We had a day out at Jodrell Bank yesterday, home of the Lovell telescope which has been sending radiowaves into space since 1957 playing a huge part in our understanding of space. The dish is enormous, once the largest in the world, still the third largest. It moves too so it can be pointed in any direction. We saw it move while we were there, rotating round the track it sits on, which was actually really exciting.
A new visitor centre has been built since we were last there and is full of brain frying information about the universe, galaxies, pulsars, black holes, quasars and dark matter. It's a humbling place to visit and spend a few hours at, the vastness of space and what's out there compared to the smallness of us and what's down here. There are several artistic responses too which neatly connect science and art, space and poetry. Frighteningly the UK Research and Innovation agency have decided to cut Jodrell Bank's funding from April 2028 and without this the facility- pioneering scientifically, grade 1 listed and a UNESCO world heritage site- may close down.
I had two major takeaways from the masses of information we read. The first was that when we see light coming from space, the stars for example, we're actually looking back in time- the light is coming from hundreds/ thousands/ millions of years ago and is only reaching us now so what we are seeing has already happened. Jodrell Bank identified the Crab Pulsar, a supernova explosion seen and recorded in China in the year 1054, recorded at the time as a 'guest star' that was bright enough to be seen for several days during daylight. The second was that when we tune between TV or radio channels about 1% of the noise we hear that the antennae pick up is actually 'the fading glow of the Big Bang'.
The phrase 'the fading glow of the Big Bang' stuck with me for some time. On the way back some of what I'd been reading about and seeing at Jodrell Bank made connections with music and songs and this hastily thrown together mix is a response to that. Musically it's all over the place in the first half but then settles into a dance music groove.
Jodrell Bank and the Lovell telescope have conducted research into galaxies and clusters, including gravitational lensing studies of galaxies (the bending of light from a distant source as it travels past a massive object such as a galaxy or galaxy cluster, apparently).
Beth Orton's Galaxy Of Emptiness is from her album Trailer Park in 1996, a track mixed and produced by Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood in their studio under the flight path at Hounslow. Sonically it's incredible, all space, detail, Weatherallian FX and Ali Friend's double bass ricocheting down the line. Lyrically, it's vast and tiny, cosmic existentialism. Loss.
A pulsar is a pulsating star, a highly magnetised rotating star that is emitting beams of radiation out of its magnetic poles. Galactic lighthouses.
Ride's Pulsar was the lead song on their Tomorrow's Shore EP, released in 2018. I'm not sure the post re- union Ride have recorded a more exciting song than Pulsar. It is in their own words, 'a space anthem' about light, existence and trying to get home.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest major spiral galaxy to our own, the Milky Way, located about 2.5 million light years away and sometimes visible to the naked eye.
Timothy J. Fairplay's Free Andromeda album came out on Hoga Nord in 2022, a very fine nine track selection of synth electronics and drum machines. Worth revisiting if you haven't spun it for a while.
A quasar is an extremely bright and distant, active galactic nucleus, powered by a super massive black hole. I'm typing this but I'm not sure I fully understand it. But I like the idea that there are things that are much bigger than us that we can only stare at in wonder.
Mr Fingers came back with Cerebral Hemispheres in 2018, cosmic acid/ dance music. Qwazars was a stand out, a rotating synth pattern and chord change that is utterly hypnotic.
Cassiopeia is a constellation in the northern sky. It's five brightest stars form a W in the sky, visible to the naked eye. A section of the Milky way runs through it containing a number of young luminous galactic disc stars and nebulae.
Kolsch's Cassiopeia came out in 2014 with piano and strings by Gregor Schwellenbach. Minimal, emotive 2010s house music.
The Lovell Telescope appeared on the sleeve of Sub Sub's Space Face, a 1991 record that blew up in clubs at the time not least The Hacienda, thundering breakbeats and Balearic pianos with an aptly chosen sample, 'My god, it's full of stars' (taken from a 1984 film called 2010- The year We Make Contact). Sub Sub were local boys, from Wilmslow, just down the road from Jodrell Bank. As I'm sure you know, a few years later after a fire that destroyed their studio/ rehearsal space on Blossom Street in Ancoats they became Doves. In 2011 they played an acoustic gig at Jodrell Bank in front of the Lovell telescope. Here they are playing a Bagging Area favourite, Kingdom Of Rust.
A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion.
Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
I went down a memory based rabbit hole with Pye Corner Audio, Boards Of Canada, Vangelis and Blade Runner, Jan van den Broeke and Aphex Twin (and those tracks all fit together really well, a nice twenty five minute ambient/ synth set). Out in the Oblique Saturday community we found Ernie with a trio of forgetful tracks from Morgan Morse, Farmergeddon and Kenmore Classic, Beerfueled with Pixies covering Leonard Cohen, Al G with the Sultans Of Ping F.C. and their lost jumper, Mrs G with Doves, Khayem and The Mekons, Jake Sniper and The Caretaker and Rol with The Panic Brothers.
This one's for Jake and his Mum.
This week's Oblique Strategy card reads thus- Spectrum Analysis.
After leaving Spacemen 3 Sonic Boom released his first solo album Spectrum and then several albums and singles as Spectrum (including the sublime Highs, Lows And Heavenly Blows).
In 1992 Spectrum/ Sonic released an EP with a cover of Daniel Johnson's True Love Will Find You In The End. It's a blissed out cover, Sonic singing dreamily with a choir of angels backing him, over twinkles, drones and pedal steel. 'Don't give up now/ True love will find you in the end', Sonic croons, sounding like he might just mean it and might just make it through the night.
Anyone who's read Spacemen 3 bassist Will Carruthers' memoir Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands will recall the chapter describing a memorable evening the band played at a health club in Chester, the occasion when they were introduced to ecstasy (to add to the cocktail of somewhat stronger and more addictive drugs Sonic and Jason were well into by that point). The 1997 compilation CD What Came Before After finishes with this track, a nine minute exploration/ distillation of the Spectrum sound- synth drones, repeating and oscillating into eternity.
This is from Spectrum's Indian Giver album with Captain Memphis from 2008. It's the same song that Sonic recorded for Recurring, 1991's final Spacemen 3 album, written by Mudhoney. Sludgy, stoned space rock.
Aphex Twin returns making consecutive Oblique Saturday appearances. In 2016 he put out a 12" single called Cheetah, which paid tribute to an obsolete British electronics company of the same name who made unfathomably difficult to work out synths. The first track on the EP was this one...
Aphex Twin in coasting mode is still some considerable distance ahead of his peers. Slow motion, slippery and phased to jiggery.
Finally, one of my favourite albums of last year was by Sewell And The Gong, pastoral sounding Balearica, instrumental folk gone cosmische. As Rob at Ban Ban Ton Ton put it, 'jubilant, trance- inducing, celebratory.... like a drug free, jolly Spacemen 3'. Which ties things together nicely.
Cal Gibson's Secret Soul Society has been drip feeding us with new tracks all summer, a series of dubby weird disco tunes blurring the boundaries of new music, edits and versions. The tracks below are all highly recommended, hazy and dubbed out soul/ dance music, old and new fused. I'll leave it for you to work out where the source material comes from.
First, in mid- July- Situation Station, a low slung, machine funk song with a soulful vocal.
A couple of weeks after that, bubbling, summer sounding funk soul/ cosmic disco About2Believe, the singer telling us, 'You're about to believe/ In love again'.
Then, in late July there was Emotional Dub, dub and disco spliced together, a slinky floor filler with choppy guitar, bubbling bass and killer vocal.
A couple of days later in early August there was Lemonade All Day, trippy cosmic/ Balearic with chanting and FX
A week on from that came Mountain Of Tears, a bass driven soul number, urgent and impassioned night time music, drums pushing and synth FX splashing around.
In mid- August, Dub Sultanas, headband wearing guitar wranglers filtered into something darker and groovier.
Last week, Dubbing In The City, slowed down groove, taut bass and fractured vocals with an oddness that gives it an edge- very tasty.
All of these (and more) can be found at The Secret Soul Society Bandcamp page here. They work very well individually but probably best sequenced one after the other, a forty minute late summer dub/ disco/ soul compilation or mixtape.
Back on 20th March 2010 when this blog was less than three months old I wrote this post...
My 6 year old daughter has seen me doing this and asked what I'm doing. When I explained about the blog she said she wanted a go, so here it is, a guest post by E.T.....
'I like this song because i like dolly parton .I like the rhythm and i like the music i also like the way she sings.'
Eliza shouted up the stairs to me on Tuesday night that Dolly Parton had died, and followed it with, 'Dolly Parton, my queen...'
Dolly Parton has been everywhere in the two days since she died and rightly so. Not only did she write some songs that are universal, she was a hugely compassionate and right minded person- her work donating trying to get kids to stay in school, her Imagination Library, paying for scholarships, supporting and paying for research into pediatric diseases and Covid vaccines, for AIDS charities and Black neighbourhoods in Nashville are all examples of what you'd hope the rich would be doing with their money- doing some good. As many people have said in the last two days, she's the best of America. The contrast with some of its public figures could not be greater.
I don't listen to her songs that often but this one always, always sounds good...
Jolene was written in May 1973 about a red headed bank clerk who'd sometimes flirt with her husband Carl. The name came from an encounter with a fan who had red hair, pale skin and green eyes who came backstage for an autograph. These are the sort of details I love, that get under the skin of where a song comes from.
In 2013 there was a phase where people discovered the joy of slowing down 45 rpm singles to 33 and posting them on the internet. Jolene sounds magnificent at 33 rpm, a heartbroken cowboy who's lost his love to another woman.
In 1993 One Dove released their own version of Jolene, a trippy comedown dub/ ambient house gone country version, Dot Allison's voice giving Dolly a Glasgow make over. I could listen to this on repeat for ages. It came out as a B-side to their Why Don't You Take Me single, the record company looking for a hit. The 12" came with two more tracks, the ice cold reggae of Skanga and an Underworld remix of the title track. Four stunners on one piece of vinyl.
In 2004 The White Stripes covered Jolene too, a raw and electrifying version of the song, Jack and Meg at the edge of their senses under Blackpool lights.
Mano Negra were a French band founded and fronted by singer Manu Chao. Manu took his roots- Galician- Basque parents, Cuban heritage, upbringing on the outskirts of Paris (the family had fled Spain when Franco issued a death sentence to Manu's grandfather)- and fused them with all the excitement of punk, folk, ska, rockabilly, reggae, salsa, rai, hip hop and everything else he'd heard coming out of the speakers in a multi- cultural Paris suburb. They would switch between singing in Spanish, French, Arabic and English, sometimes within the same song, and found success in Europe and South America, supported Iggy Pop on a US tour, but they were never more than a cult concern in the UK.
In 1989 they made Puta's Fever, eighteen slices of high energy, fully committed, world fusion/ rock 'n' roll. Voodoo is from that album and starts off like some drunken French uncles singing at a wedding. Then a whistle blows, the drums thump in and the song kicks in, bass pumping away and Manu singing, 'Last night I saw you diggin' in my cemetery baby/ Now you better watch out/ Cause you can't get back from Voodoo!'. Tyres screech and layers of varnish are scrubbed from the acoustic guitars.
Mano Negra formed in 1987 and split in 1994. When touring Puta's Fever they'd often abandon the stage and troop outside to play the encore in the streets. After the split Manu Chao went solo making several albums and touring with his Radio Bemba Sound System. His self described patchwork style of music and solid left wing politics and activism place him as one of the true inheritors of punk and The Clash, someone who walks the walk as well as talking the talk. I thought I had one of his albums, 2001's Proxima Estacion: Esperanza but it's not on the shelf under either M or C so your guess is as good as mine.
It doesn't really require any words of explanation from me, the song and the footage speak for themselves and the life affirming nature of the dancers, captured from various pieces of footage from the 20th century and more recently, brings a smile to the face- until the last few seconds which has the capacity to shock you out of your complacency.
Two weeks ago David played a live two hour set for Never Never, a Belfast clothes shop. The set is a blast, a sublime blurring of the boundaries between psyche, jazz, blistering hip hop, soul, funk and repetitive wonky acid house. You can listen at Mixcloud. David has got lots of irons in the fire at the moment- The Five Techniques project and his production on the imminent Dexys album have both been 2026 projects along with his various DJ gigs, and a few weeks ago he spent an afternoon in his home studio with Eric Cantona who turned up unexpectedly...
Birds Of Pandæmonium have been gearing up to an album release, out on Sprechen next month. Their epic uber Balearic cover of New Musik's On Islands came out in July complete with three Hardway Bros remixes and prior to that there was Days Go By, remixed by Richard Norris.
The last single before the release of the album came out last week- Could Heaven Ever Be Like This, ten minutes of dreamy, sun kissed psychedelia, slo mo chug with cosmic house pianos and multi- tracked vocals that come down like soft, warm rain.
The EP comes with remixes including two courtesy of Hifi Sean, the man who was once a Soup Dragon and is now a DJ/ producer/ songwriter (you might remember his albums with singer David McAlmont particularly 2022's Happy Ending). Sean vocoders the vocal and goes four- four with the drums, turning up the whammy and whacking the bass to the fore. There is a Birds Of Pandæmonium remix, a Hifi Sean dub, an instrumental and deeply addictive, goth dance Dub Poem version which has really stuck around in these parts over the weekend.
Get the Could Heaven Ever Be Like This EP at Sprechen's Bandcamp page.
Could Heaven Ever Be Like This was originally a lush jazz- funk/ disco jam by Idris Muhammed and was played at David Mancuso's Loft. A celebration of love and romance and a longing for transcendence- you can see why it struck a chord in mid- 70s New York.
The Birds Of Pandæmonium album comes out in mid- September and is called Eudæmonia, a Greek word which translates as living well by doing what is right and fulfilling one's potential. It is a central concept of Aristotle's philosophy, where a eudæmonic life is one of 'virtuous activity in accordance with reason'. Something to chew over on a Monday in late August.
