the return, after an eight-year hiatus, of the founding fathers of Montreal instrumental post rock, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Epic, it was. I hope this set is too.

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
The Fairlight Pendant - ...And You'll Know Us By The Trail Of Dead- Tao Of The Dead
Batcat- Mogwai - Special Moves
Tell The Bitch To Go Home - Faust - Something Dirty
Sci-Flyer - Swervedriver - Raise
Fade Away - Gliss - Love The Virgins
Wish You Dead - Curve - Doppleganger
Ghost Blonde - No Joy - Ghost Blonde
Ordeal - Pale Saints - In Ribbons
Honey Power - My Bloody Valentine- Tremolo
You Kids Should Know Better - Airiel - The Battle Of Sealand
Snowblinder - Lilys - In The Presence Of Nothing
Jeremy Parker - Swirlies - Blonder Tongue Audio Baton
Tag - Bailter Space - Capsul
Right On Time - The Gordons - s/t
Cross The Breeze - Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
Thebes - Om - God Is Good
Rockets Fall On Rocket Falls - Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui U.X.O.

But don't forget, you now have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Divshare logo instead of pushing the play button.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Motorik and more...

2011-03-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is an accidental set, pure happenstance, in which I somehow, for cryptic, subconscious, free-associative reasons, collected examples of the myriad forms of the krautrock modus known as motorik. I've written of it many times before, how, from Neu! to Kraftwerk to Stereolab to Circle, the forward momentum rush of travel-by-thought, incarnate as sound, as music, as rock 'n' roll, informs so many aspects of non-blues derived modern music (possible only since the postwar industrial age inspired art to reflect technology). It's one of those things... you know it when you hear it. And without getting into another academic discussion of what it MEANS, this set comprises a number of songs/styles in accordance with the ethos. Then we diverge, or perhaps more accurately, MERGE, into avant motorik jazztronica (with a vocal and song oriented slant), then culminate with a finishing flourish of experimental/instruMENTAL electro-psych-jazz. Sssshhh... just listen...

Soft Circle is Hisham Baroocha, formerly a noisemonger with Black Dice, now exploring mantra-as-motif, and on this latest one even getting a little dancefloor-friendly. Holy Fuck are a juggernaut of a live four-piece who dare anyone to sit still while they play. Woodsman came out of left field (Denver?!?!?) to surprise us with ebbing and flowing psychedelia like Animal Collective channeling vintage krautrock. Mogwai finally admit how much they listen to Neu! The arch druid Julian Cope has admitted it all along. The Church offer up an atypical track from an obscure and sadly overlooked mid-career album. Phil Manley breaks out of Trans Am and The Fucking Champs and busts some Klusterish kraut-homage. Jackie-O Motherfucker drop one of their most cohesive improvs ever, sounding more freight train propulsion than their usual ramshackle clamor. Swell Maps got the voodooooooooo...

Then...The Phantom Band have always incorporated motorik in their Scotch balladeering, but in a subtle way. LCD Soundsystem sound more like Eno on their latest than Eno does. And Talk Talk are mostly known for a couple cliche' 80s pop hits, but put out three albums of atmospheric avant vocal-jazz explorations that only critics and collectors seem to know about, from which this track has been culled. Which provides a nice transition for...

...a diversion into the realm of experimental jazztronica... sometimes difficult, not so accessible, but rewarding for those with the patience. So don't give up: if you like being transported to other worlds via the vehicle of space rock (and if you're here, you must), these tracks from Radian, Trapist, Supersilent and The Necks have the same principles and properties. Go with it... you'll be glad you did.

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming from this site, the following tracks should appear in the player below:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Bonzer - Soft Circle- Shore Obsessed
Super Inuit- Holy Fuck - LP
Dikembe Mutombo - Woodsman - Collages
Mexican Grand Prix - Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Kolly Kibber's Birthday - Julian Cope - World Shut Your Mouth
Angelica - The Church - Sometime Anywhere
Night Vision - Phil Manley - Life Coach
The Cryin' Sea - Jackie-O Motherfucker - Ballads Of The Revolution
Full Moon In My Pocket/Blam!!! - Swell Maps - A Trip To Marineville
The None Of One - The Phantom Band - The Wants
All I Want - LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
Desire - Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden
Feedbackmikro/City Lights - Radian - Chimeric
Time Axis (Part 2) - Trapist - Ballroom
11.4 - Supersilent - 11
Fatal - The Necks - Chemist

But don't forget, you now have the option of spacerock to go:

1. Click on the Divshare logo instead of pushing the play button.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Space Rock To Go!

2011-02-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

Here it is folks (finally!): by overwhelming popular demand, it's The Great Spacerock Continuum Podcast Experiment! New! Improved! Transportable! The deluxe take-it-with-you version of this month's "podcast" is ready for the busy spacerockers on the go. Remember: this isn't a true podcast, just an mp3 that you can download:

1. Click on the Divshare logo instead of pushing the play button.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

Unfortunately you'll still need to refer to this blog's text to know what song yer on, but hey... baby steps. Let me know what you think!

Startin' this set off with a bit of poppiness, (as "pop" as I ever get on the SRC). Not that this stuff would get played on pop radio, but let's just say it's more accessible and less challenging than your average space rock. KC Accidental is the precursor to Broken Social Scene, who are ostensibly a pop band. But most folks don't know that BSS's first album was pure instrumental post rock, and this track shows where that ethos originated (the titular K & C being BSS bandleaders Kevin Drew and Charles Spearin). In honor of the legendary Aussies The Church's current tour, where they are playing, in their entirety, three full albums: Starfish, Priest = Aura and their latest, Untitled #23, I offer you a track... from none of those albums, but instead a stellar track from the sleeper album I wish they were playing (thanks to Brian Wilcher for turning me on to it). Beach House is hardly space rock, being more somnambulant dream pop, but they veer close enough that they've always intrigued me, so I include here a track illustrating their associations with the genre. And San Francisco artist Christopher Willits is light enough to be considered on the pop side, if you could possibly include shimmering shoegazey guitar-through-laptop artists like him and Fennesz "pop".

What better place to drop White Noise Sound's most epic bliss rock anthem? This band has got all the touchpoints nailed (Spacemen 3, Primal Scream, Love & Rockets, et al.) and I can't stop listening to 'em. Speaking of epics... I don't usually plop a 20-minute track in the middle of a set, but using such a track as the closing coda risks less people hearing it, so right here, demanding your full attention, is quite possibly THE most epic track ever from legendary and prolific Japanese psych rockers (pictured above) Acid Mother's Temple's entire massive catalog. And it's not even close in intensity to some of their extended psychotic guitar-mangling face-melting freakouts, some measuring over an hour, so chill out, relax, absorb it into yer brain... and be exalted when the guitar solo comes in at around 14 minutes. You'll be glad you did.

Guess what? The mighty Mogwai has a new one, and it's their best in many years, and their most diverse and atypical collection of songs, as this track illustrates. Silly song titles aside (they tend to excel at this), this slow burner rivals their best work. Brit improv collective Mugstar is another band I can't get enough of lately; their motorik madness is unparalleled except perhaps by their stateside equivalent Oneida (whose wry psychedelic impressionism is detectable in this track). Speaking of triumphant returns, enigmatic Finnish absurdists Circle have managed to top themselves yet again, with a succulent stew of mind-melting manic/mantric prog they call, tongue firmly in cheek, the New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal. And speaking of metal, who knew that bands like this could rework such a tired cliche of a genre into one of the most viable musical art forms out there? Kylesa did. This multi-guitar, multi-vocalist Georgian (as in Savannah, not Russia) outfit is unlike any other nu-metalists out there. And they RAWK.

Grails continue to evolve; their more esoteric 70s influences (Popul Vuh, Ennio Morricone, et al.) continue to emerge from a slow thaw of more trad psych and post rock, and their experimentation is fearless, as this recent installation of their Black Tar Prophecies series shows. San Francisco vets The Alps (featuring Jefre Cantu-Ledesma of Tarentel) reside on similar terrain, and this sitar-laden exploration is among their best work. Jackie-O Motherfucker recently released one of their most accessible albums to date with Ballads of the Revolution, surprising even the legion of fans of their psych-Americana free-musik improv.

Next up, a little surprise in the form of Noel Redding's obscure post-Hendrix project, simply and cryptically titled Road. Rawkin' track, no? Circa 1972. One of last year's major discoveries for me was Wolf People (see January's set), a crew of young Brits paying homage to and expanding upon classic Cream, Blind Faith, Blue Cheer... even Jethro Tull (and a slew of 70s British baroque folk rock). I dare anyone to not jump out of their seats air-guitaring to this track. And again, in reference to my putting lengthy and challenging tracks as the ultimate mindfuck of each set... well here ya go: free-associative modern power trio Heavy Winged.

For you traditionalists who don't mind streaming, the following tracks should appear in the player below:

Nancy And The Girdle Boy - K.C. Accidental - Captured Anthems For An Empty Bathtub
Block - The Church - Uninvited, Like The Clouds
Mile Stereo - Beach House - Teen Dream
Sun Body - Christopher Willits - Tiger Flower Circle Sun
(In Both) Dreams and Ecstasies - White Noise Sound - s/t
Pink Lady Lemonade (May I Drink You Once Again?) - Acid Mothers Temple - Myth Of The Love Electrique
You're Lionel Richie - Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Technical Knowledge As A Weapon - Mugstar - ...Sun, Broken...
Vaellus - Circle - Rautatie
Unknown Awareness - Kylesa - Static Tensions
Self-Hypnosis - Grails - Black Tar Prophecies Vol. 4
Telepathe - The Alps - Le Voyage
Skylight - Jackie-O Motherfucker - Ballads Of The Revolution
Spaceship Earth - Road - s/t
One By One From Dorney Ranch - Wolf People - Steeple
Breathe Life - Heavy Winged - Sunspotted

2010 Albums Of The Year!!!

2011-01-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

But first, R.I.P. Captain...

You will be missed. You remain fast 'n' bulbous...

Now on to the spacerock champions! Why wait any longer? Here are BeeDub's Top Ten Albums of 2010!

1. Tame Impala 'Innerspeaker'
2. Black Mountain 'Wilderness Heart'
3. Wolf People 'Steeple'
4. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra 'Kollaps Tradixionales'
5. Sleepy Sun 'Fever'
6. Nice Nice 'Extra Wow'
7. White Noise Sound s/t
8. Mugstar 'Lime'/'...Sun, Unbroken...' (tie)
9. Liars 'Sisterworld'
10. White Hills s/t

Honorable Mention:
1. The Flaming Lips 'Dark Side of The Moon'
2. Sleigh Bells 'Treats'
3. The Besnard Lakes '...Are The Roaring Night'
4. Woodsman 'Collages'
5. Neil Young 'Le Noise'

Where to begin on 2010? It was a harrowing year for my family, but that's all in the past now, we survived and are stronger for it. But were my listening choices a bit... darker, this year? Or is that just coincidence? I think it was a dark year for most of us. But here's to an auspicious 2011...! Meanwhile the music was rife with heavy riffage, hypnotic repetition, haunting refrains... a whole lotta psychedelicism and altered state-inducing sounz, and dang if it didn't RAWK! Bring it on... all 3-1/2 hours of it!

UPDATE! New! Improved! Transportable! The deluxe take-it-with-you version of this month's "podcast" is ready for the busy spacerockers on the go. Remember: this isn't a true podcast, just an mp3 that you can download:

1. Click on the Kadoo logo instead of pushing the play button.

2. Click "download" when redirected to the Divshare site.

3. Once downloaded drag it to yer iTunes and sync it with yer pod - simple!

We start with a doozy of a new album by Neil Young. Just his ragged voice and inimitable electric guitar, with cinematic production by the master Daniel Lanois (hence the album title, "Le Noise"). It's epic, timely, angry, a balm for our souls' abrasions, and it feels like a great intro to this year-end set. Cuz, lookout! Next up is a leftfield entry from bubblegum punk duo Sleigh Bells, running the needle into the red with blown out beats, scuzzy guitar and little girl vocals, one of the most arrestingly enjoyable guilty pleasures in a long time. And with their nod to modern R&B, we slink into the closest thing to a dance-rock set ever seen on the Continuum, with !!!'s spacey slinky boogie that's equal part NYC no wave and rave-friendly dancefloor workouts, Soft Circle's newfound beat-orientation augmenting his usual ambient mantras, Holy Fuck still living up to their name with another album of ecstatic booty-shakers, and Squarepusher taking a rather rare departure from his spastic breakbeats and bassisms with a stop at the heavy metal disco.

Liars put out yet another album meeting or surpassing their best, and this track is a throwback to their early angsty-young-punk days. Jesu brings the dark metal of his Godflesh past to modern shoegaze dirges resulting in monolithic slabs of sorrow like this one. Serena-Maneesh put out their scattershot second collection exploring everything from saccharine bliss pop to swirling shoegaze to art-scuzz instrumentals recalling midperiod Primal Scream. Abe Vigoda took a departure from their arty afrobeat postpunk to dark anthems in an updated 4AD vein (dang if the singer's not channeling Robert Smith from The Cure!). And Tamaryn released a debut chock full of swooning shoegaze of a vintage variety (Pale Saints, anybody?).

This seemed to be the year for druggy dark & hazy back-alley mantras from bands who worship Spacemen 3 and their ilk, which is a dang fine thing! Crocodiles, Suuns, Royal Baths, Weekend and Moon Duo (the latter featuring members of Wooden Shjips!) could all fall into that category, although each has its own unique take on the template. Texas psychsters The Black Angels continue their homage to all things Roky on their third release. British newcomers Mugstar, who meet in a collision at the crossroads of acid rock and motorik, released two albums this year (hence the tie) of mindsplitting improvisational pyschedelia. And, as a gift to us all, White Noise Sound is like an unholy alliance between Spacemen 3, The Jesus & Mary Chain, and Love & Rockets - proudly wearing those influences on their sleeves, they may be derivative but it's derivative done right!

Among the more exploratory and experimental of the psych/improv realm are Nice Nice, who ventured from the cerebral math rock of their past to a more visceral approach (like in the way peyote is visceral), and two bands featuring members of Oneida, People of The North and White Hills, who expand the blueprint of the Big O's manic motorik sound. Woodsman appeared like forest pixies out of thin air with an album that, despite the separate tracks and titles, is basically one long improvisation, a magically hypnotic one. And The Alps and Citay continue to lead the pack of SF instrumental psych (although Citay balances its albums with songs drenched in soaring harmonies).

Nick Cave is still on a role with his second release as his Grinderman alter ego, where he and some of his Bad Seeds explore how sexual depravity is affected by middle age. Speaking of SF psych, the scene sweethearts Sleepy Sun have done it again with their sophomore album, which doesn't quite live up to the first but could hardly be called a slump. Black Mountain have also triumphed with their third album, more accessible than ever yet just as unabashedly RAWKING as ever.

Two young bands who put out such amazingly mature albums this year that my mind is still spinning (as are their CDs, constantly) are Australia's Tame Impala, whose breezy Floydian psych is like floating in a hammock, swinging in a warm breeze and the bliss of an acid comedown; and Wolf People from the UK who channel their forebears in Cream, Blind Faith, Blue Cheer and British baroque pop as if having been summoned as spirits from the past. If I had to pick three albums from 2010 to be the only ones I listened to for all of 2011 these two and the Black Mountain album would easily be my choices.

A couple weird ones, of the hard-to-classify variety, are Women, an enigmatic band of all men who incorporate 80s jangle pop, 90s indie rock and a load of experimental acts from This Heat to Swell Maps - a very diverse collection, this one; and Parlour, who, despite their sedate moniker, put together a collection of angular and energetic post rock designed to simultaneously confound and delight.

A band who shamelessly borrow from anthemic pop-metal and manage to make it all their own, Fang Island was the surprise sleeper of the year for me. Cloudland Canyon continue their dreamy stream-of-consciousness homage to vintage krautrock, and Deerhunter follow in a similar darkly nostalgic feel that I think is so appropriate for this last year. And The Besnard Lakes have perfected their combination of Canadian post rock and melodramatic torch songs.

And not to be overlooked - ending the set is high praise, don't forget - the band I predicted to take Number One Album... got close, but the first three positions were usurped by some young upstarts. Nevertheless A Silver Mt. Zion outdid themselves and most of their peers in the world of pathos-ridden apocalyptic post rock. All-in-all an AMAZING year for the ol' space rock. I'm just glad it's over, and happy to have all this incredible music as a result.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Walk With Me - Neil Young - Le Noise
Infinity Guitars - Sleigh Bells - Treats
AM/FM - !!! - Strange Weather, Isn't It?
First Time - Soft Circle - Shore Obsessed
Lucky - Holy Fuck - Latin
Maximum Planck - Squarepusher - Shobaleader One: d'Demonstrator
Scarecrows On A Killer Slant - Liars - Sisterworld
Dethroned - Jesu - Heart Ache & Dethroned
Blow Yr Brains In The Mourning Rain - Serena-Maneesh - S-M 2: Abyss In B Minor
Crush - Abe Vigoda - Crush
Mild Confusion - Tamaryn- The Waves
Billy Speed - Crocodiles - Sleep Forever
Gaze - Suuns - Zeroes
Needle And Thread - Royal Baths - Litanies
Coma Summer - Weekend - Sports
Motorcycle, I Love You - Moon Duo - Escape
Yellow Elevator #2 - The Black Angels - Phosphene Dream
Sunburnt Impedance Machine - Mugstar - Lime
It Is There For You - White Noise Sound - s/t
Set And Setting - Nice Nice - Extra Wow
Tunnels - People Of The North - Deep Tissue
Three Quarters - White Hills - s/t
Spirit Stone - Woodsman - Collages
Crossing The Sands - The Alps - Le Voyage
Secret Breakfast - Citay - Dream Get Together
When My Baby Comes - Grinderman - Grinderman 2
Desert God - Sleepy Sun - Fever
Old Fangs - Black Mountain - Wilderness Heart
Morning Born/Cromlech - Wolf People - Steeple
Desire Be, Desire Go - Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
Heat Distraction - Women - Public Strain
Simulacrenfield - Parlour - Simulacrenfield
Sidesweeper - Fang Island - s/t
Hope Sounds Dry - Cloudland Canyon - Fin Eaves
Desire Lines - Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
And This Is What We Call Progress - The Besnard Lakes - Are The Roaring Night
There Is A Light - Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra - Kollaps Tradixionales

Post Rock Primer

2010-12-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

The writer who supposedly coined the term post rock (generally attributed to Brit-crit Simon Reynolds in 1994) probably immediately regretted it, but it has become a blanket term for bands that use rock instrumentation in nonstandard formats (ie, not blues-based) or who rock the non-rock instrumentation (which makes me want to include bands like Rachels or Stars Of The Lid or World's End Girlfriend, but they don't rock... at all). A lot of it could be considered closer to classical in its arrangements, but you need to some have some semblance of guitar-bass-drums (preferably well-amplified) to be considered rock, therefore without those you become experimental or ambient or avant garde or whatever, which is very worthy, but not post rock.

As with last month's installment, it's impossible for me to include all the appropriate candidates in the field, and have left out some to avoid redundancy. Some artists, of course, are more influenced by what came before within the genre - call them the second generation - than they are totally innovative in and of themselves (Destroy All Dreamers, Jakob, Parlour, Maserati, The Mercury Program, This Is Your Captain Speaking, Kriedler, To Rococo Rot, Beans, Dreamend, etc.). And some straddle multiple genres - math rock, prog rock, post metal, psychedelic, and good ol' space rock - and aren't purely post rock (Cul De Sac, HiM, Kinski, Turing Machine, Don Caballero, Grails, Red Sparowes, Mare, Pelican, Russian Circles, etc.). Hey, we're gonna have a really long set* even without including EVERY band, ya know? So I tried to include primarily the groundbreakers, or at least those who do/did it best, as well as some of my personal faves, this being one of my all time favorite classifications of musix.

And I'm sorry, but despite numerous sources identifying bands like Bark Psychosis (ironically, they're the band Reynolds was reviewing when he first used the term), Talk Talk, Hood, Stereolab, Pram, Main or Bowery Electric as post rock, they just aren't in my book, okay? Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to.

For simplicity's sake there can be ascribed to the genre two primary schools (oversimplification in a Beatles/Stones dichotomy way, to be sure, but it helps): the Mogwai school and the Tortoise school. Mogwai are best known for developing the quiet-loud-louder-LOUDER STILL crescendo technique. They later abandoned it as the cliche it had become, but not after influencing countless other bands, including the Montreal school (Godspeed You! Black Emperor et al.)... it's all about the dynamics. And the flipside is the jazz and world music informed tendencies of the Chicago school of Tortoise and their ilk. Of course there are many other aspects to the genre (in fact, each band may be its OWN genre), but suffice it to say: it's mostly instruMENTAL, quite experiMENTAL, and just plain MENTAL.

*Another aspect of post rock, as you'll surely see, is the near-universal propensity for rather lengthy compositions. And despite omitting some major players to try and condense this list I've nonetheless left you with four and one half hours of the stuff! Merry freekin' xmas!!!

Hmmm... where to start? Well, what better intro than the opening salvo on the second of multitudes of Trans Am releases, a decidedly guitar-centric intro to a long and consistent catalog of their trademark rhythmic retro robot rock? Follow up with a quintessentially Canadian post rock template track from Do Make Say Think's debut? Yes, please! San Francisco's on-again off-again Tarentel have spanned the gamut from prog to ambient to clattering noisescapes, this track reflecting the chameleonic outfit's contribution to the traditional post rock blueprint. Their hometown peers in Rumah Sakit could be called math rockers, with their complex and unorthodox time signatures, but I think they fit nicely in this context. And the scene vets in Battles have dabbled in many aspects of boundary-pushing instrumental rock, but this early track demonstrates their take on our featured genre.

Returning to the Canadian avant garde, Le Fly Pan Am are confounding iconoclasts, simultaneously revering and shattering traditions with the firm force of tongue-in-cheek yet trance-inducing grooves and absurdist studio manipulations. Their forebears in This Heat took dissonance and arty noise to their zenith - they were one of the biggest influences on the genre. From Torino, Larsen delve deep into the music-as-a-living-breathing-being ethos; their songs pulse with a pulmonary primalcy. As the story goes, the enigmatic Italians invited trendsetter Michael Gira (of New York no wave innovators Swans), although they'd never met, to produce their first collection, supposedly playing silhouetted behind a screen and never once speaking to him in English, but occasionally erupting in chaos invisible to him. Legend has it he paid to put it out on his own Young God label sight unseen, as it were. And mysterious Detroit thunder trio Paik (two guitars and timpani drums) take outer space to the core of the earth and back to the garage where it belongs.

My next choice is bound to be controversial, in that My Bloody Valentine are most commonly (yet simplistically) categorized in the shoegazer realm, but this particular track illustrates the post rock aesthetic par excellence. What better way to take the rock out of rock than drop the rhythm tracks, leaving only undulating abstract sheets of sound? Supposedly it's all guitar and feedback and no keyboards. Speaking of enigmas, the obscure and prolific Finns in Circle have long and patiently toiled in the underground, perfecting, varying, expanding and contracting their namesake circular mantras. Reinvention is their modus operandi, yet their repetitive motif remains the same. Louisville KY legends Slint put out two highly influential yet oft-overlooked paeans to the po-mo ethic that still inspire countless bands to this day.

Earth started out stripping sludge metal to its core of massive fuzz and grind, moving at glacial speed and weight with the sparest of rhythmic elements, emulating the elemental music of the spheres, as heavy as the rotation of the planet we call home. As they evolved they eventually eroded away the veneer of gauzy distortion that encased their songs until all that was left was a gritty twang and thud, like the hulking pace of giants wandering through a desert landscape, wide brimmed hats pulled down over their eyes (cinematic, ain't it?). Another act balancing earthiness and ethereality, Jackie-O Motherfucker mangle free-folk faux traditionals and experiments in hypnotic repetition born of the purest improvisation. Labradford excel at soundtrack music for imaginary films, with a spaghetti western slant, skewed by otherworldly drones.

Yume Bitsu seem to hover in the stratosphere, where shimmering layers of atmosphere are refracted by effects-laden guitars and the occasional ecstatic vocalization. Continuing the rarefied anomaly of song-oriented (ie, utilizing vocals) post rock the wistful and transcendent (and lamentably defunct, as are Team Yume) Rum Diary capture an innocence and melancholy well beyond their youthful vim. The post rock project of Fourtet electronicist Keiran Hebden, Fridge ranged from rhythmic complexity to pure abstraction, often within the same song. And Jim O'Rourke's Gastr Del Sol was rarely grounded in the mundane fundaments of la musica rock, preferring fractured avant folk and musique concrete. He and his fellow Chicagoans in Tortoise led the charge in the formative years of American post rock, oft-imitated but never duplicated, as this track from Tortoise's first album clearly shows.

SF Bayrea skateboarding guitar stalwart Tommy Guerrero gathered some like-minded friends for some explorations of the Chicago school's tenets with Jet Black Crayon. Pele perfected the clean guitar interplay and diving, dodging rhythm patterns that inspired many imitators (they devolved into Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, a much more challenging logical progression of their previous band's sound). Salvatore bottled up a more clearly distilled version of the style in sip-sized portions. And Souvaris may play within similar constructs but they make them their own through sheer frenetic enthusiasm.

Finally we make it to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Montreal scene's most admired and influential orchestral apocalyptic soothsayers, who combine dystopian found recordings with an unrivaled climactic pathos. Unrivaled except perhaps by Sigur Ros and A Silver Mt. Zion; the former a swooning Icelandic crew whose leader bows electric guitars to coax the soar of cellos in space, and croons in elfin falsetto to lure the listener into imaginary worlds hidden behind earthly shadows; and the latter an extension of Godspeed steeped in even heartier melodrama with creaking strings augmenting the cracking voice of heartbreak.

Another band wallowing in string sections, and electric guitars that sound like string sections, Japan's Mono have taken the extreme dynamics (see Mogwai below) beyond the pale - not only do they get loud, louder and insanely LOUD with a finesse rarely seen, they also take songs into impossibly quiet moments, barely-there whispers that forebode the inevitable explosive transition. Speaking of which, Texas' Explosions In They Sky borrow from the same songbook of pathos and orchestral-sounding fretwork, all staccato shimmer and incendiary combustions of dangerously overdriven amps. German trio Daturah bring an hallucinatory quality to their crescendo-focused opuses, where the instruments crackle like arc lightning, truly cathartic reflections of Wagnerian sturm und drang.

And the most obvious place to conclude, especially while on the subject of dynamics, is with the Glaswegian godfathers Mogwai, largely credited with the invention of this aspect of post rock. Although they've moved on from the crescendo-for-its-own-sake model, this early track sums up their essence, their manifesto... where beauty comes from ugliness, peace from violence, calm from turbulence... and the world has never been the same.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Motr - Trans Am - Surrender To The Night
1978 - Do Make Say Think - s/t
Steede Bonnet - Tarentel - From Bone To Satellite
I Can't See Anything When I Close My Eyes - Rumah Sakit - s/t
S Z 2 - Battles - B
L'espace Au Sol Est Redessine Par D'immenses Panneaux Bleus - Le Fly Pan Am - s/t
Health And Efficiency - This Heat - Health And Efficiency
Tu Ark - Larsen - La Fever Lit
Purple - Paik - The Orson Fader
To Here Knows When - My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Dedofiktion - Circle - Prospekt
Good Morning, Captain - Slint - Spiderland
Land Of Some Other Order - Earth - Hex: Or Printing In The Infernal Method
Bonesaw - Jackie-O Motherfucker - The Magick Fire Music
Up To Pizmo - Labradford - Fixed::Context
I Wait For You - Yume Bitsu - s/t
Back In The Hardcore Days - The Rum Diary - We're Afraid Of Heights Tonight
Five Four Child Voice - Fridge - Happiness
Hello Spiral - Gastr Del Sol - Upgrade & Afterlife
Ry Cooder - Tortoise - s/t
The Mentalist - Jet Black Crayon - Inaccuracies Of The Mind Machine
Pickled Pear - Pele - Elephant
Easy - Salvatore - Tempo
Nobody Is Fine and Everybody Needs a Drink - Souvaris - A Hat
Blaise Bailey Finnegan III - Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada
Svefn-g-englar - Sigur Rós - Ágætis Byrjun
I Built Myself A Metal Bird - A Silver Mt. Zion - Kollaps Tradixionales
Karelia - Mono - Hey, You
Catastrophe And The Cure - Explosions In The Sky - All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
Warmachines - Daturah - s/t
Mogwai Fear Satan - Mogwai - Young Team

Krautrock Sampler

2010-11-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, kids! Edu-muh-cation time! For those of you who regard my references to krautrock and its sub-genre motorik with suspicion and unease, this month's installment (which borrows its title from eccentric British musician - of The Teardrop Explodes and multitudinous solo albums - enthusiast and historian Julian Cope's long out-of-print fanboy tribute) should help clarify things.

What I won't do is get bogged down in history - there are numerous tomes dedicated to just that, including Cope's more subjective musings. In fact the playlist is organized by flow, not chronology. Sticking with my policy of never repeating a track I may have not been able to include my first choice of tracks from these bands, but you can search the previous posts for various other appearances of the artists featured here. Nor will I attempt to be comprehensive - only the major players, the most influential and innovative, some of whom cross-pollinated the scene by playing in more than one of the bands I've included, will be featured. Sorry Cosmic Jokers. Sorry German Oak. Sorry Agitation Free. If I tried to include everyone we'd have an even lengthier set than this one already is (hey, the songs are long too! which is typical of krautrock). I'm more concerned with who did what and how they sounded. The various modi operandi of the krautrock scene are wildly disparate, from psychedelic to free rock to proto-prog to analog electronic to pure avant garde... and everything in between.

Suffice it to say... it's the late 60s/early 70s in Berlin, in Cologne, in Dusseldorf... and it's one of the most exciting times for rock music, momentous at the very least, as many of these bands never made much of an impact outside the European and British undergrounds music scenes until many years, even decades, later. Oh, at let's clear up a misconception: the term krautrock was coined by the pigeonhole-crazed British rock press - the politically correct term, coined by Tangerine Dream's Edgar Froese, is kosmische. As in COSMIC.

We begin whit La Dusseldorf, which, like I said, isn't the best place to start chronologically. But I think it's a great track to start the set off with a bang and also introduce the concept of motorik. The word means just what it seems to: it describes a form of music that is motorized, moving, propelled ever forward by a propulsive, usually minimalistic, 4/4 beat. Bass, guitar and keys should be interlocking with the percussion, flowing and lush, embellishing the rush of movement. It is the very antithesis of "free" music drumming (think free jazz, where the beat purposefully never settles into a locked groove). The drummer who, if he didn't "invent" it (he very well may have), excelled at its simple tenets, is one Klaus Dinger. He developed it during his tenure with a very early incarnation of Kraftwerk, who continued the style with their synthesizers and drum machines after his departure along with guitarist Michael Rother to form Neu! (who are next up in the set) where he perfected it (as well as heavily influencing loads of modern bands from Stereolab to Trans Am). Rother and Dinger split and while Dinger did La Dusseldorf for a few albums, Rother birthed a large catalog of solo albums (the next track is from one of them) continuing his bandmate's drumming style but focusing more on his own guitar explorations, then Rother joined up with members of Cluster to form Harmonia, a perfect midway point between those two acts. Harmonia blended a streamlined motorik vision with the more amorphous electronics of the experimental electronic (krautronic?) duo Cluster (aka Kluster). The tracks from those two artists I've featured are of their more straight-forward variety rather than the free-drifting experiments both dabbled in.

Speaking of free-drifting electronics, I guess now's the time in the set to showcase Tangerine Dream, who dabbled in the formless masses of sound of avant garde eletronica, but also had some more structured pieces, like the slow-burner I've included here, as well as the hackneyed 80s soundtrack work most Americans know them for. They actually used traditional instruments along with their proprietary electronics! Who knew? Guitar, bass, drums, flute, strings, etc. are featured in their early work. The same can be said for Kraftwerk, who in the early lineup mentioned above (Rother and Dinger along with Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider) , who ventured on into their more widely known robot rock on the Autobahn) were downright experimental, as evidenced by this track which should catch many of you by surprise.

I think it's about time to bring the ROCK, don't you? Ash Ra Tempel and Guru Guru were acid rock afficionados, who combined traditional blues-rock format, blazing wah-wah guitar solos and swirling psychedelics with the occasional foray into avant gardism and lysergic exploration ("Wouldn't it be great to get Timothy Leary to sing on an album?"). Then we bring the weird: no less rockist OR psych-inspired, Amon Duul literally began as a hippie acid cult/commune; the more refined version II laid out the template for future prog rockers to follow, all multi-part song suites, virtuoso soloing, and histrionic fantasy story-telling.

Let's quiet things down a bit with the elegiac/ecstatic compositions of Florian Fricke, who as Popol Vuh (taken from the Mayan creation myth), drew from classical, ethnic and devotional music to create, if not all actual soundtracks (he composed for Werner Herzog, among others), at least soundscapes. Popol Vuh was the least rockist of all krautrock, but entirely kosmische and utterly essential. It would be impossible to chronicle the krautrock bands without including their most legendary possibly their most influential wunderkinds, known as The Can (later amended to just Can). Combining ethnic music elements, circular improvisatory song structures, and unhinged stream-of-consciousness vocals (first briefly from the American Malcolm Mooney then more prolifically from the Japanese Damo Suzuki, who both sang in English). Can were and continue to be one of the greatest spacerock bands of all time, as this epic illustrates.

And we wrap this survey up with the enigmatic Faust, the tricksters of the bunch, who dabbled in folk, experimental, musique concrete, tape manipulation, and the heavy instrumental psychedelia that would influence multiple future genres, especially that of sturm-und-drang post rock (next month's segment will be my definitive post rock set!). The track I've included is somewhat atypical of their sound, but is featured for two reasons: the title is a piss-take on the musicians of the genre's disdain for the demeaning label kraut, but simultaneous beats the motorik bands at their own game in a blazing maelstrom of hypnotic sonic mayhem that only Faust could pull off (check their latter day "comeback" work in the 90s and 00s for examples of where this has led them).

This, kids, is krautrock! What do all these bands have in common? Well, in a nutshell, they're all... sehr kosmische. I highly recommend continued study here: The Crack In The Cosmic Egg

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Düsseldorf - La Düsseldorf - s/t
Hallogallo - Neu! - s/t
Erikönig - Michael Rother - Fernwärme
Walky-Talky - Harmonia - Deluxe
Sowiesoso - Cluster - Sowiesoso
Fly And The Collision Of Comas Sola - Tangerine Dream - Alpha Centauri
Stratovarius - Kraftwerk - Kraftwerk I
Amboss - Ash Ra Tempel - s/t
Immer Lustig - Guru Guru - Kanguru
Soap Shop Rock - Amon Duul II - Yeti
Hosianna Mantra - Popol Vuh - Hosianna Mantra
Halleluhwah - Can - Tago Mago
Krautrock - Faust - Faust IV

Okay, where were we...?

2010-10-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Oh yes... the SPACEROCK! Sorry for the delay, but since we were getting off our target of a new post on the first of every month, and because of a multitude of terrestrial issues and events to attend to, I decided to blow off September completely and move right on up to October. Okay by you? In the long run I not only managed to put together a singularly smoking set for this month, but to get a head start on some "educational courses" for the November and December installments, not to mention beginning to compile the auditory event that is the January Best Of segment which will reflect on 2010. Quite a year it's been, and what a massive couple-few months we have left. Of course there are those that say there is no time in in space...

We begin with a bang of bombast in the form of a re-release of criminally overlooked 90s British garage/psych monsters, The Heads. Then, in tribute to their Bay Area appearance this Saturday, a track from The Flaming Lips' most recent album (not counting their song-by-song cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon), the epic double-album Embryonic. Another band toiling in relative obscurity, the underappreciated all-male Canadian 4-piece Women concoct a heady mix of post-punk dissonance (a stripped-down Sonic Youth?) and art-rock absurdity (a less-abrasive This Heat?), as this track from their second album demonstrates. And in what is perhaps the sleeper of the year, Sleigh Bells comes from left field, marrying a coquettish child star's saccharine R&B-esque vocals with a hardcore guitarist's blistering overdriven riffs , and leaving nothing but scorched earth and a smile on your face. Fun stuff!

A semi-contrived segue back into garage/psych of a dark and scuzzy bent is up next with tracks from Jesus & Mary Chain worshiping Woven Bones, newly-gone electro-shoegaze Crocodiles, and a new one from Texas trippers The Black Angels that adds newfound color to their previously dark monotone.

And now for something completely different: modern Swedish progsters Dungen are back with a more exploratory collection that expands on their early 70s influences, to great effect. Nick Cave and his new band of seedy old debauchers Grinderman continue to put a heretofore unseen ragged angsty edge to his Southern goth tendencies. And for comparison's sake the next track is from the late great Memphis originators of said genre The Grifters, whose 4-track fidelity surpasses most massive studio productions. They are sorely missed.

Where to go from here...? How about off the deep end with some damaged instrumental improv from enigmatic rockers Peeesseye & Talibam! (that's their exclamation point)...? An extended track from Oneida's likely best album of a few years back, Secret Wars...? A sincerely tongue-in-cheek homage to krautrock's motorik groove from electronic-gone-organic Norweegie "space disco" master Prins Thomas...?

Seems like the only logical departure here is for the heavenly climes of ecstatic dream pop, from blisstronic duo Viernes, the shimmering vocals of Scots one-offs Simian, and the homecoming kings of early-90s shoegaze Chapterhouse (this in honor to their upcoming San Francisco appearance). A pseudo-Eastern synth-psych mantra from Brooklyn/Boston hippie-futurists (a trio of current and former hare krishna practitioners - no shit!) Prince Rama next, followed by a new track from modern krautronica duo Cloudland Canyon, and a blast of shoegazing post-metal shrapnel from Miami outfit Torche.

The illustrious Black Mountain, featured in this space many a time, have put out a contender for album of the year... yet again. But you'll have to wait until January for a track from that one. Instead I wrap up this set with a slow-burn opus from their previous album that shows yet another dimension to the Vancouver rockers who worship at the altar of Sabbath, Zeppelin and Floyd, yet manage to make the trope of those godfathers sound new again.

See you in November! I'll try to be on time...

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
Quad - The Heads - Relaxing With...
The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine - The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
China Steps - Women - Public Strain
Treats - Sleigh Bells - Treats
Creepy Bone - Woven Bones - In And Out And Back Again
Stoned To Death - Crocodiles - Sleep Forever
Bad Vibrations - The Black Angels - Phosphene Dream
Högdalstoppen - Dungen - Skit I Allt
Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man - Grinderman - Grinderman 2
Black Fuel Incinerator - The Grifters - Crappin' You Negative
You Tried (To Eat It) - Peeesseye & Talibam! - s/t
Changes In The City - Oneida - Secret Wars
Sauerkraut - Prins Thomas - s/t
Sinister Love - Viernes - Sinister Devices
The Wisp - Simian - Chemistry Is What We Are
Falling Down - Chapterhouse - Whirlpool
Om Mane Padme Hum - Prince Rama - Shadow Temple
Mothlight Pt. 2 - Cloudland Canyon - Fin Eaves
Out Again - Torche - Songs For Singles
Bright Lights - Black Mountain - In The Future

Late again...

2010-08-08T15:33:00.001-07:00

Ah well... all apologies, my friends. Those of you who know me understand that I've been attending to terrestrial affairs of a massively celebratory portent. That, and... well, I've been caught up in a lazy hazy summer - after all, it IS August. Sometimes you just gotta soak up some of the most glorious of earthbound pleasures before returning to the cold airless confines of the spacerock satellite.

But no excuses! The music must go on! And I think I've got a doozy of a set for you... a tad scattershot and helter-skelter perhaps, yet encompassing various and disparate factions of Ye Olde Space Rock as they enter my stream of consciousness. Onwards!

Superstar DJ duo The Chemical Brothers have always had a psychedelic side to their block-rockin' beats, as this track from their stellar return-to-form from this year aptly illustrates. Githead, led by former Wire frontman Colin Newman, spans the gamut from Wirey postpunk minimalism to shoegaze, bliss pop, and modern motorik, as in the case of this track. Another track here from Tame Impala's recent release, fast-tracking its way to best album of the year - this track shows why. I just can't get enough of them!!! Another surprise from the realm of DJ/electronica here from the illustrious DJ Spooky, from his recent album that sounds ever more like an electro-organic hybrid, and that features not one but TWO instrumental (and not sampled either?!?!?) Led Zeppelin covers including this one, probably the Zep's most psychedelic song.

Speaking of DJs, the Scottish dancefloor outfit Simian's Mobile Disco was not always such. They began, bizarrely enough, as Simian, a dream pop band saturated with blissful Beach Boys derived harmonies - this track is probably their most stand-out, and the refrain "chemistry is what we are" gets me every time. Berlinian post rock-tronica trio To Rococo Rot (love the palindromic name!) are back after a six-year hiatus, sounding more refined and sophisticated than ever, and we're the luckier for it. High Places are a primitivist mostly-electronic duo that incorporate a lot of faux-African rhythms in their play along with lovely soaring female vocals, but I chose this track for its relevance within this set, as the distant shimmering guitar sheen conjures vintage krautrock explorations (think Ash Ra Tempel). For the polyrhythmic portion of this playlist look no further than The Books, with their own fine return-to-form released this year and possibly topping all previous releases in vision and diversity, and also hyper-rhythmists Mahjongg, who returned this year with their most booty-shaking yet still head-spinning release yet (although I culled this track from their previous album).

Chicago power trio Mass Shivers come to me without much context, but I find their nerd-punk math-psych ramblings enigmatically compelling. Another difficult-to-quantify unit, Indian Jewelry returned with yet another album of dark-psych agit-prop electro-glam musings that doesn't quite measure up to their previous work but I plucked this gem from this less-distinguished album because I love them so much. Hopefully they've got plenty of heady material left in them for the next one. Next up, the bastard children of vintage German motorik La Dusseldorf show us how Neu! and Kraftwerk weren't the only purveyors of that uniquely Teutonic trance rhythm.

Speaking of enigmas (I was, wasn't I?) the next two artists define the "creative unit toiling in obscurity for the better of all mankind, so abstruse and unique that they defy category" ethos that I love so dearly, and they both rank with my favorite bands of all time. Not only are they obscure, they're from exotic lands: Larsen, despite the Swedish name, are from Turin, Italy, and supposedly laid down initial tracks from behind an opaque screen for producer Michael Gira (Swans), who never actually met them before signing them to his label. Myth? Legend? PR gimmick? Who cares? Their music often appears to pulse, to breathe, to be a living thing, and their inventiveness and diversity continue to inspire. Also musically diverse to an infinite degree is Pori, Finland's mighty Circle, a band who have put out dozens of hard-to-find releases encompassing everything from postrock, folk, ambient, free-improv and even hardcore metal. Their only constant is a self-referential repetitive circularity to their mostly instrumental (except when they're singing in Finnish or a made-up language they call Meronian) blitzkrieg. One of the most exciting avant-rock acts in history and still going strong despite the fact that most of the world has never heard of them and probably never will.

Bringing us a textbook example of instrumental postrock, Red Sparowes nevertheless manage to bring justification to the much-maligned genre. Beloved yet long-defunct Jersey boys Chavez managed to bring angular 90s indie rock (Polvo?) into the Marshall stacks guitar worship of arena rock (Smashing Pumpkins?) - after only two albums and a recent remastered repackage from which this is taken, they are sorely missed. Fans of the Spacerock Continuum know I love to stack the end of the set with longer more mind-fucking tracks, and this one is no exception: first a guitar sludge-and-shrapnel behemoth from Long Beach, CA's Magic Lantern, then an epic cinemascopic journey through the western high desert from the aptly-named Scenic (featuring former members of Savage Republic) that summons a peyote-fueled vista of Joshua trees, boulder formations, rocky arroyos, coyotes, rattlesnakes, sandstone canyons...

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
Dissolve - The Chemical Brothers - Further
Space Life - Githead - Art Pop
It Is Not Meant To Be - Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
No Quarter Dub - DJ Spooky - The Secret Song
Drop And Roll - Simian - Chemistry Is What We Are
Seele - To Rococo Rot - Speculation
Canada - High Places - Vs. Mankind
I Am Who I Am - The Books - The Way Out
Tell The Police The Truth - Mahjongg - Kontpab
Because The Sun - Mass Shivers - Ecstatic Eyes Glow Glossy
Tono Bungay - Indian Jewelry - Totaled
Time - La Düsseldorf - La Düsseldorf
In Illusions Of Order - Red Sparowes - The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer
Flight 96 - Chavez - Better Days Will Haunt You
Deathshead Hawkmoth - Magic Lantern - High Beams
A Journey Through The Outer Reaches Of Inner Space - Scenic - The Acid Gospel Experience

Better late than never...

2010-07-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being AWOL, spacerock fans. The satellite link-up was being upgraded and now I have an even faster upload capability (up, up and UP, into the stratosphere!!!), the better to bombard you with cosmic rays of sound! And this month's playlist is one of my freekingest bestest, if I do say so m'self. So let's dive right in, shall we?

We start with one of the most anticipated projects of this year: not only is it The Flaming Lips, one of the greatest bands of all time, and not only is it also Lips frontman Wayne's Coyne's nephew's band Stardeath & White Dwarfs (appearing previously here on the SRC), not only does it feature unlikely guest stars Henry Rollins (?!) and Peaches (?!?!?), but... it's a song-by-song cover of the entire album The Dark Side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd's seminal zenith and easily one of the greatest albums - spacerock or not - of all time!!!!! And as with any worthwhile cover versions it's a loose interpretation, taking liberties with arrangements but keeping the lyrics and vibe intact. Turn this shit up loud, loud, LOUD!!!!

Hard to top that, surely, but my original lead-off track is next, from the sophomore effort by SF's Sleepy Sun. Mind-blowing is an understatement - still got this turned up LOUD?!?!? I hope so cuz next up is a track from the band and the album that has me absolutely obsessed! Australia's Tame Impala have a timeless sound - shades of mid-period Floyd, early krautrock, heavy blooz (from Hendrix to Blue Cheer), 70s-era production values and lo-fi psych tendencies worthy of the Elephant 6 collective. You'll be hearing a LOT more of these guys. Dare I say they may usurp the best album of the year spot? Next, why not add a semi-sincere/semi-kitsch contribution to the very sensibilities we've just explored, circa 1988? Tongue-in-cheek or pure homage? YOU decide. LA allstars Masters of Reality put out a debut album that was a pastiche of all things 70s prog, psych and stomp, with an obvious love as well as instrumental prowess. And subsequently why not follow them with the original masters of reality, Black Sabbath, with an oft-overlooked track from the album that inspired it all?

Then a bit of a departure as we get eclectic with a once-per-album balls-out instrumental jam from normally fey folksters Woods, an apocalyptic lament from Grails' Emil Amos aka Holy Sons, a slow-burn freakout from Long Beach's Magic Lantern, a fist-pumping anthem from Japandroids' recent odds & sods album, a smoldering dark-psych love song from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and a song from the new Alcest release that pinpoints the exact juncture where swirling shoegaze meets mind-splitting metal.

Want time to regroup? Forget it: next up is Tobacco, a refugee from the enigmatic rural southern collective Black Moth Super Rainbow (think Blair Witch meets Deliverance on the brown acid), who not only continues his personal exploration of freakazoid retro-futurism, all analog synth, wrecked beats and broken vocoder, but manages to blow his first effort off the planet with this release! Okay, now a brief reprieve with a soaring cinematic journey through the desert both real and of the mind with the peyote-fueled visions of Scenic, featuring members of Savage Republic and Shiva Burlesque (for those who remember - LA peeps?!?!?). Taking it up a notch with some trance-inducing heavy repetition is Holy Fuck who also manged to top their debut this year. Manitoba, the former moniker of the Canuck electronic artist now (more widely) known as Caribou who had to change his name to appease the similarly-named has-been Jersey boy Handsome Dick Manitoba who once fronted 80s faux-punx the Dictators, continues a forward-long momentum often known as motorik (his first two albums as Manitoba have subsequently been released under his Caribou incarnation). And in a similar vein (solo electronicist going organic and a bit motorik), David Holmes, who flirted with the mainstream by soundtracking the Ocean's Eleven franchise, goes mostly organic for an album in tribute to his deceased parents, with stellar results. And still within the realm of solo electro-organic workouts, Prins Thomas brings a distinctly Scandinavian vibe to a solo effort vibing on the vestiges of post rock.

We then summon a little drift und drang improv from SF's defunct Mirza, an early effort by the SF free-psych wunderkind Steven R. Smith, also featured here previously as Hala Strana and Ulaan Khol. Speaking of Ulaan Khol, let's let them add a ballistic blast at the end of Mirza's heady jam, shall we? And then what more perfect way to end this than with an epic raga by Rangda, an improv-heavy made-in-heaven collaboration between Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasney and The Sun City Girls' Sir Richard Bishop?!?!? Absolutely EPIC, I tell you! Don't believe me? Just L-I-S-T-E-N.............!

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
Speak To Me / Breathe The Flaming Lips - The Dark Side Of The Moon
Marina - Sleepy Sun - Fever
The Bold Arrow Of Time - Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
The Blue Garden - Masters Of Reality - Masters of Reality
After Forever - Black Sabbath - Master Of Reality
From The Horn - Woods - At Echo Lake
Evil Falls - Holy Sons - Decline of the West
Friendship - Magic Lantern - Platoon
Darkness on the Edge of Gastown - Japandroids - No Singles
Aya - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Beat The Devil's Tattoo
Écailles De Lune - Part 2 - Alcest - Écailles De Lune
Constellation Dirtbike Head - Tobacco - Maniac Meat
Lightspeed - Scenic - The Acid Gospel Experience
Stilettos - Holy Fuck - Latin
Hendrix With Ko - Manitoba - Up In Flames
Holy Pictures - David Holmes - he Holy Pictures
Ørkenvandring - Prins Thomas - s/t
The Path Is White Clouds - Mirza - Iron Compass Flux
Untitled 5 Ulaan Khol - III
Plain Of Jars - Rangda - False Flag

Is it June yet?!?!?

2010-06-01T15:26:00.000-07:00

The weather systems down on your blue-green planet seem to be a bit haywire lately - is this climate change, or just the return of that little bastardo, El Nino? Had enough rain? Well howzabout some burning bright starlight shining through the clouds? Okay then... commence beaming down love, light, and crazymusix...!

We begin with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, in a triumphant return to form with their noisiest yet still quite accessible effort to date. Liars have also topped themselves with this new release, bringing back some of their earlier postpunk guitar crunch to their dark electronic weirdness. Alcest have gone beyond the heavy shoegaze of their debut for a full-on metal assault that remains just as transcendent and psychedelic as before. Serena-Maneesh have also expanded on their glam-gaze sound incorporating everything from bliss-pop sheen to motorik mayhem. Speaking of motorik, the Brian Jonestown Massacre seem to be dabbling in it now - who do they think they are, Primal Scream?

Continuing that rushing momentum are Mi Ami, adding berserk latinesque polyrhythms and insane falsetto vocals (yes, that's a dude singing), Holy Fuck, with THE most acid-drenched stunner this year, Nice Nice, dabbling in their own off kilter psych/motorik, an expansion of their previous math rock incarnation, and Wooden Shjips, who almost manage to get funky on this rawkin' track.

Then it's time for a mid-set epic with a massive sprawl of kaleidoscopic repetition and nonsense from obscure Long Beach outfit Magic Lantern, who I can't wait to hear more from, and their lead guitarist takes it down a notch to let our minds and ears rest in this solo exploration as Sun Araw (read it backwards).

Broken Social Scene always manage to add spacey elements to their otherwise hook-filled yet delightfully skewed avant pop, and this instrumental track brings me back to their very first album, a little-heard gem of an album of mostly instrumental post rock. I promised you some new Society of Rockets last month, and here it is, finding them more Stereolab than Sly & The Family Stone, to great effect.

Warehouse dwelling utopians can be a mixed bag, musically speaking, but some of the ones who pull it off (Akron/Family, anyone?) are worth cutting through the bohemian pretentions to find the meat of mind-altering jams. Case in point, the paisley pop meets synthy sonics of MGMT, and the retro-futurist 70s/80s worship of Yeasayer.

Just to throw a late set left hook I slipped in a Pit Er Pat track, here exploring their spacier dubbier side. And we bring the set to crescendo and conclusion with a brand new head trip from the illustrious Cave. I hope this brings the light of this reluctant summer into full display. There's no reason you can't enjoy some earthly pleasures like warm days, cold beverages and a gently swinging hammock while your mind wanders the heavens in search of solace and spirituality. Cheers!

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
Half-State - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Beat the Devil's Tattoo
Scissor - Liars - Sisterworld
Percées de lumière - Alcest - Écailles De Lune
Ayisha Abyss - Serena-Maneesh - S-M 2: Abyss In B Minor
Tempo 116.7 (Reaching For Dangerous Levels Of Sobriety) - The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?
Latin Lover - Mi Ami - Steal Your Face
Silva & Grimes - Holy Fuck - Latin
A Vibration - Nice Nice - Extra Wow
Vampire Blues - Wooden Shjips - Vol. 2
At The Mountain Of Madness - Magic Lantern - s/t
Get Low - Sun Araw - Heavy Deeds
Meet Me In The Basement - Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
Circulate And Sing - The Society Of Rockets - Future Factory
Siberian Breaks - MGMT - Congratulations
Wait For the Wintertime - Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals
Specimen - Pit Er Pat - The Flexible Entertainer
Brigitte's Trip (White Light/White Jazz) - Cave - Pure Moods

Another Beltane under our belt

2010-05-01T10:03:00.001-07:00

Happy spring, you spacerockin' pagans!

Since last month's highlighted album was the recent release by Montreal's A Silver Mt. Zion, I thought I'd go back and revisit their previous work, and the resulting find is the opening track for this month's set, yet another anguished apocalyptic epic that cements their place in the post rock canon (give it til the 3:40 mark if you're skeptical). Next up, equally histrionic and equally Canadian, The Besnard Lakes have come up with their best collection yet with their third release, as this barnburner indicates. Portland, OR, eccentric Luke Wyland, who performs in many guises including the revolving ensemble known enigmatically as Au, has topped himself as well with this EP, strangely enough a collection of alternate versions of previous songs (and one new track, featured here) that manages to improve on those versions every time, a rarity in this approach.

Also rare would be the number of times that Massive Attack has been included on a space rock playlist, but here they are. Their early incarnation as the soulful side of UK trip hop and their gradual transition into a This Mortal Coil-eque ensemble creating neo-goth explorations has come full circle, incorporating all the best elements of their metamorphosis into this, their best album in quite a while. Remaining in the realm of space-tronica, we attempt to rein in the mostly brain-frying avant garde tendencies of experimental duo Autechre by plopping an unusually accessible (if you can believe that) track out of context into the middle of this set to see if it sticks (and I think it works, if nothing other than an interesting transition). As long as we're heading out there, lets dabble in the post-post punk update of the Brits known as These New Puritans and Oaksterdammers called Clipd Beaks who both put out stellar debuts, promising much for the future. And the realm of reinvented post punk and neo-no wave is lucky to have the long-standing pillar known as Liars, who released a return to form tour de force destined to be one of the best albums of 2010.

Confession time: I honestly have no idea how I stumbled upon the next "band", Kukkiva Kunnas . No recollection whatsoever. Suddenly two of their albums appeared on my desktop when I checked in one morning. Apparently I was doing some late night websurfing and came across some free downloads from these (what subsequent research found to be) Finnish absurdists (Finnishness and absurdity being prime movers in my book), but I still have zero remembrance of what led me to them - I'll chalk it up to a gift of serendipity! To add to the mystery, one press release spends a few paragraphs basically revealing nothing about these outsider artists until you come to their motto: “THE METHOD OF HOLY UNANIMOUS AMBIGUOUS INSIGNIFICANCE — THE AIM OF LAUGHING ZEN & PING FU KUNG, in which (if rightly interpreted) all is expressed." as if that clears anything up. Fun stuff though.

And now for something completely different... an impossible transition is often the most fun and ear-catching. So why not zag where should have zigged and drop an IED of stadium-sized Afro-poppin' indie rawk?! Why not Fang Island, indeed, a contender for sleeper of the year award. Next up, the illustrious San Francisco auteur (and Friend of the Continuum) Mr. Joshua Babcock's Society of Rockets. I was assembling this playlist before he turned me on to his current album, so this month we'll return to what I would consider his zenith, the sprawling epic he released in 2007 (I'll get to the new one next month).

Another enigma I know very little about is the Long Beach, CA, psych rock combo Magic Lantern, but I dig this track, culling moments of amorphous drift and tranced-out transcendence from predecessors like Yume Bitsu and Flying Saucer Attack. I look forward to exploring more of their material if I can find it. Continuing the atmospherics is yet another track from the Soft Circle (Hiram Baroosha, formerly of Black Dice) album that I still can't stop listening to. From there it's straight to the heart of the sun with two blistering kraut/psych/motorik blasts from two of the top ten albums of 2010, to be sure, from Nice Nice, who formerly resided in the spazz/math duo category but have broadened their horizons exponentially with this release, and White Hills who have upped their ante by expanding on the Oneida (the drummer's regular band) penchant for face-melting extreme instruMENTALism.

And, as is often my wont, I leave you with a lengthy and slowly unfolding rambler with a title echoing the name of the artist as well as album, Quiet Orchestra. Now git yer spring on!

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound - A Silver Mt. Zion - 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons
Like The Ocean, Like The Innocent Pt. 2: The Innocent - The Besnard Lakes - ...Are The Roaring Night
Ida Walked Away - Au - Versions
Atlas Air - Massive Attack - Heligoland
Known(1) - Autechre - Oversteps
Swords Of Truth - These New Puritans - Beat Pyramid
Melter - Clipd Beaks - Hoarse Lords
Proud Evolution - Liars - Sisterworld
Please Me - Kukkiva Kunnas - Ordem Progresso
Daisy - Fang Island - s/t
California's Burning - The Society Of Rockets - Our Paths Related
Feasting On Energy - Magic Lantern - High Beams
Earthed - Soft Circle - Full Bloom
Make It Gold - Nice Nice - Extra Wow
Polvere Di Stelle - White Hills - s/t
Quiet Orchestra - Quiet Orchestra - s/t

Album of the year contender!

2010-04-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

I know it's only April, but we already have an album that will be hard to beat in the form of the new Silver Mt. Zion release. Wow. What started as a side project now outshadows its predecessors. Imagine an angst-ridden Roger Waters fronting Godpeed You! Black Emperor and you're only half the way there. The crunch of the guitar, the swoop of the strings, the manic pathos and divebombing dynamics...! You'll find a stunner from this album near the end of this month's set. Read on!

First, a nice word of encouragement from my number one fan:

"I read the descriptions and I get psyched to listen to the music. I swear to the baby Jesus, you're the best music journalist online these days. That factors every fucking Cisco router in China, Siam, and the Del Marva peninsula into account. HOW THE FUCK IS IT POSSIBLE THAT YOU AREN'T PAID MASSIVELY FOR THIS? ...You enrich my life by making these things."

*swoon*

Love you too, buddy. Spread the word, ya'll!

We begin this journey with a lengthy tour de force from the enigmatic and defunct Space Needle, incorporating free-floating pych, angular guitar contusions of freejazz intensity, and a wall-of-frenzy finale. For the meek or more pop-inclined: skip to the next track. But for the adventurous: TURN. IT. UP!!!!! To come down off that skronky opus we delve into a much more accessible variety from a pop-friendly guitar band that could be the median between the college boy Afro-pop of Vampire Weekend and the oblique guitar manglings of No Age or Abe Vigoda. This particular shoegazey track sounds like neither of those actually but it's the closest to actual space rock on the debut album by Surfer Blood, a true gem from last year I overlooked in my Best Of segments. Followed closely by a stomper from the highly enjoyable new (fourth? they lost me a couple times along the way) album from Black Rebel Motorcyle Club, simultaneously a return to form and a sonic advancement (and lovingly mastered in the red), perhaps somewhat owing to new drummer and femme fatale Leah Shapiro. Remaining in the epic guitar swagger mode we have Alan Sparhawk's side project Retribution Gospel Choir allowing him an outlet for histrionics not associated with his main effort, the slowcore veterans Low.

Next we drop deep into the realm of dark motorik trance with the stellar new collection from White Hills. The whole album is a sincere homage to 70s krautrock updated through a Brooklyn warehouse sensibility, all murky guitar ramblings and hypnotic groove, which isn't surprising once you notice, as I just recently did, the presence of Oneida drummer Kid Millions behind the kit. Canadian ensemble The Besnard Lakes, whose earlier tense post rock meets melancholy cabaret musing (a la The Dears), have really come into their own on this their third release, as evidenced by this soaringly ecstatic track. Then, a band I somehow missed out on for the past few years, fronted by no less than Wire's Colin Newman, his lovely wife Malka Spigel, and noneother than Robin Rimbaud aka the experimentalist Scanner. They're called Githead and have three full-lengths and an EP under their belt! Who knew? The couple trade off lead vocals (while Rimbaud flails on guitar rather than his usual electronics) but rarely tread the minimalist anthemic punk ground laid by Wire, favoring instead jet-propelled motorik rhythms peppered with psychedelic passages worthy of Neu!

Continuing that forward-moving rhythmic style but this time via synths, loops and samples comes a recent track from Kieran Hebden's Fourtet which shows its kraut roots in borrowing from Cluster and Kraftwerk but updating it through modern house music. Furthering the electro theme is the conspicuously monikered Pantha Du Prince who recently put out an absolutely stunning collection of warm, organic, visceral psych-tronica in the Plaid vein, and while not exactly space rock per se, if you add some hallucinatory multi-tracked vocals from Panda Bear of Animal Collective you end up with some pretty spacey (and tasty) shit! Which reminds me: I haven't played nearly enough tracks from Panda Bear's debut solo album, so here ya go! Panda's old buddies in Black Dice have certainly been prolific, but Hisham Baroocha split from the group quite a while back to pursue various endeavors including the decidedly less noisy solo act Soft Circle which incorporates loops, electronics, treated vocals that evoke spiritual reverence, and various drums including East Indian percussion. Heavy stuff!

Taking it down a notch is a lovely head spinner from Texan space folk duo Tom and Christina Carter, aka Charalambides. And back up a notch, the leadoff track from psych-Americana outfit Sleepy Sun, whose debut was the best album of 2009. The drummer/multi-instrumentalist Emil Amos (also of Grails fame) has been all over the place, sonically speaking, in his prolific work as Holy Sons - here he summons mid-period Pink Floyd with a track seemingly derived from the sound of the Floyd's soundtrack work on More and Obscured By Clouds. Then just to shale things up, an obscure little ditty from Norman Greenbaum, he of Spirit In The Sky and Petaluma fame, with a lysergic love letter to his adopted home state.

Then: the pièce de résistance from our featured band A Silver Mt. Zion (or whatever variation on that name they've taken for this release)... PLAY LOUD! And then... a tribute to Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous who sadly took his own life this year. What a tremendous loss. And carrying us off to oblivion, yet another feedback-drenched barnburner courtesy of manic guitar slinger Ira Kaplan's Yo La Tengo... well, just because I love you.

R.I.P. Mark Linkous

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
Where The Fuck's My Wallet? - Space Needle - The Moray Eels Eat the Space Needle
Harmonix - Surfer Blood - Astro Coast
War Machine - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Beat The Devil's Tattoo
Poor Man's Daughter - Retribution Gospel Choir - 2
Dead - White Hills - s/t
Glass Printer - The Besnard Lakes - ...Are The Roaring Night
Displacement & Time - Githead - Landing
Ringer - Fourtet - Ringer EP
Stick To My Side - Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise
Comfy In Nautica - Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Swirl - Soft Circle - Full Bloom
Swimming Pool - Charalambides - Glowing Raw
New Age - Sleepy Sun - Embrace
From Now On - Holy Sons - Criminal's Return
California Earthquake - Norman Greenbaum - Spirit In The Sky Anthology
Kollaps Tradicional (Bury Three Dynamos) - Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra - Kollaps Tradixionales
Cow - Sparklehorse - Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot
And The Glitter Is Gone - Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

March Madness!

2010-03-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

Helloooo down there...! What on earth is going on down there...?!?!? From my vantage point up here on the satellite it appears your world is literally turning upside down. Up is down, black is white, Republicans and Democrats living together... it's ANARCHY! Fierce partisanship, corporate hegemony, blatant greed, blind ideological allegiance, Darwinian economics, and utter disdain for the very ecosystems that give it life is emanating from the human "race" (is this a contest?), the only earthly animal that thinks itself above all matters mundane. It's so big it's visible from space...! And it's an ugly aura folks. Too big for your britches is what the human race is... it's time for your mama (Mother Earth) to deliver a beat-down.
(UPDATE: I wrote this BEFORE the Chilean earthquake.)

And down the rabbit hole we go...

Ah well, might as well have a cathartic dose of the ol' psychedelicious space rock as a soundtrack for your armageddon, eh?

We begin with a double shot of downhome Oklahoma psychedelica, with the Flaming Lips' front man Wayne Coyne's nephew's new band Stardeath and White Dwarfs (sic). Rumor has it the two bands recently collaborated on a song-by-song cover of the Pink Floyd's bar-setting epic Dark Side of the Moon... well, it's not rumor - I streamed it a while back and it's phenomenal - but I can't seem to get my hands on a hard copy. Yet. You'll be the first to know when I do. Continuing the juggernaut pace is SF's Citay, returning with their triumphant third album of sunshiney spacepop, replete with homages to Queen and other classic rockers of the multi-tracked guitar persuasion (here supplied by the talented Tim Green of the Fucking Champs). Closely following is a band I just can't seem to get enough of, Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, also from SF, with yet another track from 2009's album of the year (I had the distinct pleasure catching them WITH Citay last fall at the glorious Frisco Freakout festival). Up next is a departure for the enigmatic Woods, a band mostly dedicated to folksy yet unhinged pastorals, who here meander on a lo-fi spacerock improv worthy of an Ash Ra Tempel jam.

The always-reliable Joan of Arc put out a gem last year, which I somehow overlooked, perhaps attributable to multiple reviews calling it a cynical collection of outtakes from their previous album Boo Human, and while it does include a modicum of throwaways and instrumental workouts, it's still chock full of the usual oblique lyricism, abstruse guitar figures and downright Kinsella-cious weird rock that Tim Kinsella and the ever-revolving Last Supper of cohorts that contribute to Joan of Arc recordings. This track is a rare-enough foray into folky/freaky/Faheyesque good-timey rags from a prolific and unique outfit. I keep stumbling across sporadic gems among the catalog of Piano Magic, a loose ensemble of British musicians in various combinations that come off like a post-millennial post-ROCK This Mortal Coil, and here's another one of those gems.

And that's where this set really plummets deep down the rabbit hole, with the uncategorizable Bear In Heaven, here from their first album, a track from the amazing new Clipd Beaks album, and a self-released recording from my personal buddy Professor Ben's project Guitar Vs. Gravity. Another of 2009's winners was Japandroids' bro-rawk opus Post-Nothing, so I dropped another standout from it here. Also blowing minds last year was the side project of Portishead's Geoff Barrow known mysteriously as Beak> (unclipped), sounding absolutely nothing like his main band and showing off his diverse influences. And we pretty much hit rock bottom of the WTF dimension with a limited-release CDR by experiMENTAL improv weirdos Scantily Clad.

Then... howzabout a long-awaited space-tronica section for you oft-neglected 'lectro lovers...? Joakim diverges from its more dancefloor-friendly postpunktronica with this noisy leadoff track from its new album. The Field, with its very live-sounding bass and percussion sequenced in with the warm electronics, owes as much to the klassic kraut of Kluster and Kraftwerk as it does to the postmodern techno of Underworld. Oldschool noisemongers Black Dice take us on a speaker-blowing journey through Beaches And Canyons, and Portland's White Rainbow lulls us into ecstatic bliss with his amniotic waves of sound.

Okay... the world seems a bit less chaotic now. Better keep my distance.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
The Birth/Those Who Are From The Sun Return To The Sun - Stardeath And White Drawfs - The Birth
Careful With That Hat - Citay - Dream Get Together
Two Stage Rocket - Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound - When Sweet Sleep Returned
September With Pete - Woods - Songs Of Shame
Flowers - Joan Of Arc - Flowers
You Can Hear The Room - Piano Magic - Disaffected
Bag Of Bags - Bear In Heaven - Red Bloom Of The Boom
Blood - Clipd Beaks - To Realize
World Of White Walls - Guitar Vs. Gravity - City Of The Future
Heart Sweats - Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Blagson Lake - Beak - Beak>
Mint Volcano - Scantily Clad - Two
Back To Wilderness - Joakim - Milky Ways
Sequenced - The Field - Yesterday And Today
Things Will Never Be The Same - Black Dice - Beaches And Canyons
Tuesday Rollers And Strollers - White Rainbow - New Clouds

Okay, You Asked For It...

2010-02-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

Well, somebody did. Although anyone as deeply involved, nay, IMMERSED in music as I am knows, it's exceedingly difficult to nail down any kind of Year End list (or really any "Best Of" list for that matter) to merely ten. But, since personalities like mine are also compulsive list makers, for the sake of argument/discussion I will do so here. Obviously these lists exists in a constant state of flux, as the nebulous winds of the ether blow them this way and that, and they are as hard to pin down as a starry smear of night sky as one entry twinkles, then the next and the next and the next until it's impossible to tell which one is currently shining brightest, especially what with the speed of light and all. Anyway, here goes...

THE TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2009 (PLUS SOME):

1. Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound "When Sweet Sleep Returned"
2. Sleepy Sun "Embrace"
3. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead "Century Of Self"
4. Super Furry Animals "Dark Days/Light Years"
5. Flaming Lips "Embryonic"
6. Oneida "Rated O"
7. Cave "Psychic Psummer"
8. Fuck Buttons "Tarot Sport"
9. Volcano Choir "Unmap"
10. Japandroids "Post Nothing" / Ganglians "Monster Head Room" (tie)

Yes, that's a tie for 10th - I really can't decide. Honestly. You choose. And also because narrowing it to only 10 is just so very unsatisfying, here are the runners up (just five, uh, or six, er, seven...? wouldja believe...?)...

Honorable Mention:
11. Helvetia "Helvetia's Junk Shop"
12. Dan Deacon "Bromst"
13. Stardeath and White Dwarfs "The Birth"
14. Tortoise "Beacons Of Ancestorship"
15. Health "Get Color" / Woods "Songs Of Shame" / Real Estate s/t / Pterodactyl "Worldwild" (four-way tie, sorry, it's all so good!)

Okay, enough of that, on to the playlist! Featuring the Very Best of 2009 (to the best of my omniscience)... PART DEUX! (see last month's post for the first installment).

We begin with a rambunctious romp through the urban jungle with Animal Collective, with their latest album seemingly influenced by the African music so du jour with their Brooklyn peers. A math rock ensemble (called Meneguar) gone folky, Woods put out an album of sublime little ditties that bite and scrape like campfire equivalents of early Flaming Lips. Volcano Choir is a match made in heaven between the elaborate experimentalism of postrockers Collections of Colonies of Bees and the heavily treated vocal stylings of avant-folkster Bon Iver. Speaking of heaven, apparently there be bears there, and this Bear In Heaven has some of the dreamiest, most enigmatic and oddly arranged symphonic shoegaze I've heard in a long while (not to mention that their band name evokes the great Space Needle song "Beers In Heaven").

Deerhunter maestro Bradford Cox moonlights as the more stripped-down Atlas Sound and put out a strong second full-length, with the track included here quite possibly the finest on the album, featuring vocals by none other than the inimitable Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab. L.A. dark psych afficionados The Warlocks have also streamlined their sound with this new album, and to great effect, especially on this track with its melty My Bloody Valentine guitar swoon. UK goth weirdos The Horrors have undergone a complete transformation from cartoony Birthday Party hairfarmers to spaced out shoegazers with their second album. And A Place To Bury Strangers continue their self-described vocation as The Loudest Band In New York - despite the bandleader's day job as guitar effects entrepreneur, their Joy Division roots are showing.

Underground noisemongers Health return with a follow-up to their debut that's stronger and more focused, and dare I say it, more accessible. The same could be said for O.G. noize boys Black Dice, although in their case it's been a slow transformation over many albums, this being their strongest since Beaches And Canyons. No-fi guitar scuzz gets a sunny kaleidoscopic makeover by Wavves on his sophomore release. And Future Of The Left return with an album that's both as furious as their previous incarnation as Mclusky, the most pissed-off postpunk Wales has ever seen, and somehow more refined.

A lot of talk has circulated through the uber-underground community concerning the preponderance sloppily psychedelic (if you can imagine vintage Black Flag as an LSD-enhanced soundtrack for tripping beachtown slackers) guitar-and-drum duos like No Age and the aforementioned Wavves, but none has seized me as immediately as Japandroids, perhaps because they trigger memories of late-greats from outside the genre as diverse as Swervedriver and The Archers Of Loaf. So on the subject of obscure musical genres, please allow me to now coin the term spazz-jam. To be a spazz jam band you should be less than the standard rock and roll four piece, care nothing about your outward appearance, work entirely from improvisation, and preferably reside in Brooklyn. While none of those are prerequisites, it certainly applies to originators Oneida on their umpteenth release, a three-CD progrock cornucopia of epic proportions that spans the gamut from free-noise freakouts to grinding motorik repetition and nonsense. It also applies to Pterodactyl who return with another slab of shrieking start-stop insanity. And Cave continue their Krautrock-infused neanderthal noodling while Wooden Shjips offer more of their hypnotic neoprimitive groove.

Sometimes well-known and respected musicians form super groups, and oftentimes the outcome is less than super, the whole being less than the anticipated sum of its parts. But in the case of Them Crooked Vultures it works - it sounds exactly like you'd expect singer/guitarist Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones on bass and the ubiquitous Dave Grohl back where he belongs behind the drum kit. Rawkin'! Prolific multi-intrumentalist and musicologist (and Friend Of The Spacerock Continuum) Emil Amos of Grails put out his sixth and seventh releases as his solo project Holy Sons last year and they're the best work he's ever done, IMNSHO. And while we're on the subject of moonlighting, Beak is an against-type side project of Portishead's Geoff Downes and it's absolutely confounding and entrancing.

Real Estate is a young New Jersey ensemble that's more Feelies homage than Jersey Shore guidos, and their crystalline jangle pop is absolutely refreshing. Hardworking Seattleite Jason Albertini put out his fourth self-produced album as Helvetia, named for the country (what's now Switzerland) not the font, and to my mind he stakes his place as the poor man's Broken Social Scene (and that's a compliment!). And in the most startling of comebacks, everyone's favorite North Carolina warped and twisted mathrockers the mighty Polvo return to both pick up where they left off and expand on their already impressive, if abstruse, unique vision.

We get heavy at the culmination of this set, but for me if it's metallic it's gotta be progressive, and that aptly describes both the trodding dirges of Pelican and the lofty flights of Russian Circles. Philly-delic stalwarts Bardo Pond is sandwiched between these two heavyweights in order to showcase a track from a record company sampler that perfectly encapsulates their modus operandi. And longevity seems to have paid off for Austin prog-punks And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead as they released their strongest album in years. I've concluded this set with a mind-altering excursion from one of the most sonically inventive bands in recent memory, the elusive Fuck Buttons, and hopefully it's enough to propel you starward, away from earthly concerns, at one with the cosmos.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
Summertime Clothes - Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
To Clean - Woods - Songs Of Shame
Island, IS - Volcano Choir - Unmap
Dust Cloud - Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Quick Canal - Atlas Sound - Logos
The Midnight Sun - The Warlocks - The Mirror Explodes
Mirror's Image - The Horrors - Primary Colours
In Your Heart - A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
Die Slow - Health - Get Color
Ultra Vomit Craze - Black Dice - Repo
Get In The Sun - Wavves - Wavvves
Arming Eritrea - Future Of The Left - Travels With Myself And Another
Crazy/Forever - Japandroids - Post-Nothing
No Sugar - Pterodactyl - Worldwild
Ghost In The Room - Oneida - Rated O
Encino Men - Cave - Psychic Psummer
Motorbike - Wooden Shjips - Dos
Elephants - Them Crooked Vultures - s/t
Arranged Release - Holy Sons - Criminal's Return
Backwell - Beak - s/t
Suburban Beverage - Real Estate - s/t
All The Money Is Gone - Helvetia - Helvetia's Junk Shop
Dream Residue/Work - Polvo - In Prism
Strung Up From The Sky - Pelican - What We All Come To Need
Lord Of Light - Bardo Pond - Every Noise Has A Note
Malko - Russian Circles - Geneva
Isis Unveiled - And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - The Century Of Self
Surf Solar - Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport

All Hail 2010!!!

2010-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

That's got a nice sci-fi kinda ring to it, without the apocalyptic overtones of 2012, or the blink-and-you-missed-it dystopian vision of 2001. It will surely be the Year Where Things Could Only Get Better, with hope, faith and diligence from all of us terrestrial or extraterrestrial. Luckily 2009 was a fantastic year for the space rock, so much in fact that, rather than bombarding my faithful listeners with an epic length set, as some of the more recent installments have been, this one will be divided up into two month's worth of playlists, in January and February. This should make these stimulating slabs of soul-sustaining sustenance much more digestible. Longtime fans of the Continuum know also that the Best Of editions stretch the definition of space rock to its breaking point, as I am apt to include as much of the music that moved me this year as possible without regard to how much it can be squeezed into the space/psych/prog/post/acid/experimental etc. pigeonhole. You might even find bits of electronica, jazz, pop, straight-up indie rock or even underground hip hop (well, maybe), but it all sums up the music that kept BeeDub alive last year, and I hope it nourishes you as well.

So! On to the VERY BEST TRACKS OF 2009! (in no particular order, of course)

We start off, as I am apt, in a post rock vein, with two of the legacy practitioners, Montreal's Do Make Say Think, here with a 4-song essential distillation of their modus operandi, each song titled after, and evocative of, one of the verbs in their name, and Chicago legends Tortoise still showing up the naysayers with their most vital album (and subsequent tour) in a long while. Would it be odd to transition into classic krautrock here? Not when the band in question is the seminal Faust, who are stronger than ever after nearly four decades of confoundingly inventive music, even in 2009. Sit down children, and LEARN.

Speaking of legacies, The Flaming Lips have constantly reinvented themselves, from Butthole Surferish acid-punk, to psych-noize extremists, to indie pop darlings, and with their 2009 release they have come full circle back to dark beginnings, but with a fresh and brand new musical approach. I call them the godfathers... and the young prince of this family line is young Dennis Coyne, nephew of the Lips' Wayne Coyne, who, along with his former Lips roadie pals, has his own project off to a great start with Stardeath and White Dwarfs... another entry in the heritage of OK City's finest. Their whimsical lysergic tendencies have been absorbed through osmosis by one Neon Indian, an unhinged electronica producer who shares a similar a taste for the blotter. Not to be overshadowed in this sort of beatific frenzy, the one man band (with laptop and outboard effects) known as Dan Deacon has a myriad of influences to wear proudly on his sleeve then shake out and hang on the laundry line to be absorbed by the cosmic winds of devotional audience participation. And so... why not round this segment out with yet another classic from the prolific longevity and ever-mindblowing enduring creativity of Jersey oldschoolers Yo La Tengo?

Shifting gears toward the Welshmotorikpsych (there was one?) we have a couple winners from newbies The Phantom Band and stalwarts the Super Furries, bringin' the brogue to outer space. A sonically smooth but geographically abrupt transmogrification brings us to Sacramento CA for the Ganglians' lo-fi Brian Wilson worship, and San Francisco's Assemble Head's Crazy Horse/Laurel Canyon devoutness. Another Neil Young acolyte, Built To Spill's Doug Martsch harvested yet another fruitful batch of beauty this year (this track could be his response to Do Make Say Think's imperative above)... may his travelin' boots never wear thin.

Which brings us into a bit of the oft-occurring alt-country/psych crossover with Chicago pluck and crank artists Califone, SF guitarist Ben Chasney's otherworldly folk in Six Organs, a "supergroup" featuring the one dude from The White Stripes and that chick from the The Kills known as the The Dead Weather, with their high profile take on some dark amalgam of voodooswampblooz, and the enigmatic and explosive Sleepy Sun, who very well may have released the album of the year. Stay tuned!

More psychamericana from everyone's favorite party pixie Devendra Banhart, and jam cult Akron/Family's continuing series of anthemic mantras, stripping down to worn and bare southern gothic with newcomers UUVVWWZ. A left field twist brings the next track from Mercury Rev covering, of all people, Black Sabbath, in a rather faithful yet unsettling rendition of one of their more atypical tracks, at a crossroads of Eastern malady and stargazing melody. So why not round out the set with a sitar-drenched bass & drum drone from the latest and best Om album, this one featuring Grails & HolySons alumnus and friend of the show, drummer/multi-instruMENTALIST Emil Amos, followed by workhorse Montrealite Sam Shalabi's Land of Kush, an album with a track-by-track/chapter-by-chapter correlation (supposedly) to Tom Pynchon's recent novel of the same name. Heady stuff, eh? Well, that's why yer here, innit?

Also for 2010 I've dusted off the original opening theme from when this podcast/blog/thing was a webcast on internet radio, courtesy of BAGel Ted's Live 365 station bagelradio.com... 'member when? And don't forget: if you don't see all that you wanted here, there'll be Part 2 continued in February!

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles - BeeDub's Spacerock Continuum
Do - Do Make Say Think - Other Truths
Prepare Your Coffin - Tortoise - Beacons Of Ancestorship
Kundalini Tremolos - Faust - C'est Com...Com...Compliqué
See The Leaves - The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
The Sea On Fire - Stardeath And White Dwarfs - The Birth
Deadbeat Summer - Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms
Snookered - Dan Deacon - Bromst
Here To Fall - Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs
Folk Song Oblivion - The Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage
Cardiff In The Sun - Super Furry Animals - Dark Days/Light Years
Valient Brave - Ganglians - Monster Head Room
The Slumbering Ones - Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound - When Sweet Sleep Returned
Done - Built To Spill - There Is No Enemy
Giving Away The Bride - Califone - All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
The Ballad Of Charlie Harper - Six Organs Of Admittance - Luminous Night
3 Birds - The Dead Weather - Horehound
New Age - Sleepy Sun - Embrace
Rats - Devendra Banhart - What Will We Be
Everyone Is Guilty - Akron/Family - Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free
Berry Can - UUVVWWZ - s/t
Planet Caravan - Mercury Rev - Peel Sessions
Creation Ghat II - Om - God Is Good
Iceland Spar - Land Of Kush - Against The Day

December Double Play!

2009-12-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

Last year when the holiday season rolled around, I felt compelled to offer up a double playlist, in the spirit of giving and all that blah blah blah. So why not do it again this year? It's not like there's a shortage of stellar music to choose from. So pour yourself a hot toddy, sit back by the fire, spark one if ya got one and enjoy your double dose of spacerock. In fact, these two playlists are absolute monsters, a nonstop barrage, no punches pulled, no holds barred. In fact, I'm not even sure you people are ready for this... ARE YOU READY FOR THIS?!?!? Okay then...

A funny thing happened after Mercury Rev's second album Boces: they lost their lunatic frontman David Baker, and guitarist Jonathan Donahue, upon seizing the reigns, seemed to have lost his distortion pedals. The lighter, more mercurial Mercury model has done some great work since then, but nothing comes close their first and best album, represented here with our lead-off track. Completely unrelated come Portland's mysterious freejam ensemble Eternal Tapestry with a track from some limited-release CDR. Next up, yet another track from Oneida's sprawling triple CD from this year, one of '09's best releases.

So with last month's epic and ever-expanding americana set I finally realized that Memphis' gritty lysergic blooz punx the Grifters have been sorely underrepresented here, so I'll be making up for that in the future, and here we have a quintessential stomper from them, followed by more dark South(west)ern Gothic from from Spindrift, and another of this year's best, Sleepy Sun (more to come from them!). Another band I dearly love that I had to shake free of the mothballs and give new life is the mighty Snowmen, from San Francisco's pre-dotcom musical renaissance, circa '95. Transitioning nicely, Sonic Youth have yet another entry from their best album in years, also from 2009, followed by the refreshingly noisy Wavves and the jarringly berserk Mahjonng.

Right about there we get a taste of African (and African-American) psychedelia with Johannesburg, South Africa's BLK JKS and Brooklyn, NY (by way of Cleveland, OH)'s Dragons of Zynth. Where else to go but with one of the greatest bands of all time, The Flaming Lips, this track culled from their current release, another contender for Best of '09. Okay, so I can't get enough Cave, so sue me - this track's from this year as well, as are the next few contenders for the year-end roundup, slightly mellowing noisemongers Fuck Buttons, lo-fi garage trippers Crocodiles, and the "loudest band in New York", A Place To Bury Strangers.

Demented and demonic prog-metalist Maynard James Keenan gets alternate ends of his career represented with his recent side project Puscifer and his full time band Tool's very first album. Keeping it heavy is metallic postrockers Russian Circle, then a psychedelic tribute to an obscure 80's porn star by non-Seattlites (they were from Providence, Rhode Island) Space Needle. Wrapping up our first set is one of the dreamiest-ever tracks from sadly overlooked Aussie psych-pop godfathers The Church.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Chasing A Bee - Mercury Rev - Yerself Is Steam
Brain Drain - Eternal Tapestry - Mushroom Owl
Luxury Travel - Oneida - Rated O
Holmes - The Grifters - Crappin' You Negative
Colt's Crime - Spindrift - The West
White Dove - Sleepy Sun - Embrace
V-8 Vega - The Snowmen - Soundproof
Anti-Orgasm - Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Vermin - Wavves - Wavvves
Blivable Dogggiiiieeeee - Mahjonng - Raydoncong
Lakeside - BLK JKS - Mystery
Breaker - Dragons Of Zynth - Coronation Thieves
Silver Trembling Hands - The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
High, I Am - Cave - Psychic Psummer
Rough Steez - Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
Refuse Angels - Crocodiles - Summer Of Hate
Ego Death - A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
Vagina Mine - Puscifer - V Is For Vagina
Sober - Tool - Undertow
Geneva - Russian Circles - Geneva
Hypatia Lee - Space Needle - The Moray Eels Swallow The Space Needle
Is This Where You Live? - The Church - Of Skins And Heart

Ready for Round 2?!?!?

This one starts off with an extended motorik motif featuring enigmatic lo-fi deconstructionists Blues Control, continuing with Cave (YES AGAIN!) off their first album this time, Eternal Tapestry (see above), jangle-psychsters The Feelies (circa 1980), and early Can, with original vocalist Malcolm Mooney at his most unhinged. Speaking of Can, and speaking of Thin White Rope (weren't we? see the November installment!), the next track, a Can song, would have fulfilled both the americana and spacerock cover versions sets in one fell swoop! Well, better late than never. And no spacerock set would be complete without an homage to a particular line of guitar fuzz effects pedals, this time from skullfucker extraordinaire Skullflower.

From this point on I relinquish all responsibility as to the damage the next couple tracks are capable of inflicting upon the unsuspecting listener's mind. Suffice it to say, it's an extended mid-set mind journey courtesy of free-folk improv ensemble Sunburned Hand of the Man, and oscillator-'n'-tapes pioneers White Noise (featuring 60s-era BBC composer and temptress Delia Derbyshire - Dr. Who anyone?!?!?!). To bring us out of the analog synth morass is a feedback symphony from electronica producer Nathan Fake, the bliss pop of a digitally forged variety from Delorean, and a slip into an electronic epiphany with Mountains.

A slow return to consciousness via Piano Magic, then being transported into the ether with yet another self-referentially titled track from the stellar new Oneida collection, and finally taking it into the stratosphere with Iowan shamans Raccoo-oo-oon should be about all you need to ring in the new year and hang in there until January's BEST OF 2009 installment! Bon voyage.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Good Morning - Blues Control - Local Flavor
4.24.06 - Cave - Hunt Like Devil
Temporal Starshine Voyager - Eternal Tapestry - Mushroom Owl
Forces At Work - The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms
Uphill - Can - Delay 1968
Yoo Doo Right - Thin White Rope - Sack Full Of Silver
Big Muff - Skullflower - Ruins
No Magic Man - Sunburned Hand Of The Man - No Magic Man
The Black Mass: An Electric Storm In Hell - White Noise - An Electric Storm
The Sky Was Pink - Nathan Fake - Drowning In A Sea Of Love
Seasun - Delorean - Ayrton Senna
Summer Of Dub - Color Filter - I Often Think In Music
Add Infinity - Mountains - Choral
Waking Up - Piano Magic - Low Birth Weight
O - Oneida - Rated O
Forever/In The Woods - Raccoo-oo-oon - The Cave Of Spirits Forever

Don't be a fool...

2009-11-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

...stay in school.

Pay attention, class... school is still in session. Here we are with the third and final installment of Spacerock School before we break for the winter solstice holidays. I hope you've been studying!

Quiz #1: What the heck is this?!?!?

Quiz #2: What do spacerock and the musical genre known as americana have in common? Trick question? Nothing, you say? Wrong! Despite the inherent earthiness or implied groundedness of americana, as it were, many of its practitioners over the years have dabbled in the spacey and psychedelic sides (outer space and inner space, respectively) of rock music, and this set should illustrate that beyond dispute.

Starting off with a bang of a Neil Youngian stomp from MV & EE (aka Matt Valentine & Erika Elder) in one of their many incarnations (here with The Golden Road - see Tower Recordings below) and leading into the neotraditional 'Merican southern gothic ravings of Nick Cave, on his first solo album from back in '85, and the beloved Gun Club (RIP Jeffrey Lee Pierce) and you should be getting an inkling of where this journey's headed. Next up a triple dose of the defunct but influential "Paisley Underground" scene of mid-80s Los Angeles where many of the loosely affiliated bands also had a cowpunk edge (see also The Long Ryders, Rank & File, The Knitters, et al.), here represented by the inimitable first draft of The Dream Syndicate (well, second if you count a bass player change), their frequent stagemates Green On Red (bandleaders Steve Wynn and Dan Stuart even collaborated on the barroom bluster one-off effort as Danny & Dusty), and Davis, CA's mighty True West (sadly I have no Thin White Rope, their hometown brethren, to offer you at this time, although they would fit nicely). *

Next up, Memphis' gritty Grifters showcase the explicit connection between these genres with one of their many space-twang epics, and New Jersey's Velvets-via-southern folk originators The Feelies take us to a space rodeo. Things take a turn for the truly psychedelic with two of Portland, OR's most enigmatic experimental ensembles (and there are many, make no mistake - what's in the water in Portland?), the currently prolific Jackie-O Motherfucker with a nod to the traditional side of their "music", and the manic hippie bluegrass of 60s-era absurdists The Holy Modal Rounders. Dropping off the cliff into somnolent valleys are kinfolk Brightblack Morning Light and Sleepy Sun, before we are jolted back to "reality". Can it get even weirder? Any regular Spacerock Continuum subscriber knows the answer to that. Howzabout a Kiwi guitar mangler known only as Pumice? A Belgian faux-Appalachian bloozist who takes his name from a cartoon cat named Ignatz? Or the peyote-saturated wisdom of Arizona postpunkers The Meat Puppets?

Many a hand
Began to scan
Around for the next plateau
Some said it was Greenland
And some said Mexico

Others decided
It was nowhere
'Cept for where they stood
But those were all just guesses
Wouldn't help you if they could

The vast vista of the western horizon is audible in the wide-open expanse of the music of circus sideshow snakeoil salesmen Spindrift, transcendent brother 'n' sister-led SF rockers Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, LA surf cowboy harmonizers Beachwood Sparks, and desert-fried heavy minimalists Earth. Then we're a-goin' folky with Ben Chasney's Six Organs of Admittance, Matt Valentine (aka MV)'s Tower Recordings and the godfather of experimental acoustic guitar John Fahey. Vancouver, BC weighs in with The Sadies' twist-n-twang, the enigmatic psych-rock traveling commune Akron/Family drops another lengthy epic, and a band I never thought would grace this podcast, The Grateful Dead, illustrates the direct lineage between American traditional music and free-space jams.

A quintessential example of the genre of americana, Wilco, is also at times one of it's most avant-garde explorationists (especially since inviting spazzjazz guitar hero Nels Cline into the fold), here bringing a krautrock noise drone to the mix. Avant-folk refugees from the Chicago post rock scene Califone see fit to take us on a 16-minute trance-inducing ramble through the brambles. Sardonic indierock stalwarts Pavement start off with an epic twang-guitar workout and devolve into a nightmarish motorik hellride up the canyon. And to lighten the load just in time, everyone's favorite space cowboys (aren't you glad I didn't include the Steve Miller Band?) The Byrds, of "Eight Miles High" fame, here jangle their way through a sprightly ditty requesting a ride on a UFO. And honestly, who wouldn't want that?

* UPDATE: Since having come across some digital manifestations of the aforementioned Thin White Rope it was impossible for me not to include a track from them, and I chose one that couldn't be more aptly named to illustrate our point. In the process I have also decided to undo a couple glaring omissions in the form of southern-fried spacerockers My Morning Jacket and desert atmospheric spaghetti-westerners Calexico, which I have peppered throughout the original set below. Enjoy!

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Susquehannah (Sole Art Trample) - MV & EE And the Golden Road - Gettin' Gone
Tupelo - Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - The Firstborn Is Dead
Watermelon Man - The Gun Club - Miami
The Medicine Show - The Dream Syndicate - The Medicine Show
Abigail's Ghost - Green On Red - Gravity Talks
It's About Time - True West - Hollywood Holiday
Americana - Thin White Rope - Sack Full Of Silver
Get Outta That Spaceship And Fight Like A Man - The Grifters - Crappin' You Negative
The Last Round Up - The Feelies - The Good Earth
Rockaway - Jackie-O Motherfucker - Flags Of The Sacred Heart
Mobile Line - The Holy Modal Rounders - The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders
Hologram Buffalo - Brightblack Morning Light - Motion To Rejoin
Sleepy Sun - Sleepy Son - Embrace
The Radiant Sheen - Ignatz - II
Eyebath - Pumice - Pebbles
Plateau - The Meat Puppets - Meat Puppets II
The Wind - Spindrift - The West
Run Thru - My Morning Jacket - It Still Moves
Kolob Canyon - Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound - When Sweet Sleep Returned
Once We Were Trees - Beachwood Sparks - Once We Were Trees
Rise To Glory - Earth - The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull
Shelter From The Ash - Six Organs Of Admittance - Shelter From The Ash
Other Kinds Run - Tower Recordings - The Galaxies' Incredibly Sensual Transmission Field Of The Tower Recordings
Portland Cement Company At Monolith, CA - John Fahey - Days Have Gone By
Translucent Sparrow - The Sadies - Favourite Colours
Mid-Town - Calexico - Hot Rail
There's So Many Colors - Akron/Family - Love Is Simple
Cosmic Charlie - The Grateful Dead - Aoxomoxoa
Spiders (Kidsmoke) - Wilco - A Ghost Is Born
Heron King Blues - Califone - Heron King Blues
Half A Canyon - Pavement - Wowee Zowee
Mr. Spaceman - The Byrds - Fifth Dimesnion

Back To School Part II

2009-10-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

First, a report from one of your classmates on how to school a wingnut evangelist:

Bravo, young lady! You deserve an A for atheism.

Okay, attention class, this next subject is a fun one! It's a survey of the plethora of cover songs within the spacerock realm, whether it's spacerock bands covering songs not normally considered to be part of the genre, or bands not normally considered to be spacerock indulging in a little lysergic pleasure. It allows us listeners and aficionados to peek into the psyches of these artists and discover more about them by exposing their personal tastes and influences - after all, you wouldn't cover a song you hate, would you? Except ironically, of course, and there's a modicum of irony or satire in spacerock (look at Hawkwind, for example), but it's definitely not the modus operandi. Seeing which covers these bands choose, and how they choose to cover them - whether in sincere homage or by completely dismantling the song to reassemble it their own way - helps us to discover the lineage between these musical movements, develop contexts and histories, and better understand the solar systems and larger galaxies of spacerock.

In this segment we also get to break three rules of the Spacerock Continuum: we can play the same artist in the same set, and we can play two versions of the same song in the same set. AND, we'll be going a bit over the two-hour mark this time, so get comfortable class, this will be journey of discovery for us all.

Ready? Begin:

We start in an obvious place (at least for those of us familiar with the LA supergroup featuring members of Failure and Tool who formed purely to put out a one-off collection of radically reinterpreted cover songs) with The Replicants and their take on a "silly" Paul McCartney & Wings ditty, and a track from Pink Floyd's spacey soundtrack for the obscure 70s film 'More'. Speaking of the Floyd, we follow with Japanese electronicists Color Filter and their dreamy version of one of my favorite Floyd songs ever from the Meddle album, and Red Temple Spirits doing another track from 'More' as well as a track from 'Umma Gumma'. We then have two drastically different versions of a 13th Floor Elevators' chestnut from Oneida and Primal Scream. Red Temple Spirits put out more than their fair share of covers and here we have another one from them in the form of their version of a Spacemen 3 gem, which was actually a cover of a 13th Floor Elevators track. Confused yet? How about Spacemen 3 themselves (who put out and album coincidentally called 'Sound of Confusion') with an unrecognizable cover of a Sun Ra song? Speaking of the Spacemen, next up are two of the best tracks from a tribute album to the opiated astral travelers from Frontier and Asteroid #4.

Okay, let's get a bit more down to earth (as much as we ever do in spacerock): next up, The Gun Club's fitting rendition of an oldie-goldie from Creedence Clearwater Revival, followed by True West making their acquaintance with Syd Barrett's friend Sam and Bauhaus meeting an entirely different Sam, a friend of Marc Bolan and T. Rex. Paying tribute to The Rolling Stones' ill-advised foray into sci-fi rock are 80s goth favorites Danse Society, then Maynard James Keenan from Tool feting Bauhaus survivors Love & Rockets with his side project Puscifer. Also from that album of L&R covers is Film School sounding reverential to their obvious forebears. Also proudly displaying their influences are Jessamine covering Suicide and Loop doing Neil Young. We then have a bizarre take on another Neil Young classic from The Flaming Lips, as well as their surprisingly faithful rendition of Queen's quintessential (if overplayed) rock opera. Another surprise choice is Husker Du, here mangling a slice of Byrdsian psychedelia. Then Th' Faith Healers demonstrate where they tuned up their motorik by covering vintage krautrockers Can.

In addition to Pink Floyd and the 13th Floor Elevators, another iconic band to cover is, of course, The Velvet Underground, and here are just a couple from 80s experimental stalwarts Clock DVA and Japan (REM was too obvious). Another is, even more obviously, David Bowie, and here we have the late, great Zen Guerilla paying debt to a classic Ziggy Stardust glamrocker (which I had the tearjerking pleasure to witness live on the very day of Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson's untimely death). Then we come full circle back to the Replicants with their reinterpretation of Bowie's finest epic.

Last, but certainly not least, Built To Spill's Doug Martsch conjures the god of thunder guitar on Neil Young's most torrential opus. Exhausting but not exhaustive, this set is by no means meant to be comprehensive - there are simply to many choice covers from which to choose. What are some of your favorites not included here, class? Discuss.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Silly Love Songs - Replicants - Replicants
Ibiza Bar - Replicants - Replicants
Fearless - Color Filter - I Often Think In Music
Nile Song - Red Temple Spirits - Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon
Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun - Red Temple Spirits - If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa I Wouldn't Stay A Minute More
Slip Inside This House - Oneida - Come On Everybody Let's Rock
Slip Inside This House - Primal Scream - Screamadelica
Rollercoaster - Red Temple Spirits - If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa I Wouldn't Stay A Minute More
Rollercoaster - Spacemen 3 - Sound Of Confusion
Starship - Spacemen 3 - The Perfect Prescription
Hey Man - Frontier - A Tribute To Spacemen 3
Losing Touch With My Mind - Asteroid #4 - A Tribute To Spacemen 3
Run Through The Jungle - The Gun Club - Miami
Lucifer Sam - True West - Hollywood Holiday
Telegram Sam - Bauhaus - In The Flat Field
2000 Light Years From Home - Danse Society - Heaven Is Waiting
Holiday On The Moon - Puscifer - A Tribute To Love & Rockets
An American Dream - Film School - A Tribute To Love & Rockets
Cheree - Jessamine - Another Fictionalized History
Cinnamon Girl - Loop - A Tribute To Neil Young
After The Gold Rush - Flaming Lips - A Tribute To Neil Young
Bohemian Rhapsody - Flaming Lips - A Tribute To Queen
Eight Miles High - Husker Du - single
Mother Sky - Th' Faith Healers - Lido
Black Angels Death Song - Clock DVA - Advantage
All Tomorrow's Parties - Japan - Quiet Life
Moonage Daydream - Zen Guerilla - Trance States In Tongues
The Bewlay Brothers - Replicants - Replicants
Cortez The Killer - Built To Spill - Live

SPACE JAZZ...?!?!?

2009-09-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

It's back-to-school time, kids! And our first lesson is about the intersection of spacey sounds and high-minded JAZZ! Now it's no secret that the illustrious Sun Ra claimed to be from outer space (Saturn, I believe), as have many African American auteur/musicians from George Clinton to Dr. Octagon (aka Kool Keith who insists, "Earth people: I was born on Jupiter")... what IS it with that, anyway? So this month's installment is a bit of an inter-disciplinary study, deviating from the decidedly rockist format of this spacecast; a chance to explore the spacier tangents of jazz from the bop era to the space age, from free jazz exploration to avant garde science fiction.

We begin with the band who brought jazz (along with dub, latin rhythms, spaghetti western and experimental electronics) to the nebulous genre known as post rock, the mighty Tortoise, standard bearers of the Chicago sound. Following them are their Chi-Town schoolmates Pit Er Pat who bring a skewed melodicism and scattershot rhythmic edge to the proceedings. Next up, a very a-typically jazzy track from no-wave avant gardist Rhys Chatham who's more known for postmodern orchestral pieces (if a composition for 100 electric guitars is your idea of orchestral) as well as inspiring the likes of Sonic Youth. And how could this playlist be complete without drum-and-bass DJ and all-around madman Squarepusher, who alongside his prodigious programming talents just happens to be one berzerk mofo on electric bass. Another entry from the realm of electronica, the former drum-and-bass experimental duo Spring Heel Jack have morphed in recent years into extreme avant garde jazzists along with many trad jazz players and other unlikely guests including Spiritualized's J. Spaceman.

Another couple entries from the Chicago school (are they dominating this genre?), Exploding Star Orchestra and Isotope 217, both feature an alchemical mix of trad jazz and avant players, from cornetist and composer Rob Mazurek to multiple members of Tortoise. Next we trip lightly through a segment featuring the godfathers of space jazz, the always angular Ornette Coleman, the free jazz pioneer Pharoah Sanders, and the spaceways exploring Sun Ra.

Continuing the theme of melding electronic to organic, we have the familiarly monikered Spacetime Continuum from San Francisco, the polyrhythmic dub-jazzniks HiM (not to be confused with the thoroughly awful Finnish goth-metal band Him), and a collision between British electronica composer Kieran Hebden (aka Fourtet and 1/3 of post rockers Fridge) and old school American free jazz drummer Steve Reid. And if that doesn't leave you exhausted, prepare to wrap up this astral traveling set with New Zealand motorik-monotonists The Necks.

Okay class, school's out! Time for a nap...

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

TNT - Tortoise - TNT
I Am The Jungle - Pit Er Pat - Emergency
Flash - Rhys Chatham - Hard Edge
Delta-V - Squarepusher - Just A Souvenir
Autumn - Spring Heel Jack - The Sweetness of the Water
Sting Ray and the Beginning of Time, Part 1 - Exploding Star Orchestra - We Are All From Somewhere Else
Luh - Isotope 217 - Utonian Automatic
Civilization Day - Ornette Coleman - Complete Science Fiction
Astral Traveling - Pharoah Sanders - You've Got To Have Freedom
Lanquidity- Sun Ra - Lanquidity
Manaka - Spacetime Continuum - Double Fine Zone
A Verdict of Science - HiM - Sworn Eyes
Morning Prayer - Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid - The Exchange Sessions
Abillera - The Necks - Chemist

WAKE UP, SPACEMONKEYS!!!

2009-08-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

Let us now celebrate the most uncompromising bands of our time from within and around the genre known as psychedelic. Surely it would too easy for me too just play All Pink Floyd, All The Time. Instead you're in for a dose of the obscure, noisy, and unrelenting.

I hope you enjoyed the above video from the all-time psych-pop masters of Oz, the Church, who just released their 23rd album this year (!). This track was recorded live very recently but comes from their second album of their mid-80s heyday (album title pun intended), back when I must've seen them at least a dozen times. These guys are pushing 60 (!) and rock like nobody else out there. There must be something wrong with me but this video brought tears to my jaded eyes.

So on to the blitz: there's a lot more I could've included in this set, but it started out just as any other, and only later did I attempt to classify it. I hesitate in my hasty inclination to call this my Best. Set. Ever. But whatever... "it is what it is" (to quote the most inane phrase ever coined in the English language)... and it RAWKS.

We start with the prolific favorite sons of Wales the Super Furry Animals, and the opening slab of psych/glam from the their latest (and greatest?) album, and follow them with their countrymen Future of the Left, who rose from the ashes of the mighty Mclusky, that postpunk juggernaut that was the Welsh answer to Fugazi but with a wicked sense of misanthropic humor. Both they and Death From Above 1979 could hardly be called psychedelic per se (although an argument could be made for their spacerockingness), but I thought they fit well in the set, so don't question it - you'll thank me later.

We then take a turn toward the dark side with spaghetti-western psychesters Spindrift, trance-inducing Texans The Black Angels, nerve-fraying Sacramentoans the Ganglians, raucous troglodytes Cave, and motorik madmen Circle, with a stomping tribute to their Finnish home town.

When it comes to uncompromising... with their proclivity for reinventing the same circular song pattern over the course of dozens of releases and a plethora of microgenres, all the while toiling in obscurity, Circle wrote the book. Other contributors to various chapters of this tome include Brooklyn's Oneida, and this monster of a track is culled from their umpteenth recording, an ambitious 3CD sprawl that succeeds in melting my mind easily 90% of the time. And with only 10% filler it's better for you than most American-made foodstuffs. The next chapter is writ large by Chicago postrock OGs Tortoise who, judging by this track, haven't decided to mellow into the tepid smooth jazz fusion of some of their contemporaries. They certainly backed that statement up at a stellar San Francisco show earlier in the month which I was lucky enough to witness. And of course, the foreward and epilogue to this anthology would have to be written by 70s-era krautrock pioneers Faust who are still at it today (this track coming from 1997, one of their many "comebacks"), and who continue to be more challenging and uncompromising than ever.

From there we tackle some analog synthtronica from Cluster-philes like Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, who is really a solo composer dedicated to the Teutonic arts (Mozart, anyone? gene-splice it with some modern drone theory? add some Fahey-esque guitar? yes please!), Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, space-technoist Norwegians who occasionally fall off the dance floor and rise into something more cerebral, and Sinoia Caves, the keyboardist from Black Mountain getting his Cluster (aka Kluster) on.

Yanking us, sleep-deprived from our reveries, is everyone's favorite spacepunk superheroes the Trail of Dead with a devastating track from their latest magnum opus, which then leaves us in the hands of the unarguable godfathers of hyper-dynamic post rock, Tokyo's Mono, who show us how to go from very quiet to VERY LOUD to even LOUDER to LOUDER STILL, but Glasgow's mighty 'Gwai take it further still, to the heavens and back, with their side-length biblical epic that one-ups even their other lengthy classics like "Mogwai Fear Satan" and "Like Herod". Apocalyptic times indeed, but squint a bit and you might see that elusive light at the end of the long... dark... tunnel.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Crazy Naked Girls - Super Furry Animals - Dark Days/Light Years
The Hope That House Built - Future of the Left - Travels With Myself And Another
Turn It Out - Death From Above 1979 - You're A Woman, I'm A Machine
Goin' Down - Spindrift - The West
Black Grease - The Black Angels - Passover
100 Years - Ganglians - Monster Head Room
Gamm - Cave - Psychic Psummer
Back To Pori - Circle - Pori
10:30 At The Oasis - Oneida - Rated O
Yinxianghechengqi - Tortoise - Beacons Of Ancestorship
Liebeswehen 2 - Faust - You Know Faust
Feuerprobe - Eine Kleine Nacht Musik - Eine Kleine Nacht Musik
Rothaus - Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas - II
Evil Ball - Sinoia Caves - The Enchanter Persuaded
Bells Of Creation - ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - The Century Of Self
Com (?) - Mono - One Step More And You Die
My Father, My King - Mogwai - My Father, My King

Space travel is fun...!

2009-07-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

And we're traveling all over the place this month, which should explain my tardiness in posting this installment. I briefly touched down on terra firma for summer vacation the last couple weeks, ports o' call within my orbit from San Diego to Portland, but I'm back in the satellite now with a set of the heavy, the majestic and the obscure, just for you.

Attention metalheads! The first meaty chunk of this set is for you! If you're not so metallic don't let that frighten you off - this is only the most progressive of modern day post-metal, from Harvey Milk, Torche, Helms Alee and Oceansize. The once-defunct but recently regrouped Athens GA trio Harvey Milk bring the heavy to closeted metal lovers in the oft-effeminate indie scene. Torche, who I saw on a bill with Red Sparrowes and Isis (two bands that would fit perfectly in this set, but time doesn't permit), bring a surprising melodiousness to their manic punk-metal hybrid. Helms Alee came to me through the impeccable taste of my cohort Sully, who caught the Seattle three-piece at their recent stop at Petaluma's illustrious Phoenix Theater. Oceansize is a band I struggle with pigeon-holing, because despite hailing from Madchester UK, their drift and crunch conjurs not only their namesakes Jane's Addiction, but everything from Radiohead to Tool to vintage grunge circa Alice In Chains. Confusing? But not necessarily a bad thing.

We then transition to a proggier segment with the vintage keyboard saturated space travels of Zombi, the spaciest track from the stellar new Tortoise album, some shoegazin' bliss from Ulrich Schnauss, a motorik-inspired selection from the Phantom Band, and a Phil Spector worshiping slice of melodrama from Pink Mountaintops (side project of Black Mountain stalwarts Stephen McBean and Amber Webber).

Then it's time for a couple left-field departures, where Japan's Mono bring postrock ever nearer to neoclassical proportions on their latest release, and Australia's Necks launch jazz instrumentation into Space 1990. That's when things get really weird: Black Eyes are not for everyone, and can be just as painful as their namesake to those unaccustomed to the abrasive textures where ART meets NOISE. But fear not, after the band broke up their helium-voiced singer formed a new band Mi Ami that melded the sandpaper skronk of his previous outfit to mind-melting echo chamber dub! And as icing on the noise cake, three epics of endurance: one from the enigmatic Majik Markers, one from the latest installment of the saga that is Sonic Youth, and a lengthy closer from Kiwi atonalist Birchville Cat Motel a man who straddles the line between aural and textural as well as anyone in the history of spacerock.

I hope this reaches you in time to annoy the neighbors at your Independence Day BBQ and ignite fireworks in your brain. Happy Birthday America! May your current trajectory carry us like a comet, arcing ever higher and never crashing to earth!

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Death Goes To The Winner - Harvey Milk - Life... The Best Game In Town
Amnesian - Torche - Meanderthal
A New Roll - Helms Alee - Night Terror
Catalyst - Oceansize - Effloresce
Earthly Powers - Zombi - Spirit Animal
High Class Slim Came Floatin' In - Tortoise - Beacons Of Ancestorship
On My Own - Ulrich Schnauss - A Strangely Isolated Place
Throwing Bones - Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage
Axis: Thrones Of Love - Pink Mountaintops - Outside Love
Battle To Heaven - Mono - Hymn To The Immortal Wind
Next - The Necks - Next
Yes, I Confess - Black Eyes - s/t
Echonoecho - Mi Ami - Watersports
Axis Mundi - Majik Markers - Boss
Antenna - Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Chi Vampires - Birchville Cat Motel - Chi Vampires

June Gloom?

2009-06-01T14:16:00.000-07:00

Got politics? What a clusterfuck this world is in! Ah, nevermind... the weather's great up here on the satellite, let's forget about petty human affairs and blast off into SPACE!

We start this month's installment with some seriocomic glam/prog entries from the Crazy World of notorious British eccentric Arthur Brown (circa 1968) and a tongue-in-cheek slice of "social commentary" from vintage Roxy Music ('73), winding out with THE all-time space-glam epic from our beloved spaceman Ziggy Stardust ('72) and a classic from little-known but highly influential analog synth oddballs the Silver Apples ('68). Our progression shifts to quasi-shoegaze with San Francisco's Halcyon High (a one-man psych-guitar extravaganza), and Chicago's notoriously "difficult" Labradford proudly wearing their influences on one of their most linear and accessible tracks.

From there it's a decidedly motorik affair with Swedish retro-futurists The Low Frequency In Stereo, the UK's The Horrors (suddenly dropping their Cramps/Birthday Party goth tendencies in favor of smooth krautrock for their second album), and San Francisco's Wooden Shjips from their fine second full-length release. Splintering off from that realm, the Phantom Band shows the motorik/instrumental side of their Beta Band/Super Furry Animals-style psych-pop which leads us to some acid-soaked americana from Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, from their long-lost first album (look next month for a track from their just-released third album, a contender for best of the year!), MV & EE, Dead Meadow and Comets On Fire. Aussies The Dirty Three then uplift us from the morass with an upbeat instrumental love-ditty composed of guitars, violins and... bagpipes?!?!?

Finishing this set on an up note, musical breathren Oneida and Pterodactyl drop some spaz-prog science, Fridge put the chill on post-rock and Unwound take their moniker to heart. All in a day's work, folks... enjoy!

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Prelude/Nightmare - Arthur Brown - The Crazy World of Arthur Brown
In Every Dream Home A Heartache - Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
Moonage Daydream - David Bowie - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars
Oscillations - Silver Apples - s/t
Close Your Eyes And See The Light - Halcyon High - Live on KDVS
Soft Return - Labraford - Prazision
Solar System - The Low Frequency In Stereo - Futuro
Sea Within A Sea - The Horrors - Primary Colours
Down By The Sea - Wooden Shjips - Dos
Crocodile - Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage
Creeping Spirits & Talkonaut - Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound - s/t
Canned Happiness - MV & EE - Green Blues
One And Old - Dead Meadow - Howls From The Hills
Brotherhood Of The Harvest - Comets On Fire - Blue Cathedral
Doris - Dirty Three - Cinder
Up With People - Oneida - Happy New Year
Share The Shade - Pterodactyl - Worldwild
Astrozero - Fridge - Early Output 1996-1998
Side Effects Of Being Tired - Unwound - Challenge For A Civilized Society

May Day!!! May Day!!!

2009-05-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

Happy Beltane!!! That's all I got by way of topical or witty banter this month. Let's cut to the chase, shall we?

We start slow with some stream-of-consciousness motorik from Psychic Ills, whose great new album has a more improvised-in-the-studio feel, and Wooden Shjips from their debut album (I'll be back next month with a track from their brand new one!). Then an oddball track from Mercury Rev's new one, a free download on their website, which is entirely instrumental! Just as you're drifting off you'll be startled out of your reverie by a blistering track from the incredilbe new Trail of Dead album, their best in a long line of great albums and a true return to form (thanks to Kevin at Pandora Studios for the invitation to a private Trail of Dead taping - that was AWESOME!). We move on into a set of some proggy polyrhythmic pandemonium from our beloved Animal Collective (new one's brilliant!), Marnie Stern (last track from her for a while, I swear!), and Lucky Dragons (file under WTF?!?!?). Then we have some Chicago-school jazz-prog from Pit Er Pat (sounding alot like Pram, who I've been playing a lot of lately) and some full-on space-kraut from Japan's Rovo (always amazing).

Then, as I am wont to do, we drop shear off the cliff into oblivion, with Birchville Cat Motel, a one-man experimental "outfit" from New Zealand, lo-fi San Diego noisemonger Wavves, also a one man band, and a meandering krautrockin' track from late-great San Francisco absurdists Chum Frink (hi Derek!). Speaking of absurd, if I wasn't familiar with the individual members' pedigrees (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Le Fly Pan Am... basically a who's who of the Montreal post-rock scene) I wouldn't know what to make of the next band, Pas Chic Chic, but suffice it to say their "trippy Francophone pop" is meant to be both tongue-in-cheek AND spacerockin'.

And I daresay the remainder of the set is a collection of the most linear stuff I've ever compiled on the Spacerock Continuum (barring the more free-form January best-of editions): Crystal Stilts' surfin-'in-Motown psychedelia, Sian Alice Group's PJ Harvey-esque minimalist post-rock, the Cocteau Twins-esque retro-futurist leanings of School of Seven Bells (featuring an ex-Secret Machines guitarist and the two lovely sisters from On! Air! Library!), a vintage shoegazing classic from Slowdive, the aforementioned Secret Machines whose third album, from which this track is taken, is not as bad as their miserable second but not as good as their stellar debut, and one of the greatest tracks from the sorely-overlooked and long-defunct Chameleons (UK), circa 1985. Of course I have to leave you with a mind-melting show closer, so in this case prepare to be utterly transported by Germany's Daturah (fittingly named after the traditional name for the powerful hallucinogen jimson weed). Work for you? It did for me...

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Mantis - Psychic Ills - Mirror Eye
We Ask You To Ride - Wooden Shjips - s/t
Because Because Because - Mercury Rev - Strange Attractors
Far Pavilions - ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - The Century Of Self
Lion In A Coma - Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Grapefruit - Marnie Stern - In Advance Of The Broken Arm
Givers - Lucky Dragons - Dream Island Laughing Language
I Am The Jungle - Pit Er Pat - Emergency
Cisko - Rovo - Tonic 2001
Damn Infinity Hair Tie - Birchville Cat Motel - Four Freckle Constellation
Sun Opens My Eyes - Wavves - Wavvves
Palimony - Chum Frink - EP
Vous Comprenez Pourquoi - Pas Chic Chic - Au Contraire
The Dazzled - Crystal Stilts - Alight Of Night
Way Down To Heaven - Sian Alice Group - 59.59
Sempiternal Amaranth - School Of Seven Bells - Alpinisms
Morningrise - Slowdive - Catch The Breeze
Have I Run Out? - Secret Machines - s/t (third)
In Shreds - The Chameleons - What Does Anything Mean, Basically?
Ghost Track - Daturah - Reverie

And how's about a bonus video? One for Mogwai's biggest mindfuck ever? Well, okay then:

Mogwai - Mogwai Fear Satan from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Is there spring in space?

2009-04-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Okay we're back to the random spacerock this month after a couple exhausting lessons in experimental rock history... no theme this time, no focus, no plot, just a cluster of stars that spun itself off into yet another galaxy in the Spacerock Multiverse! We begin with a bit of epic ridiculosity from the ever-reliable Germans, the lost-to-obscurity Agitation Free and the freak commune known as Amon Duul II (vintage krautrock can always be depended on for some kitsch psychedelia and in these two tracks our intrepid Teutonic explorers head to Eastern outposts), and then off into some Gabriel-era Genesis, who unfortunately are not actually intending to be tongue-in-cheek here, but are still notable in this context. We then delve into some polyrhythmic pandemonium from the early 80s (23 Skidoo) and just last year (Mahjongg), and then transport to some acid-fried Americana from Tobacco (also from last year, spun off from Black Moth Super Rainbow) Religious Knives (also last year), The Gun Club, Green On Red and Red Temple Spirits (all three are originators from the 80s and as such these recordings are poorly mastered, so turn 'em WAY up, especially the Gun Club!). Then we settle into an extended passage through some pastoral psych/folk weirdness, beginning with a track from Black Mountain to commemorate their recent passage through the Bay Area to which I was lucky enough to bear witness - mind blown? check! - culminating in the new single from the almighty Circle's latest album... with vocals in English even (courtesy of one Bruce Duff, former singer for the Jesters of Destiny, an obscure and long-defunct LA prog-metal also-ran)! Will wonders never cease? In there we hear from the very enigmatic Jane, the very French Benoît Pioulard, a pair of tracks from Ulann Khol and Hala Strana, who are basically the same person (Steven Smith from San Francisco's Thuja), a solo guitar workout (in keeping with the two previous tracks) from Charalambides, minus the usual soaring vocals of Christina Carter, and a couple of tasty morsels from freak-folksters Wooden Wand and Akron/Family. Last but not least: settle deep into yer oooohhhhmmm... with the indescribable sounds of the man known as Lichens.

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Malesch - Agitation Free - Malesch
Deutsch Nepal - Amon Düül II - Wolf City
Riding The Scree - Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
The Gospel Comes To New Guinea - 23 Skidoo - The Gospel Comes To New Guinea
Rise Rice - Mahjongg - Kontpab
Backwoods Altar - Tobacco - Fucked Up Friends
Downstairs - Religious Knives - The Door
Walking With The Beast - The Gun Club - The Las Vegas Story
Narcolepsy - Green On Red - Gravity Talks
Exorcism / Waiting for The Sun - Red Temple Spirits - Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon
Bastards of Light - Black Mountain - In The Future
Berserker - Jane - Berserker
Ragged Tint - Benoît Pioulard - Temper
Untitled 1 - Ulaan Khol - II
Wood Scree - Hala Strana - These Villages
Pasé el Agora - Charalambides - Our Bed Is Green
I Am the One I Am And He is the Caretaker of My Heart - Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice - Buck Dharma
Raising The Sparks - Akron/Family - Akron/Family & Angels Of Light
Connection - Circle - Hollywood
M St R Ng W Tchcr Ft L V Ng N Sp R T - Lichens - Omns

More Legacies and Influences

2009-03-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Okay class, this is another history lesson like last month. Pipe down, pipe down... it's for your own good. A little education goes a long way into understanding space rock. Specifically, the experiMENTAL side of rock music. It's basically what happens when you remove the blues influence and start incorporating esoteric ideas like, dissonance, drone, undertones, overtones, just intonation, atonality, microtonality, harmonics, xenharmonics and a whole lotta other concepts with fancy names that aren't really necessary to for you to know. You'll understand this music when you hear it... you'll KNOW it because you hear it all the time. This kind of music is more in tune with the natural rhythms and melodies of your body's own chemistry than any western blues-derived motif could ever be. It's the music of the cosmos!

Before this begins to sound dry, just listen to the tracks. We start with a relatively rockist number from Rhys Chatham, who has composed songs (or movements) for up to 400 electric guitars, all tuned slightly differently, and created a number of sprawling pieces like this one back in the 70's and 80's. He and his contemporary Glenn Branca, another multi-guitar proponent and "symphony" composer, begat Sonic Youth who incorporated a little punk rock and attitude into the mix, with screwdrivers jammed under the strings of their guitars, unorthodox tunings and a complete lack of cymbals on the drum kit. They're represented here with an aptly-named track from their seminal 1988 classic. The more formal side of this ethos is demonstrated by Steve Reich and Terry Riley, who really are more modern classical composers but have heavily influenced experimental rockers like Stereolab, Spacemen 3 and Brian Eno, whose collaboration with treated guitarist Robert Fripp (from King Crimson) is one the most quintessential non-rocking "rock" experiments of all time. I've thrown in some lesser-known devotees like French-Canadian sonic pranksters Le Fly Pan Am who add the element of recording manipulation (yes those little glitches are intentional), the godfathers of motorik Neu! (who in turn influenced Stereolab), fretboard sorceress Marnie Stern whose own downtown NYC milieu has strong ties to the legacy of their forebears (Branca, Chatham, Sonic Youth et al.), Texas psych duo Charalambides (just guitar and voice) and enigmatic whatchamacallits Glissandro 70 (delayed guitar and electronics). Confused? Just sit back and LISTEN...

The following tracks should appear in the player below:

Die Donnergötter - Rhys Chatham - An Angel Moves Too Fast To See
The Sprawl - Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
Swimming Pool - Charalambides - Glowing Raw
Partially Sabotaged Distraction Partiellement Sabotée - Le Fly Pan Am - Ceux Qui Inventent N'ont Jamais Vécu
Electric Counterpoint 1 - Steve Reich - Electric Counterpoint
Something - Glissandro 70 - s/t
Shea Stadium - Marnie Stern - This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That
Hallogallo - Neu! - s/t
Analogue Rock - Stereolab - Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements
A Rainbow In Curved Air - Terry Riley - A Rainbow In Curved Air
Swastika Girls II - Brian Eno & Robert Fripp - No Pussyfooting
Second Movement (The Horror) - Glenn Branca - Symphony #10
Ecstasy In Slow Motion - Spacemen 3 - Dreamweapon

By the way, I recently felt the need for a little terra firma (it gets lonely up here in the spacerock station) so I beamed myself down to earth, Petaluma specifically, and this is what I saw: