hw: New Space Ritual edition

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 26/04/2007 13:16, Arin Komins wrote:
> So, ooc, who would you pick as better vendors of floaty electronica?  

A difficult question, partially because a little floaty electronica goes 
a long way with me ;)  My wife has a bunch of New Agey CDs some of which 
have quite pleasant synthesizer scapes.  Some of them -- even apparently 
completely "generic" ones of the sort you find in any New Ageish 
bookshop -- have "floaty ambiance" that's as good as anything I've heard 
anywhere :)

But the other part is that I don't think Hawkwind are really trying to 
do "floaty" electronica, but the not-so-floaty electronica that I think 
they are trying to do is not the kind of thing I think they're good at. 
  I think current Hawkwind, consciously or unconsciously, tend to 
emulate ambient techno and acid house type stuff that they hear and like 
from established artists in those fields (artists who were themselves 
probably partially inspired by older incarnations of Hawkwind!).  I 
_think) Hawkwind are trying to do stuff along the lines of The Orb, 
Future Sound of London, Aphex Twin, Astralasia, even The KLF, The 
Chemical Brothers, or the Prodigy.  Obiviously, not as hardcore as the 
more hardcore of those artists (The Prodigy get pretty hardcore at 
times), and I could be off-course since I'm not a huge fan of these 
styles, but I'm aware of them and those artists are successful at what 
they do.

Personally, I tend to like more the older "proto-ambient" stuff like
Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze's solo work, or even Brian Eno
sometimes (though I'm not as into his stuff as some!).  Some of the old
Krautrock stuff verges on this .... Here, I get a strong feel of 
cinematic drama in the music and soudscapes that is the sort of thing 
that I think fits in well with Hawkwind's classic space-opera vibe. 
IMO, the first Anubian Lights gets even closer to this sort of thing, 
sometimes, than contemporary Hawkwind.

But, actually, I think Hawkwind were spot on with their electronic and 
instrumental experimentation in the early 70s.  If only because if the 
limitations on technology at the time, their electronic-oriented music 
consisted of artificially generated, technological sounds that 
nevertheless felt very organic -- like a spaceship grown from living 
cells, or a tree that shoots electric fire.  This is something I have 
always felt was lacking in many contemporary electronic artists -- 
perhaps by their design, but it doesn't pull me in since I respond more 
to human error than computerized precision :)  Moreover, Hawkwind's 
weird experimentations were (in the past) always few and short, adding 
spice to an album without dominating it.  And they often formed the 
background to the spoken word segements or blended quickly into chugging 
rock instrumentals.

Perhaps HotMG best exemplifies this.  It's instrumental pieces are 
either ambient rock like Brock's "Wind of Change" or odd little places 
like House's "Goat Willow" and the title track.  That's it: the rest of 
the album is pretty solid Hawkwind spacerock songs.  Likewise, Doremi -- 
there's the synthy zippery of Detmar's "One Change", and then the rest 
is songs (albeit songs with often fairly lengthy, churning instrumental 
passages).  Even on Space Ritual, "Electronic No. 1" takes up a 
relatively small percentage of album time, and the rest of the 
electronic proto-primal-ambient texturing takes place under Calvert's 
spoken word bits; no druming (and certainly no sequencing) under the 
spoken word bits, just textures.

Now look at _ET_, with essentially only 5 songs: LSD, Secret Agent, Mask
of Morning, Sadness Runs Deep, and Right to Decide.  I like _all_ the
songs there very much -- they're great stuff, exactly the sort of thing 
at which Hawkwind *rules*. But the other *9* tracks on ET are 
_basically_ instrumental filler, without _very_ much that stands out as 
music for the ages, IMO.  This is an album of a very different kind of 
structure than HotMG or Doremi, and not one that I think shows off what 
HW do best.

Cheers,
Carl

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