There are times that you hear something that sounds like it’s light-years away. The new Sounds of Saturn release compiles seminal space-rock sounds from early-1990s Michigan, but a new treatment and a new perspective gives it fresh appeal. Not that it needed fresh appeal, and it could even be the new packaging, but there’s a certain sense of newness to this release. Even if it feels like I can hear the soft lull of the guitar from the now-defunct Zoot’s on 2nd Avenue in Detroit.
But that’s only part of the story for this edition of Alternate Take. There’s new and archived music from Ghostly International. I was getting ready to moderate a panel on the topic of collaboration, and I wanted to give a preview of the artists involved. There’s music from Brijean (see video below) and Matthew Dear, as well as music from panelist Kenneth Whalum. I’ll elaborate more on that discussion in the next post.
There’s also new music from Stefan Betke, aka Pole. His new recording, Fading, is inspired by the topic of memory — or more specifically memory loss. This makes one wonder whether or not memory might be playing tricks on us when we consider the age of a new release like the archived space-rock comp Sounds of Saturn. Did it really sound like this almost three decades ago, or are we hearing it as if for the very first time?
The new version of Alternate Take, entitled “Get a Grip,” is up now on dublab.
Thanks for being out there.
Top image art by Jonathan McCabe, and is the cover for ADHD by WL. Jonathan McCabe is a generative artist from Canberra, Australia who uses Turing patterns as a basis for the algorithms that drive his pieces. Turing patterns were discovered by Alan Turing who figured out the math behind spot and stripe patterning in nature, such as the spots on a tropical fish and the stripes on a zebra. The ADHD cover is a generative result of the Turing equations.