Spaceheads with Max Eastley - The Time of the Ancient Astronaut
(Bip-Hop)
The Spaceheads' new album, The Time of the Ancient Astronaut,
is the first album in their Universal Mind Expansion Series--a
series of improvised collaborations the band is doing with
other artists. This first collaboration is with sound and visual
artist Max Eastley, who has been making music since the 1970s and
whose main instrument on this recording is The Arc, a nine foot
long instrument with one chord that is played with a bow or glass
rods.
The Spaceheads' normal sound can be summarized as "drums and trumpet,"
and the implications of that short description are very befitting.
The duo takes a trumpet and a drum set, then piles a heap of
electronics and effects on top of them, processing them into
new sounds, and creates something very much like standard drums
and bass but with a wider spectrum due to the variety of tones
coming from the trumpet. Adding drone artist Max Eastley to the
mix acts more like subtraction than addition. Instead of causing
the duo to further complicate their sound, Eastley's presence and
the pure but eerie sound of The Arc causes the Spaceheads to slow
down, concentrate on pure tones instead of layers of sound, and
blend into the drone.
As a result, on most of these 11 tracks, the drums are rendered
useless. The beat is all but entirely removed, leaving all the
space for the sparse tones and odd, sweeping noises, making
most of these tracks cinematic alien soundscapes or introspective
drones and nothing like the jazz-based intelligent techno the
Spaceheads usually create. The first three tracks on the album set
the pace for the album, and it is a very, very slow pace. On the
first song, "The Black Drop of Venus," The Arc creates unsettling
noises in the background as Andy Diagram plays successive whole
notes on his trumpet, alternating volume and tone for effect.
This song blends into "Life Without Gravity," which concentrates
even more on the sound of The Arc, going further into the
extraterrestrial sound domain. As "Ghosts" begins, Diagram trumpet
begins creating fast-paced bursts of notes whose more familiar,
human sound seems totally out of place after the 12 minutes
build of alien sounds and drones (a totally intentional effect,
I'm sure).
The songs closer to the end of the album will seem more familiar
to fans of the Spaceheads. "Hail Bop" starts off with a simple
cool jazz trumpet riff on top of lots of free drumming from Richard
Harrison and a rapidly fluctuating, dizzying use of The Arc from
Eastley. As the song progresses, the trumpet pursues a freer
path as well, pushing Eastley's sounds to the background, creating
a very textured, busy sound. The pseudo-title track, "Ancient
Astronauts," is the most Spaceheads-sounding song on the album
with a heavily-affected trumpet creating a bass bounce, bursts
of trumpet melody, and lots of drums effects creating beats and
texture in the background creating an upbeat pace. The use of
The Arc is hard to find, as the affected-trumpet creates a wide
variety of sounds.
Adding Eastley's droning use of The Arc to the Spaceheads' formula
is quite an interesting perturbation. However, the series
title--"Universal Mind Expansion Series"--seems to apply to the
minds of the Spaceheads more than to that of the listeners. The
new sounds are an interesting twist but not any more interesting
than those the Spaceheads usually produce. The drones are solid
but not overly engrossing, leading the ears to be most perked by
the songs towards the end of the album most like the Spaceheads'
normal material. While a record that helps expand the listener's
mind is naturally much more exciting, if this series helps the
Spaceheads expand their sound to include different tempos, moods,
and ideas, that act of inspiration is definitely something
worth listening to.
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