Thinking there are now more records of cosmic music than pop music on HH (including QE) then you should reconsider your position in Julian Scope. Perhaps the year 2000 is not the same for everyone.
Limping Across The Sky is a barely changing organic piece full of spacecraft reactors, liquid bubbling sounds and a constant drone of minimal music which floods my house from top to bottom. I call my house The Tower, for obvious reasons, having a central upward-looking space in the middle which allows all sound to fill the place and reverberate. There is a “savage” intoner on this track, too. You can listen to it on the Cornucopea CD.
But Some Head is a record of Cosmic Beauty, two long pieces of unrelentless dreamstates and EXTREME OutThere-ness. On a par with Dianaver, on QE2.
Imagine an empty landscape of rolling fields, Mother Hills in a red, yellow and
green background on a cloudy menacing day. And there is nothing around your remotest of muddy paths, not even forests and the sound of your own breathing is like an electric fan. So you reach a climactic state of utter isolation and peace, and exhilarated by so much silence I am resolved to start Thighp’s Trip. Why shouldn’t I live the artist’s trip and, for that matter, make it my Own? Or are you content by humming those pretty tunes while you do the ironing? Let’s make it a Real Head trip, then.
Black Nurse already starts incredibly intensely with cosmic landscapes filling your physical world and Nature suddenly reveals its real power and with a looming storm not too far, it even becomes a bit scary, considering I am in the middle of Nowhere. But who cares? The trip must go on. After exactly 8 minutes of beauty (and these would have alone made a great record), a loud but not disturbing drone transports you all of a sudden into a Pseudo-Pagan Chant with…technopop effects! But despair not, cos those heavy TPS trademark keyboard bangs flood the place until you are back there into Cosmic Bliss again, this time being propelled by fading in percussive rythms, similar to Autechre or Aphex Twin, to find an approximate comparison, because the cosmicscape continues in the background. A psychotic childish piano which reminds me of Aladdin Sane ends this wonderfully rich track.
But if you think the record is but a game of sound effects and keyboards then you are wrong cos you just haven’t had enough of trippy music yet. Faust trombones play a melody, which my friend has adopted for doing the washing-up, surrounded by Tibetan bells and Hawaiian instruments or what the fuck, I don’t know, cos I am all at once floating. The bells tickle the cells in my brain so much that I lose touch with reality altogether. Tudor Fruits is formidably rich in sounds and Psychic Awareness. By the time the magical bells disappear and the trombone is laid down then I am Far Out already and I realise I have gone out of the path. Shivers all over my body as ethereal choirs flood in on minute 7 and I could be in deep sea water or up in the clouds. But where I am now, motionless, is a place of incredible perfection, and I know it. An antiseptic frozen voice reads words like “instrument”, “engorgement”, “function”, “addressing” or “in defence”. These are words of wisdom, this Time, this Space. The piece sounds like the Christian images of white clean Heaven which you imagine when, as a child, you thought of what Heaven would be like and how you could find it. Well here it is. This antiseptic-ness fades away when a Brian Barritt-like microphoned voice suddenly goes “whalebone”, “dislocate”, etc. and even a cough or two followed by “contributing impact section”, the choirs never leaving… Bloody Hell, this is unique and I am in the most peaceful bliss. The trombones announce once more it is time to wake up and find my path ON-wards. The best 30 minutes released this year. And the only ones with the 2000 date as far as I know.