Hall of Mirrors: Space Rock Forever!
It was late ’96 or early ’97 when I was first enticed into the mysterious and then unknown world of space rock, kraut rock, and the psychedelic freakout. I was coming off years of devouring the Touch & Go and Dischord catalogs, Jawbreaker-style pop punk, the long-gone glory days of emo (Angel Hair, Christie Front Drive, Cap’n Jazz, et al), and a flirtation with nineties hardcore (Threadbare, Unbroken, Damnation AD—back when it was still novel and even a bit controversial for a straight-edge band to swipe so liberally from the metal playbook). I was looking for something new and different, and that’s what I got, in the form of a gaggle of big hairy Germans.
The noiseboy beat me to it—if I recall, he was the first person to play me both Can and Faust way back when—but I took that introduction and ran pretty far with it. About the same time, I met this dude named Clay, who had some variation of “Hawkwind” on his custom license plates and an enormous collection of discs by all these likeminded bands I’d never heard of. Then a group of my friends and I relocated across the Illinois River to East Peoria and a house on Division Street, conveniently located right behind Clay’s pad (Ahh…Division…the copious source of an ungodly number of insane, wonderful memories…).
I gotta give my man Clay massive props here, for he was the master, I was the student, and I sat at his feet when it came to this brave new world of space rock. He’d come up the hill almost every day with an armful of the most tripped-out, psychedelic shit I’d ever heard and proceed to blow all of our minds. It was not long before space and kraut rock (or whatever you wanna label it) became full-blown obsessions. I picked up a few Can albums, and I chanced across an original copy of the first Neu! Album for $1 (Yes, you read that right—one buck! Easily one of the greatest finds of my record-collecting career—thank you, for once, Peoria Record Company).
A 3 CD box set, The Space Box: 1970 & Beyond (Space, Krautrock & Acid Trips), from the vaults of Cleopatra Records became a bedrock of my excavations. While Cleopatra is rightly pilloried in many circles for various reasons, this box set was one of the best things to happen to me as a space rock neophyte. Featuring an array of classic tracks from Faust, Cluster, Gong, Popul Vuh, Harmonia, and no small number of Hawkwind offshoots, among many others, The Space Box stands even today as one of the first places I would point the uninitiated.
Where The Space Box focused mostly on the classics of the seventies, however, a new double-disc set on the Emperor Jones label titled Hall of Mirrors offers a similarly nifty introduction to the contemporary space/psych/freak-out scene. Astutely dubbed the “Reign in Blood of modern space/psych rock compilations”, Hall of Mirrors was compiled with loving care by Mason Jones of San Francisco’s SubArachnoid Space and Charnel Music, who quite obviously knows of what he speaks. It delivers, at two discs for the price of one, two hours of exclusive tracks from some of today’s finest, from the heavy hitters (Circle, Kinski, Acid Mothers Temple, Bardo Pond, Tarantula Hawk) to the lesser-knowns (Rubble, Gravitar, Up-Tight, Transpacific).
It necessarily covers a broad swath of musical territory under the banner of space rock, from Hawkwind-influenced stoner rock stuff to the blissed-out, drone-based side of things. If you’re thinking about dipping your toe in this scene, but you’re unsure where to begin, you have come to the right place.
CD 1
01 KINSKI Teen Center
02 CIRCLE Kuonopäivää
03 GRAVITAR Maybe Ben Hur
04 OVERHANG PARTY Le Fantôme de la Liberté [edit]
05 TARANTULA HAWK Excerpt from Live on KFJC
06 UPTIGHT Sweet Sister Vol 4
07 ST37 They Time (Edit)
08 VOCOKESH The Somnambulist Speaks
09 FARFLUNG These Clouds Are Solid
10 SPEAKER/CRANKER I Got Yer Head (Chopped Off)
11 DMBQ Small Hours
CD 2
01 SUBARACHNOID SPACE S.F. Eagle
02 FUZZHEAD Remember the Avalon
03 NUMINOUS Someplace Left Out
04 ESCAPADE 4'33
05 ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE Fire Walk With Us
06 ABUNAI Our Wayward Fuel
07 BARDO POND Do the Flood
08 PRIMORDIAL UNDERMIND Non Servium (Undermind)
09 TRANSPACIFIC Fall River Mills
10 RUBBLE Grey Baby
11 YETI Raja Gaj
You can (and should) order this online thru Midheaven, Aquarius, or Other Music.
N/P United Bible Studies – The Lunar Observatory
The noiseboy beat me to it—if I recall, he was the first person to play me both Can and Faust way back when—but I took that introduction and ran pretty far with it. About the same time, I met this dude named Clay, who had some variation of “Hawkwind” on his custom license plates and an enormous collection of discs by all these likeminded bands I’d never heard of. Then a group of my friends and I relocated across the Illinois River to East Peoria and a house on Division Street, conveniently located right behind Clay’s pad (Ahh…Division…the copious source of an ungodly number of insane, wonderful memories…).
I gotta give my man Clay massive props here, for he was the master, I was the student, and I sat at his feet when it came to this brave new world of space rock. He’d come up the hill almost every day with an armful of the most tripped-out, psychedelic shit I’d ever heard and proceed to blow all of our minds. It was not long before space and kraut rock (or whatever you wanna label it) became full-blown obsessions. I picked up a few Can albums, and I chanced across an original copy of the first Neu! Album for $1 (Yes, you read that right—one buck! Easily one of the greatest finds of my record-collecting career—thank you, for once, Peoria Record Company).
A 3 CD box set, The Space Box: 1970 & Beyond (Space, Krautrock & Acid Trips), from the vaults of Cleopatra Records became a bedrock of my excavations. While Cleopatra is rightly pilloried in many circles for various reasons, this box set was one of the best things to happen to me as a space rock neophyte. Featuring an array of classic tracks from Faust, Cluster, Gong, Popul Vuh, Harmonia, and no small number of Hawkwind offshoots, among many others, The Space Box stands even today as one of the first places I would point the uninitiated.
Where The Space Box focused mostly on the classics of the seventies, however, a new double-disc set on the Emperor Jones label titled Hall of Mirrors offers a similarly nifty introduction to the contemporary space/psych/freak-out scene. Astutely dubbed the “Reign in Blood of modern space/psych rock compilations”, Hall of Mirrors was compiled with loving care by Mason Jones of San Francisco’s SubArachnoid Space and Charnel Music, who quite obviously knows of what he speaks. It delivers, at two discs for the price of one, two hours of exclusive tracks from some of today’s finest, from the heavy hitters (Circle, Kinski, Acid Mothers Temple, Bardo Pond, Tarantula Hawk) to the lesser-knowns (Rubble, Gravitar, Up-Tight, Transpacific).
It necessarily covers a broad swath of musical territory under the banner of space rock, from Hawkwind-influenced stoner rock stuff to the blissed-out, drone-based side of things. If you’re thinking about dipping your toe in this scene, but you’re unsure where to begin, you have come to the right place.
CD 1
01 KINSKI Teen Center
02 CIRCLE Kuonopäivää
03 GRAVITAR Maybe Ben Hur
04 OVERHANG PARTY Le Fantôme de la Liberté [edit]
05 TARANTULA HAWK Excerpt from Live on KFJC
06 UPTIGHT Sweet Sister Vol 4
07 ST37 They Time (Edit)
08 VOCOKESH The Somnambulist Speaks
09 FARFLUNG These Clouds Are Solid
10 SPEAKER/CRANKER I Got Yer Head (Chopped Off)
11 DMBQ Small Hours
CD 2
01 SUBARACHNOID SPACE S.F. Eagle
02 FUZZHEAD Remember the Avalon
03 NUMINOUS Someplace Left Out
04 ESCAPADE 4'33
05 ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE Fire Walk With Us
06 ABUNAI Our Wayward Fuel
07 BARDO POND Do the Flood
08 PRIMORDIAL UNDERMIND Non Servium (Undermind)
09 TRANSPACIFIC Fall River Mills
10 RUBBLE Grey Baby
11 YETI Raja Gaj
You can (and should) order this online thru Midheaven, Aquarius, or Other Music.
N/P United Bible Studies – The Lunar Observatory
posted by Jonathan Wright at 2:49 PM EMAIL POST
