Space Music : Shultze, Kitaro, Jonn Serrie, etc.

jaxon: a lot of the pleasure in this stuff is that it is ludicrously over the top... jarre in particular, the fortress of cheese, but the plus side to a fearless lack of shame is that occasionally all their ambitions are realized... when they're good they're good, it's just that it's such a fine line.

Jarre, if you like Oxygene or Equinoxe, then proceed through 1984's Zoolook and then for god's sake Stop...

Vangelis does many different things... side 2 of L'apocalypse Des Animaux is grade A space / ambient. Blade Runner, thumbs up. Heaven and Hell... tastelessly extreme, full orchestra and choir, one track named "Intestinal Bat", Autechre sampled the main theme at the beginning of their Coachella set. Beauborg & Invisible Connections are the abstract records & they're good. I wish Erkin Koray sounded anywhere near as good as Vangelis' Earth. See You Later is a bizarre concept album, side 1 is about an electronic musician who has become bored with his equipment and recording, side 2 is about life after the apocalypse and then Jon Anderson shows up to sing "Where is my friend? Ha ha ha ha!" in his high voice. Not that it's good, it just is.

Tomita's Bermuda Triangle has weird moments, but have had trouble warming to his stuff overall. I definitely hate Kitaro.

http://www.hos.com/artist.lasso?ID=174

http://www.michaelstearns.com/

A lot of this stuff is way, way under-appreciated. there's no "hook" to hang any kind of magazine article or promotional thing on, most of these guys are just quiet, often vaguely hippyish fellows, who make a living out of unobtrusively composing soundtrack music, and experiment w/weird combinations of acoustic & electronic sound, esoteric synthesiser controllers "space" music, unusual music venues and performances etc. The best of these guys desreve a lot more props than they get, and really, any more props that they're getting would be a "lot" more in percentage terms. There's a whole thing about the way yer electronica/idm laptop act presents himself - you know, a direct line leading through stockhausen, henry, subotnick yadda yadda to my baldy hunched over his powermac, fucking about w/max/msp. I think people like braheny, serrie, stearns, robert rich are a way better candidate to actually be that.

Kitaro fcuking sucks. Imagine the intro to pink floyd's "shine on you crazy diamond" played on general midi instruments. imagine album after album after album of this.

klaus schulze can be very good, but is wildly inconsistent, and jesus, does he go on. Try "X", "Timewind" "moondawn" and if they don't do it for you, go no further. If they do, go through his stuff chronologically, and when it starts to suck, STOP.

tim blake from gong made a pair of very good space/synth albums in the late '70's that might fit in here - "new jerusalem" and "crystal machine". There are - fairly sparse - vocals, which might be off-putting, he has this weird camp intonation and the lyrics are all waterfalls in space and leylines to glastonbury and stuff, eg "faraway in outer space/lighthouse guiding star/it's there to help the human race/&tell you where you are" (from memory), I really like it, b/c he sings it w/this kind of scarily intense conviction, but I can see how it might be really, really annoying to some people.

Vangelis' "Heaven and Hell" is fucking way over the top, but fucking great, and actually quite moving in places in its kitch way.

e2e4 is good, but not remotely spacy to me, it's more like motorway music, it's really good to have on in the car when yer on a long drive.

It's also a piece of piss to make yr own space music w/the right 5 tools:

1/ korg lambda, or better still PE-2000 string machine - for reasons too techy to get into, these are just about the only 2 m/cs to make it. if you set the attack and release parameters to full, the chords you play blur into each other as you play them. Instant space. On other string machine keyboards, chords cut each other off. instant suxi0n. Jean Michel Jarre and Tim Blake both used the PE2000.

run through

2/ moog music "moogerfooger" phaser pedal

run through

3/digital reverb set to "hall" algorithm w/lo-o-o-ong decay time.

plus

4/cheap analogue monosynth or modular synthesiser (wiard, modcan, motm, blacet research etc all currently make these) set to a/vco sine wave modulated by rising or falling sawtooth wave &/or b/white noise through lowpass filter w/slow sine/triangle wave lfo modulation of cutoff.

through

5/lots and lots and lots of echo

set this lot up, spark up yer chalice, and you can keep yrself amused for hours and hours! Keep the tape rolling while yer at it as well! You might hit "the zone"

http://gagliarchives.com

Join the GAGLIARCHIVES, Saturday night at 10pm Eastern
Time, for program 903, as we feature an exclusive
interview with Electronic music pioneer, Klaus
Schulze. Klaus Schulze remains a cult figure
in the United States, where the bulk of his prolific
output has until now been available only through the
import bins. He is widely considered an avant-garde
mainstay as well as a founding father of both the
new-age space music and electronica genres. Klaus will

discuss the new and forthcoming reissues of his back
catalog, his illustrious solo career, and his
captivating performances.

"New Age Music", search and destroy.

The aimless space stuff I arranged perfectly with iTunes crossfade playback feature of 6 seconds and it sounds like a real, intentionally made album rather than a bunch of 3 minute song samples. It's great! For what it is, I mean.

Here's the order of the pure space ambient one, in case you'd like to do it yourself:

The-Tachyon-Directive
Stratos
The-last-secert
fantasy-passages
Starport-Indra
glyder
Gentle the night
continuum
The-Ancient-of-days
rediant-dawns-whisper
Welcome-Home
Light-of-thy-Countenance
Land-of_lyss
the-stargazers-journy
goldstone
Lumahai
Straits-of-madigann
Tingri-Maiden
Vista-range
Be-still-my-soul

I basically arranged it so that the song samples ran seemlessly into each other with the crossfade playback feature and it is not discernable that these are incomplete song samples.

I just hope the crossfade feature stays when I burn it to a CD-R and is not simply a feature for iTunes playback!

Oh yeah, and I got zero work done today!

Kitaro fcuking sucks. Imagine the intro to pink floyd's "shine on you crazy diamond" played on general midi instruments. imagine album after album after album of this.

this sounds kinda awesome?

Dude's discography is way too tremendous to delve into, though. There are over 100 titles on Discogs alone

Does anyone have anything good to say about Kitaro?

> Imagine the intro to pink floyd's "shine on you crazy diamond" played on general midi instruments.

^ Sums up about 1/2 of The Kitaro Quintessential, but then there's the string-y soundtrack-y, syrup-y stuff. If there's an album worth listening to, please post it. Gonna head to the new age thread in the meantime.

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1315680768_10.jpg

I simply must post this image again. Actually not a bad album incidentally.

he was in far east family band

you gotta be in the right mood for Kitaro

he was in far east family band

― brimstead, Sunday, May 12, 2019 10:08 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

somehow i did not know this

Serrie - heart of the mothership

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuwsQIz-mMA