About a week ago, I spent a couple of hours on YouTube looking up a bunch of space rock bands I was unfamiliar with, like Tomorrowland and Fuxa and Auburn Lull. What I came away with was an even greater appreciation of the genre and the moods it evokes, as well as a clearer understanding of how space rock fits into the history of psychedelic music as a whole. Thus, in the hopes of increasing appreciation for the sort of forgotten genre and of exploring the reasons for its demise (as well as its interesting resurgence in odd places like TV soundtracks and commercials), I’m starting a series called Lost in Space: Lost Space Rock Classics.
Most popular in the late 80s and early 90s and often shoehorned into a Michigan based scene because so many of the bands came from there, space rock is the sound of psychedelic rock letting go of its roots in blues rock and folk music and embracing a sound that is equal parts heavy, hypnotic, and gorgeous. Often epitomized by the title of Spacemen’s 1990’s demo collection Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To, space rock is certainly catnip for stoners and folks taking magic mushrooms, but it can be just as powerful to someone with a good pair of headphones. Borrowing heavily from ambient music and the raga drones of La Monte Young, space rock often abandons typical music dynamics, instead spending its time working away at one perfect riff for nine or ten minutes, using guitar pedals and E-bows and various production effects to subtly tweak the sound of the music without disturbing its blissful center.
As I mentioned above, the influence of space rock has crept into TV soundtracks and commercials, with the incidental music on shows like Friday Night Lights sounding like Auburn Lull or later Windy and Carl. The sound of ringing guitar lines and gentle airy synth pad major chords has become the new piano and strings. With the hindsight of almost twenty years, this makes perfect sense. Besides being gorgeous sounding and repetitive, two prerequisites for most TV and film music, there’s also something ambiguous about the space rock sound, a strange tension between uplift and sadness, drugginess and clear minded meditation, flying and drowning, that can be used to great effect in multi-layered dramas like Friday Night Lights.
Anyway, see you here next week for the first entry in the series, Windy and Carl’s Depths.
MP3 :::
Auburn Lull – Direction and Destination
