OFF: Oresund Space Collective

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 11/04/2007 23:55, Jonathan Jarrett wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 09:13:18AM +0200, SHLL (Scott Heller) typed out:
>> I don't mean to waste space with promoting my band but we just got a
>> review and the reviewer really thinks we sound a lot like Hawkwind,
>> apparently... If those of you who have the CD could comment (privately
>> is ok), I would be curious..
> 
> 	I don't have the CD, but it seemed to me from the review that 
> the reviewer lacked comparison points. He asks how one can review 
> spacerock without making a Hawkwind comparison at one point, and that is 
> kind of his weakness. Apart from one reference to the California Guitar 
> Trio, his checkpoints are Hendrix (once), Pink Floyd (once or twice), 
> the Grateful Dead (once or twice) and the Doors (a lot--does this mean 
> those track involved actual organ lines perhaps?), and Hawkwind (the 
> rest). I don't know how you'd avoid a Hawkwind comparison at that rate. 
 >         I would have said a more pointed comparison, at least on the
 > basis of the material that was up for download on the OSC site last year
 > because I haven't caught up with the new stuff yet, sorry, would be the
 > laid-back bits of Ozric Tentacles.

I do have the CD, and while it's fair to make reference to Hawkwind in 
almost any kind of spacerock review, I don't think there are necessarily 
as many points of similarity as the reviewer hears.

And I would actually agree that the Ozrics are a far closer comparison 
-- quite often, when I hear the intro to an OSC track pop up during 
random play on my iPod, I think "Hmmm, I don't remember this Ozrics 
track from its intro", except of course that's because it turns out to 
be OSC :)  And it sounds less like the Ozrics after a minute or two, 
because OSC is actually flying by the seat of their pants and doesn't do 
the Gongy-proggy-reggaehead jumps and turns and slips to half-time dub 
and back that the Ozrics (at their best) tend to do.  The Tangerine 
Dream comparison may be apt, from what I've heard at least -- I've not 
got a lot of TG, but what I have has some similarity.

> Not the US space-jazz stuff so much, 
> because the improvised nature tends to mean that there is a steady 
> rhythm and a slow progression, rather than the abrupt transitions of 
> Alien Planetscapes or the planned patterning of Quarkspace. Otherwise I 
> think I'd resort to descriptions like `chilled-out Dead with more 
> synths' before I got to Hawkwind, because the similarities are really 
> only clear with the jams on the early nineties HW stuff to me. 

Nah, I am a raging Deadhead (OK, not that raging, because I've seen the 
raging ones and they're very scary, but still, I've got a lot of Dead :) 
and I don't seen _that_ much similarity barring the obvious "it's improv 
  over a set of chord changes or sometimes no chord changes" -- but we 
could make the same observation about Coltrane, and I'm not sure the OSC 
immediate sounds that much like Coltrane _per se_.  The OSC have a much 
denser, and effected (and synth-heavy) sound than the Dead ever had, and 
don't have anything like the amount of country-blues in them 
(unsurprisingly :) to recall the Dead.

To make a comparison with bands in the modern US jam band scene ..... 
I'd say Particle are a more reasonable shot, though OSC are less 
electronic-oriented than Particle.  (Particle have their own tenuous 
affiliations with the Grateful Dead family, but only tenuous, really ....)

Cheers,
Carl

-- 
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:cea at carlaz.com
http://www.carlaz.com/