The Very Best of 2015 Part 2!

Here it is! Part Two of the very best space rock of 2015, a full three-hour playlist! So much goodness! Suck it up and let it be your soundtrack to the coming year!

Here's the tracks in the player below (continuous mix):

The Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles
Peasantry or 'Light! Inside Of Light!' - Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress
Peaking Duck - Carlton Melton - Out To Sea
Pan - White Manna - Pan
Don't Kill The Vibe - Ecstatic Vision - Sonic Praise
Salvation - Destruction Unit - Negative Feedback Resistor
Crusher - Kylesa - Exhausting Fire
Pusher Man - Uncle Acid And The Deadbeats - The Night Creeper
The Beacon - Golden Void - Berkana
Mirror In My Mind - Flavor Crystals - The Shiver Of The Flavor Crystals
Wilding - Moon Duo - Shadow Of The Sun
Heavy Metal Suicide - Ringo Deathstar - Pure Mood
Crybaby Demon - Crocodiles - Boys
Perfect Dope - Black Lizard - Solarize
I'm Crying - Rancho Relaxo - White Light Fever
Self Hypnosis In Three Days - Wand - Golem
Zond - Pond - Man It Feels Like Space Again
Puzzles - Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Multi-Love
Lonely Steel Sheet Flyer - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Quarters
Slab Of Butter (Scorpion) - Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz - s/t
Bunker Buster - Viet Cong - s/t
Deeper - The Soft Moon - Deeper
Old Girl - Algiers - s/t
Web - Thee Oh Sees - Mutilator Defeated At Last
20th Century Boy - Ty Segall - Ty Rex
Say Hello - Fuzz - II
The Day Nico Died - Driftwood Pyre - s/t
Faith Healer - Gateway Drugs - Magick Spells
Pretty Pimpin' - Kurt Vile - B'lieve I'm Goin' Down
Qalgebra - Hagerty-Toth Band - Qalgebra
Wild Strawberries - Eternal Tapestry - Wild Strawberries

The Spacerock Continuum's Best of 2015 Part 2 by Thespacerockcontinuum on Mixcloud

The Very Best of 2015!

A nice comment on a previous SRC playlist just came to my attention: "I love this, a legal wake and bake for those not in the legalized states!"

So. Can you believe another year has gone by?!?!? Can you believe the amazing amount of space rock that came out last year?!?!? Can you say...

 THE TOP TEN of 2015?!?!?

1. pinkshinyultrablast ~ "Everything Else Matters"

2. Flavor Crystals ~ "The Shiver of The Flavor Crystals"

3. Wand ~ "Golem"

4. Pond ~ "Man It Feels Like Space Again"

5. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard ~ "Quarters"

6. Rancho Relaxo ~ "White Light Fever"

7. Ringo Deathstar ~ "Pure Mood"

8. Driftwood Pyre ~ s/t

9. Swervedriver ~ " I Wasn't Born To Lose You" / Cheatahs ~ "Mythologies" (shoegaze tie!)

10. Föllakzoid ~ "III" / Weites Luftmeer ~ "O.S.T." (motorik tie!)

And so much more! I've compiled two playlists clocking in at FIVE AND A HALF HOURS of incredible musix. This is INSTALLMENT NUMBER ONE (number two next month!), and contains a continuous mix of the following tracks (see Mixcloud and Soundcloud players below):

The Spacerock Continuum Intro - bRambles
No Cave - Maserati - Rehumanizer
Electric - Follakzoid - III
The Field's Crawling - Weites Luftmeer - O.S.T.
Straight - A Place To Bury Strangers - Transfixiation
Remember Nothing - No Joy - More Faithful
Minions - Torche - Restarter
Acetate - Metz - II
Red Queen Arms Race - Swervedriver - I Wasn't Born To Lose You
Murasaki - Cheatahs - Mythologies
Neshel - Vaadat Charagim - Sinking As A Stone
Glitter - Pinkshinyultrablast - Everything Else Matters
Seventh Moon - The Black Ryder - The Door Behind The Door
Transformation - Valet - Nature
Sparks - Beach House - Depression Cherry
California Nights - Best Coast - California Nights
Take Care - Deerhunter - Fading Frontier
The Giving In - The Velvet Teen - All Is Illusory
You Satellite - Wilco - Star Wars
Irreal - Disappears - Irreal
Mr. Noah - Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper
Stone Fist - Health - Death Magic
Ha Howa Ha Howa - Sexwitch - Sexwitch
Mind On Fire - Dan Deacon - Glass Riffer
Non-Violence - Battles - La Di Da Di
Dead Format - Blanck Mass - Dumb Flesh
Ton 01 - Karamika - s/t
The Spacerock Continuum End Theme - bRambles

The Spacerock Continuum's Best of 2015 Part 1 by Thespacerockcontinuum on Mixcloud

Spacerock for breakfast!

Spread THAT on yer toast!

And what better way to wake up (and bake up) than with this decidedly HEAVY and SPACEY playlist. Sometimes they just come together that way. This one's like strongass coffee spiked with psilocybin! 

This installment of the Spacerock Continuum contains a continuous mix of the following tracks (see Mixcloud and Soundcloud players below):

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Astral Plane Parts 1-3 - Ecstatic Vision - Sonic Praise
Ancient Astronauts - The Holy Mountain - Ancient Astronauts
Vow - Naam - Vow
Acid Head - White Manna - s/t
Smell of Physiqal - Sungod - Contackt
Duck and Clover - Pond - Frond 
9 - Follakzoid - II
Back Of Your Mind - Asteroid #4 - s/t
11:32 - Sleepy Sun - Maui Tears
Guitar Voodoo - The Darkside - All That Noise
Pseudoephedrina - FoneZ - Adhesivo De Contacto Espacial
Grass - The Black Ryder - Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
Starting Over - LSD And The Search For God - s/t
Homage - Causa Sui - Euphorie Tide
The Ballad Of Freer Hollow - Chris Forsyth And The Solar Motel Band - Intensity Ghost
Dream Team - Mark McGuire - A Young Person's Guide To Mark McGuire
The End - Daniel Lanois - Flesh And Machine

The Spacerock Continuum October 2015 by Thespacerockcontinuum on Mixcloud

It's Desert Stars time again!

Just TWO WEEKS from today we will be back at Pappy and Harriet's roadhouse in Pioneertown, near Joshua Tree in the California Mojave Desert! It's an amazing place, and an amazing festival. Come join us in the desert! Here's a mix of the artists who will be performing:

Sci-Flyer - Swervedriver - Raise
Young Men Dead - The Black Angels (Alex Maas) - Passover
Six To Let The Light Shine Thru - Dead Meadow - Warble Womb
Dandelion Seeds - The Lemonheads - Varchons
Moving - Lou Barlow - Brace The Waves
Upon Your Shore - The Spiral Electric - Upon Your Shore
Lonely Alibis - Sky Parade - label compilation
Fadeaway Girl - Darwin - Souvenir
Solar Chariot (Apollo) - Gateway Drugs - Dr. Flower demos
Fall In - Chatham Rise - s/t
Vanilla - The Cosmonauts - Persona Non Grata
The New Theme - Hollow Sidewalks - Hollow Sidewalks Are Not People
Got Gratitude - The Love Dimension - single
Hide It... - Drinking Flowers - Sanity Restored 1972
The Wind - Spindrift - The West
Grim Reaper Blues Part 2 - The Entrance Band - s/t
Redrum  - Dumb Numbers - s/t
No Easy Way Down - Rain Parade - Explosions In The Glass Palace
   

Desert Stars Mix 2015 by Thespacerockcontinuum on Mixcloud

Summer in Space

We're back! Let the sun shine on!

Quite the playlist this time around folks (but aren't they all?). This one is particularly relentless... must be my mood. Some familiar faces, which is a result of composing these playlists over roughly the same time period, then mixing 'em up at the last minute just for fun (in the sun).

Beginning our journey to the center of the summer sun, we set the controls with the blazing Spacemen 3/Stooges space punk of the legendary Heads. The suburban wasteland of Orange County, CA, is an unlikely place for a spacerock band like Dagha Bloom, but space IS the place. Another place, A Place To Bury Strangers' riled the late night crowd with their crowd-surfing, instrument-destroying and eardrum-exploding destroying set at this year's Austin Psych Fest - it was definitely in the top three of that festival, and their most recent album is one of their best.

Some new discoveries for me this year include The Asteroid #4, Drinking Flowers, The Shivas, (erstwhile Primal Scream guitarist) Little Barrie, and The Spyrals, and I have Desert Stars Fest to thank for most of them, if memory serves. And the crushing sludge of Meatbodies is the project of Chad Ubovitch, collaborator with the creme de la garage rock, including Ty Segall, Fuzz, and Mikal Cronin. This segment of the set veers from the garage to the surf and back again. Hold on to your hats and glasses - it's gonna be wild ride!

The brothers Pontiak continue their dark, swampy, stoner rock bombast with their latest release. We can thank The Brian Jonestown Massacres' Anton Newcombe for exposing Cologne-based Dead Man's Eyes to the rest of the world. Another track from Swedish enigma Goat, the mysterious pagan cult of mind-melting tribal ritual music. Velvets-y transcendentalists Acid Baby Jesus bring the hypnotic torpor to new levels.

Californians (the former from the south, the latter from the north) Wand and Sleepy Sun have also in common the ability to bring an ecstatic catharsis well beyond what psychedelic usually means. Portlandia's Daydream Machine combines classic Brit pop with Cali-psych for an uplifting and unique sound. Eagle's Gift, from France, start with the Jesus And Mary Chain and feeds it through a shoegazer's effects board and a danceable beat. Continuing the dance-able theme, the motorik genre's forward motion rhythms have always brought the boogie to the bombast (or at least some serious head nodding), and Chile's Follakzoid do it better than most.

The two gals and one guy in Mexico's Mirror Travel explain their ethos through the sound and title of this track. Scotland's saviors, and near-inventors of post rock, Mogwai continue to transform,  Lately in the guise of stately and dynamic keyboard-driven soundtrack rock, but the wittiness of their song and album titles remains constant. Ex-Sonic Youth Thurston Moore's solo album was one of the best of last year, a strangely uplifting album, throughout the dissonance (and the dischord of his personal life). This track illustrates exactly all of that. And King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, from Down Under, continue to entrance with their spasmodic yet hypnotically enthralling psychedelic nirvana.

Since Divshare's demise I've not found a widget player where you can select individual tracks, so you get continuous playlists instead. Here's the playlist:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Legavaan Satellite - The Heads - Everyone Knows We Got Nowhere
Space Is The Place - Dagha Bloom - No Curtians
I'm So Clean - A Place To Bury Strangers - Transfixion
Rukma Vinama - The Asteroid #4 - s/t
Hide It... - Drinking Flowers - Sanity Restored 1972
Swimming With Sharks - The Shivas - Whiteout! 
Surf Hell - Little Barrie - King Of The Waves
Lying - The Spyrals - Out Of Sight
Mountain - Meatbodies - s/t
Soma - Dead Man's Eyes - Meet Me In The Desert
Gathering Of Ancient Tribes - Goat - Sun Structures
Diogenes - Acid Baby Jesus - Selected Recordings
Fire On The Mountain (I-II-III) - Wand - Ganglion Reef
The Lane - Sleepy Sun - Maui Tears
Sounds Like Anesthesia - Daydream Machine - Twin Idols
Opposing Alliance - Eagles Gift - s/t
Trees - Follakzoid - II
Stoner - Mirror Travel - Mexico
HMP Shaun William Ryder - Mogwai - Music Industry:3, Fitness Industry:1
Forever Moore - Thurston Moore - The Best Day
Head On/Pill - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Float Along - Fill Your Lungs/Oddments

MAY DAY! MAY DAY! It's time for Austin Psych Fest yet again!

AKA Levitation this year, next week will be the eighth annual Psych Fest, and the third I've attended in a row! It's the mellowest, coolest, most transcendent festival in the world - the exact opposite of Lollapa-loser or Bro-a-smella - and of course all the bands can be  at least loosely defined as psychedelia (akin to my loose definition of space rock). And this year's lineup in INCREDIBLE! Some seriously big names and heavy hitters which you can check out on the website.

For those of you not lucky enough to have attended Psych Fest, check out some of LAST YEAR's performances:



So, in honor of my annual pilgrimage (and let's face it, the only real reason to go to Texas... well besides breakfast tacos and BBQ) I offer a mix I made featuring many (but not nearly all) of the bands playing this year.

Playlist as follows:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Unconsciously Screamin' - The Flaming Lips - In A Priest Driven Ambulance
Young Men Dead - The Black Angels - Passover
The Dream - Thee Oh Sees - Carrion Crawler/The Dream
Slip Inside This House - Primal Scream - Screamadelica
Run - Spiritualized - Laze Guided Melodies
Desire Be, Desire Go - Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
How Long Have You Known - Diiv- Oshin
Die Slow - Health - Get Color
Remember The Future - Soft Moon - Zeroes
Drippin' - ZZZs - Magnetica
Wet Blanket - Metz - s/t
Loose Sutures - Fuzz - s/t
Ain't Dumbo - Night Beats - s/t
Swagger Vets and Double Moon - White Fence - Family Perfume Vol. 1 & 2
Too Deep - The Goastt - Midnight Sun
Native Dreams - Rose Windows - The Sun Dogs
Sunburst Impedance Machine - Mugstar - Lime
Swans - Indian Jewelry - Free Gold!
Odisea - Vaadat Chirigim - The World Is Well Lost
Gone Without Feeling - The Black Ryder - Buy The Ticket, Take the Ride
Mild Confusion - Tamaryn - The Waves
Hymn To The Pillory - The Nothing - Guilty Of Everything
Tambourine Girl - Ringo Deathstarr - Colour Trip
In Your Heart - A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
Trees - Follakzoid - II 
Temporal Starshine Voyage - Eternal Tapestry - The Invisible Landscape
Smell Of Physiqal - Sungod - Contackt
Keep Your Lantern Burning - White Manna - s/t
Center Of The Sun - Samsara Blue Experiment - Long Distance Trip

Austin Psych Fest 2015 Levitation Mix by Thespacerockcontinuum on Mixcloud

Snap, crackle...POP!

Most of the time here on The Spacerock Continuum we indulge in lengthy psychedelic excursions like this EPIC one:



But we're not at all averse to the occasional pop aesthetic along with the snap, crackle and fuzz, and this month's installment indulges in a little pop (meaning light-hearted and accessible, but not implying "pop"-ular among the great unwashed masses), albeit still spacey psych-y garage-y and always mild altering. Because, you know, spacerock... and cereal (surreal?) elves:

The lead-off track isn't exactly pop (none of these are really, but about as close as you're going to get to pop on the Spacerock Continuum), if anything it seems a little new-agey, which is what's intriguing about guitarist/multi-intrumentalist Mark McGuire's work: he's generally considered to be avant garde, especially in his collaborations with drone freaks Emeralds and the like. But on this and other albums he crafts epic guitar instrumentals that journey into the stratosphere accompanied by keyboards, loops and drum programming all performed by the man himself. The Heads aren't pop, but they are the most accessible and rockingest of the post Spacemen 3 psych/shoegaze breed. Ty Segall's always got at least one foot in the garage, but the other reaches for psychedelic pop as well as monster guitar jams. Meatbodies and of course Thee Oh Sees follow a similar course, easily navigating between power pop and juggernaut RAWK.

The Shivas bring a distinctly surf rock flavor to their power pop, while King Tuff summons the skewed whimsey of Syd Barrett for inspiration. Parquet Courts and Blank Realm have their poppy moments and both draw on a distinctly early 90s indie pop aesthetic, the former imagining the Archers of Loaf going on extended jams with the Dream Syndicate, the latter conjuring the damaged art pop of the Downtown NYC no wave scene.

And that's about it for the pop; now that I've got my hooks (or Hookworms) into you it's time to blast off into some de rigueur space rock from some familiar names and some new ones I'm introducing for the first time. The aforementioned Brits Hookworms are manic motorik psychedelicists. Goat, featured many a time here, are an enigmatic Swedish cult of shamanic tribal jams. Bo Ningen are Japanese spazz-psych. And Chicagoans Cave take trance-inducing repetition to an extreme, here offering a kinder, gentler version of their track "Bobby's Hash" which was featured in the January 'Best of 2014' installment below.

Now for some less familiar names: Shit and Shine are, as the name implies, absurdists and improvisers, most of whose catalog is too extreme to feature even here in the outer realms of space rock, but their most recent collection is positively tame by comparison. Tobacco is the leader of schlock rockers Black Moth Super Rainbow and his solo material is relatively similar, in a "the thing that crawled from the swamp" pulp fiction theme songs kinda way. Trans Am have always been kinda schtick-y as well, and their more recent material finds them delving into vintage synths and away from epic guitar jams. The same can be said of Mogwai, who have all but abandoned the quiet-loud-LOUDER-EVEN LOUDER-IMPOSSIBLY LOUD triple guitar dynamics of old in favor of imaginary 70s sci-fi film scores.

Some more relative unknowns of an international flavor follow: the Argentinian kraut-psych of FoneZ, the Chilean cosmic trance of Follakzoid, the Greek mesmerists Acid Baby Jesus, Portland OR's acid rock explorers Eternal Tapestry, the Floridian brother-duo of Tonstartssbandht (strangely American, despite the foreign-sounding name), and culminating in Australia with the blazing psychedelia of the mighty King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (see video above). Whew! What a journey!

So, Divshare seems to have taken a dump - haven't been able to upload to them by "press time", so you won't see the individual track player below. The file storing site which has been the host of choice of the SRC since Day One has been having problems for a while now and may be gasping its dying breath. Luckily, both Soundcloud and Mixcloud are hosting the continuous mix. The playlist is as follows:

The Spacerock Continuum Theme - bRambles
Earth Grid (Activation) - Mark McGuire - Noctilucence
Fuego - The Heads - Everyone Knows We Got Nowhere
Feel - Ty Segall - Manipulator
Two - Meatbodies - s/t
Savage Victory - Thee Oh Sees - Drop
Stalking Legs - The Shivas - You Know What To Do
Eyes Of The Muse - King Tuff - Black Moon Spell
Every Day It Starts - Parquet Courts - Content Nausea
Falling Down The Stairs - Blank Realm - Grassed In
The Impasse - Hookworms - The Hum
Bondye - Goat - Commune
Inu - Bo Ningen - III
Butthash (Harsh Mellow Mix) - Cave  - Release
PG-13 - Shit And Shine - Powderhorn
Eruption (Gonna Get My Hair Cut At The End Of The Summer) - Tobacco - Ultima II Massage
Nightshift - Trans Am - Volume X
Remurdered - Mogwai - Rave Tapes
Nola - FoneZ - Adhesivo De Contacto Espacial
Sky Input I - Follakzoid - s/t
Troublemaker - Acid Baby Jesus - Selected Recording
Wholedome - Eternal Tapestry - Dawn In Two Dimensions
Alright Medley - Tonstartssbandht- Overseas
I'm In Your Mind/I'm Not In Your Mind/Cellophane/I'm In Your Mind Fuzz - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - I'm In Your Mind Fuzz
   

The Spacerock Continuum April 2015 by Thespacerockcontinuum on Mixcloud