The Vinyl-Only Sessions #09: Albion Venables
Sessions #09 | Albion Venables – Outer Space Stimuli If you talk about space and disco in the same sentence then you are definitely talking complete nerd-dom. Seriously, there is a point at which it is still accessible – for listening to or collecting – but it soon develops into the realm of obscurity where...
John & Alice Coltrane – Cosmic Music
John Coltrane (1926-1967) needs little introduction, a revolutionary figure of the avant-garde jazz scene and a damn good saxophonist. The man has been heralded far and wide but the titles of two of his records, Cosmic Music and Interstellar Space, suggest he already had his head above the clouds. In the 1950s, John Coltrane fell...
Encore Records – Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ranked as one of the top stores in the country by Rollingstone, Encore Records is nestled behind a few trees at 417 East Liberty Street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The store acts as a cultural hub for those who view records as “little art objects,” like the two down-to-chill owners, Bill and Jim. Known as...
Label profile: Planet Bohemia
Planet Bohemia is a Berlin-based independent music label and a promotions platform for alternative events and culture that has recently initiated its quest for beauty in the German capital. The PB label aims to bring you sparkling, experimental, psychedelic sounds and a loose, free place to experience creativity, beauty and joy, all with the noble...
Spicelab – A Day On Our Planet
Oliver Lieb is responsible for an enormous amount of extremely high quality techno/trance, and his Spicelab album A Day On Our Planet, is up there as one of his best and most ingenious. Released in 1994, a year even before his groundbreaking Rendezvous In Outer Space, this second Spicelab album A Day On Our Planet sounds...
Interview: Jean-Jacques Perrey – The Elephant Never Forgets
Well-known as one of the earliest pioneers of electronic music, Jean-Jacques Perrey has always believed in space as a perfect companion for his work. The friendly and inspiring 82-year-old Frenchman also invented a technique which imagines music in the most spatial way: he dreamed of cutting and glueing analogue tapes, which developed into present-day tape...
Scientist and Artist: Eduard Artemiev’s Space Odyssey
Eduard Artemiev inhabits the space between science and art, between the electronic avant-garde and popular music. Known best as the composer for Russian sci-fi classic Solaris, Artemiev also pioneered one of the first synthesizers and puts his central role in electronic music down to the finely honed calibrations of the cosmos. Early in the 1979...
Spinvis: The Dutch Astronaut
His name is Erik de Jong. His name is Spinvis, Dutch for ‘Spiderfish’. This is his alias, his nationally famous one-man band. iCrates takes a look at the life and musical career of Spinvis, the “Dutch Bob Dylan”. At first glance Erik de Jong seems to be quite the ordinary man, aged 50 and living...
The Voyager Golden Record: “To the makers of music — all worlds, all times”
In 1977 NASA funded a space program like no other. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were unmanned space craft, sent into the infinite darkness to monitor conditions at the outer limits of our solar system. And despite all the mind-boggling, state-of-the-art interplanetary measuring equipment on board, perhaps the most important piece of kit was the...
Retro-Futurist Cover Art
Vincent Lopez – Music Out of Century 21, Released in 1962 on World’s Fair Records Retro-futurism is an artistic style influenced by portrayals of the future and of outer-space conceived of before the 1960′s. These depictions were often fantastical and utopian, optimistic of mankind’s future in the final frontier. Of course, it was a conception...
The History of the Synthesizer featuring Roger O’Donnell
When Joe Meek recorded the 1962 hit, “Telstar” with his band The Tornados, he used the distorted tape recording of a toilet flushing in his house to recreate what he believed to be the sound of outer space, which was then used in the intro of the song. The rest of the song was played...
Interview: Idris Ackamoor of “The Pyramids”
When a young Idris Ackamoor was given the opportunity to travel to Europe with a saxophone and a tape recorder, there was only one thing he was going to do: form a jazz band. Contemporaries of Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Pyramids created a unique avant-garde sound which looked back to...
