Label: Ash International [R.I.P.] Format: CD
This is the third in Andrew Lagowski‘s excursions into the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and perhaps the most disengaged from the planet of sound. The theme is escape from Earth and oneself – hence the title. Much more Solaris than Apollo 13 in other words, and with nods to both the end sequence of 2001 and thirty years of NASA research and/or cover up along the way too.
The hum of a spaceship interior; squarking astronauts and Houston; the interrupted radio signals; solar flares brushing into audible bandwidths; winds dusting the surface of Mars; imaginary landscapes; real conspiracies; mains ignition; coded transmissions form Earth to the alien motherships; a rapidly jacked-out comms port; post-Ambient signifiers of giant spaceships and otherness; wow and flutter; saucers full of black secret technology; skiffy signifiers, spheres in disharmony; voices from beyond the wub; Discovery making a (hidden) discovery… Pod offers a trip into low orbit, to the reconditioned and privatised Mir, to the space stations of the mind. An impressionistic selection of extra-vehicular activities, spacewalkman-style, with vertigo included and alienation just a skip away.
-Freq1C-
(A Second Opinion)
The sounds come from various sources in the universe.
“Source” versus “Pod.”
The avowed purpose is to “leave ourselves behind and become new beings”. Will another recording create the necessary atmosphere for this? Yes and no. Lagowski‘s vow not to execute live actions in England may have something to do with this view. But define “new”? It could be said that every new draught of information caught by the mind – is a change, another step towards the “new”. Your reading this review is, as the notes say, “a metaphor for escape.” These sounds create this review – pod after pod – and the disc is still silver, circular and completely evidential.
Yet another series of deeper sounds from which ideas flow, about which impressions are made and through which panties are lost.
-David Cotner-
