Monday's Long Songs

One of this blog's readers Spencer regularly sends me musical tips and recommendations and he's rarely wrong. On Friday he sent me a link to an EP by Rosco, The Call of The Cosmos (volume Unit Number 2). Rosco, aka Sterling Roswell, was the some time drummer in Spacemen 3 (he left in 1989 having played on The Perfect Prescription and the live album Performance). He also writes, records, plays guitar and other instruments, produces and fronts The Darkside. Spencer was listening to Call Of The Cosmos, three pints in admittedly, and sent me the link, calling it 'mind melting electronic psyche'. 

Opening track, The Call of The Cosmos, is twenty minutes and twenty seconds long, more a long, strange dream than a piece of music. It is sounds and colours and yes, mind melting electronic psyche. Set aside twenty minutes of your day and listen to it here.

There's more- Trip Inside This House is eight minutes of cardboard box drums, swirling organ, peels of feedback, sound effects and drones. A Second Variety is a walk on the moors after dark, wind rushing through the speakers, ominous drones and chanting. Eventually a pipe of some kind plays a lament. There are three shorter songs too, Ojos En Llamos 8mm Film Soundtrack, Watkins Rapier 44 Blues and El Rosco Rides Again, all of which drink from the same well. Nothing on Call of The Cosmos is conventional or expected, it's experimental psychedelia and totally absorbing. Listen/ buy here. 

This is from The Perfect Prescription, the second Spacemen 3 album, released in 1987- the year is there in the song's lyrics, '1987, all I want to do is fly'. Come Down Easy roots the Spacemen's music in gospel and the blues, specifically the song In My Time Of Dying, a song first released by Blind Willie Johnson back in 1928. Spacemen 3 turn repetition into into religious experience, the rhythm and riff repeated endlessly.

Come Down Easy