OFF: Oresund Space Collective

[Jonathan Jarrett]

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. 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. The 
earlier seventies HW stuff has the same spirit but more aggression and a 
different sound, and the later stuff is almost all much more song-based.

	Obviously all reviewers, me included, should listen to much more 
spacerock :-) Yours,
		     Jon

ObCD: Ramones - _Pleasant Dreams_ (that'll help!)
-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk