Born out of 100 years of passionate listening and a shared love of Coltrane, Krautrock and the many and varied eccentricities of English Psychedelia, 'From Above' is a record with many antecedents but precious few contemporaries.
Emerging from the landscape of Iker Spozio's other-worldly cover painting (itself an echo of the Nubian utopia created by Mati Klarwein for Miles Davis) through to the final idiot funk spasms of 'Scatter', the Lunar Dunes' debut album is that very same pagan yawp - seventy five minutes of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies that would have Bugs and Tweety cranking up their JBL 100s at the drop of an ACME anvil.
Lunar Dunes clearly know their 'Live Evil' from their 'Wolf City' but this record offers no hiding place for the oldies fetishist. Recorded in three days, edited and mixed in four, the Lunar Dunes come out sounding at once wholly modern and thoroughly European. Shifting from cacophonies of noise and horror to elongated drifting cadences where time becomes space, here is living proof that the making of truly psychedelic music requires less the ingestion of hallucinogens and more by way of imagination, a love of the form and a disregard for the rulebook.
With three hours of music on tape the selection process that produced this double album was pretty straight forward - anything that sounded too much like something they had heard too often before went straight on the cutting room floor. In the words of John Sinclair, a man with more than a passing acquaintance with rock and roll as chaos theory, they will either "make you feel it or leave the room".
It is wholly fitting that what is, at times, a confusingly contradictory record should be created by three people whose shared personal histories go back thirty years, but who had barely spent thirty hours playing together before making their debut album.
If you can detect some Faust here, a little of 'The Who Live At Leeds' there and the simultaneous holographic presence of Elvin Jones, Tina Weymouth, Hariprasad Chaurasia and even Mick Bolton's UFO then you too are riding down Titan's magic mountains with Saturn's rings visible just out the corner of your eye.
'From Above' - Space Rock without the simulator and available right now from a kosmische kiosk near you.
Bio provided by Ian Blackaby (Lunar Dunes)
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