Trevor Wishart's legendary electroacoustic trip from the yawning YorkUniversity breakfast table into the off planet starmind vacuumoriginally span onto two bits of vinyl way back in 1973. Now Paradigmhave rescued it to aluminium bit-coded posterity, in all it's lo-ficollaged glory, with a slightly off putting sleeve note from thecomposer who seems embarrassed by the naivities he now finds in theexecution of his first release. Three years in the making, 'JourneyInto Space' mixes up free improvised junk toy fiddling, clocks ticking,rocket launch blasts, slamming doors, heartbeats and haunted chainrattling, with a hell of a lot of tubular bell bashing along the way.Wishart mixed and remixed field recordings and captures with improvisedand scored contributions from 48 musicians, including Steve Beresfordand Jonty Harrison. The opening thirteen minutes of deep bowed stringdrone, gurgling grey hospital limbo groans and creaks and jinglingbells might feel right at home on your favourite Nurse With Wound albumor sat alongside the admittedly more tidy and better recorded ThrobbingGristle masterpiece 'Journey Through a Body.' This is a perhaps agenuinely seminal work, which might have had as much if not moreinfluence on the outsider industrial scene as the academic corridorsfrom which it crept slowly. The "Birth" intro winds out with distantchoirs singing odd hymns to a crying new baby. The least successfulsequence is the man waking, yawning, belching and generally fartingabout that starts the almost fifty minute 'Journey,' which continueswith a car zooming off into the quaint honking city. Suddenly a fanfareheralds a rocket launch amongst the dwindling traffic noise and thescene shifts, planets dwindle, time slips. The rocket engine roar eatseverything until discordant anti-vacuum bells dissolve into the silenceof space. Strange new worlds open up in alien instrumention. Distantradio crackles in from homeworld. Chiming into the void new forms takeshape from hazy fluting, and an alien city emerges from the blue bellfog. Inside they're having a good ol' B-movie tentacle party, rituallysqueezing honk horns, until the nightmare giant babies google in fromthe black and white swamplands and the first word is spoken by chantingnose-monks. It's hard to hear this without being reminded of early1970s sci-fi classics 'Solaris' and '2001.' 2002: Lost in space theland that time forgot is remembered and reissued.
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