Space Is The Place with Truant Recordings

TOBY: This was an odd format for a ‘single’ (though the Orb had recently done something similar with ‘Blue Room’). Seven tracks. Over 40 minutes of music, most of which didn’t make it onto the album of the same name released shortly after. This was a life changing record for me. It set me firmly on the path from grunge and psychedelia to ambient / electronica. I could have picked any number of tracks from the album but I feel it makes sense to go for the first track I heard, and the feelings that immediately came with it. Aged 14, a cassette in a battered boombox, watching a meteor shower on the roof of an old house in a small village in the Algarve. The night so free of light pollution that the stars and meteors flickering and streaking across the sky seemed impossibly close. The picture this music painted for me at this moment was otherworldly. Beautifully elusive organic sounds are embedded into a unique electronic soundscape. It is evocative of organic life but not as we know it. It transports you to another world. An earth-like planet in another solar system? (Perhaps even more poignant now as human preoccupation with space exploration creeps ever further into popular culture and the search for exo-planets is fully underway, brought into sharp focus by the climate crisis.) The album itself is a beautiful creation. No silence. A continuous piece of organic electronica from another world. One of the things I love most is that they basically tricked EMI into letting them make the record. ‘Papua New Guinea’ had propelled them to fame along with the rest of the album Accelerator, and they were signed by a fumbling label hoping they would make another ‘hit dance record’… to which they stuck up a rigid middle finger and in their own words ‘went deep’. Thanks EMI.

BOTH: This is one from the Truant Recordings catalogue. ØxØ (pronounced ‘null’)’s first EP ‘Mythologies’ came out last week, and it describes our relationship to digital space and the personal myths we create in response to it. According to ØxØ, we are perceived and understood in terms of our things. Our lives are transformed into mansions of algorithms, subject to whims of edge, core and cloud. We are submerged in these mythologies. Machines that learn, humans that merely calculate, and culture that is produced in silico. The contemporary milieu orbits around data. Our phones (edge) talk to our email (core), or store photos (cloud). This is all invisible to us, and yet the cloud has become, in particular, a way of thinking about computers that is truly a mythology. We picture a white cloud that somehow holds our data, our lives, and our experiences. Everyone is aware of their connection to the cloud, but most have only vague notions of what it is and how it works. It is a magical idea, through which we lose the ability to understand, and therefore control, our own lives.

ALEX: I could have chosen so many other tracks from the spiritual jazz canon (not least of all the obvious choice of Sun Ra) but Pharoah Sanders’ music speaks to me in a much more profound way. His music explores space not just in the cosmic sense, but the space inside us. He asks what it means to be alive, what it means to understand – or attempt to understand – creation and the purpose therein. This music of inner and outer space invites you to be transported to those realms and then to consider your place in both of them.

BOTH: This is another track from the Truant family, and explores the concept of geographical space. Movement of Light comes from Kinbrae’s most recent album, and their first for Truant Recordings, ‘Landforms’. According to Concrete Islands, Landforms is an “enchanting psychogeographic evocation of the River Tay that channels the cycle of renewal through analogue ambient soundscapes”. The album explores the River Tay estuary, the spaces surrounding it, and the effect it had on Kinbrae’s twin brothers Mike and Andy Truscott growing up. Landforms is a celebration of the spaces in which we love and grow; how they can inform our view of the world and our musical creativity.

BOTH: We both love the collaboration between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, both their albums and their soundtrack work. Glass is the follow up to their score for ‘The Revenant’, and is a beautiful combination of album and soundtrack. It was performed and recorded live at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut, during the private opening to Yayoi Kusama’s installation marking the 110th anniversary of Johnson’s birth. The pair made use of the architectural dimensions of the space by fixing contact mics to its glass walls, which they effectively played as an “instrument”, rubbing it with rubber gong mallets to generate delicate tones which they combined with a sympathetic palette of singing glass bowls, crotales, keyboards and mixers. As we’ve all come to expect from anything involving Alva Noto, the production is sublime. Laser focussed. Each individual sound perfectly placed amongst the wash of tones and static. Listening to it is like lying on your back and looking at the firmament, picking out and identifying each individual star while simultaneously taking in the cosmic panoply as an awe-inspiring whole. The album not only evokes ‘space’ by exploring the Glass House as a structure and location, but the sonic result, as with most of their other work, is as spacious as you’re likely to hear. It sounds like a direct transmission from the stars themselves. As a label, this is a record we would love to have signed. Maybe their next one…