INNER SPACE QUARTET
Transmitting From Higher Altitudes
(Dime Records)
The first thing to know about Inner Space Quartets' Transmitting From Higher Altitudes, is that this is a heavy record that could only possibly safely exist in outer space. Down on gravity drenched terra firma, very little can withstand the collective weight of the seven tracks you’ll find here. And find them you must.
Past output from Inner Space Quartet amounts to a series acclaimed but long out-of-print late night psychedelic dance singles. Transmitting From Higher Altitudes is highly focused, moving along from those singles, it’s dubby, it emblazons your psyche with its insistently repetitive drift, the mixes extend way on past your bedtime and keep you up, drawing you, drawing sounds in, and letting you go. But never letting you go. What else does that?
Put together in the South of France, in towns not prominent on tourist maps, and featuring members The Bees, The Hanging Stars and The Soundcarriers in various places, Transmitting From Higher Altitudes is the sonic love-child of so many records made but never released. You know the ones, from sweeping trashed tapes from the studio floor, you know who they’re by. You know have far you have to search through the archives, how much you have to bid up on Storage Hunters to unearth a rush like this.
‘Death Valley Paradise’ will remind you of the time you ill-advisedly drove out into the Mojave desert from Vegas mid-morning. It had been 100 degrees at dawn. Before falling sunsick at night in a motel at Furnace Creek, slipping in and out of a miasmic haze for days… Not even now knowing the name of the woman who stayed with you and saved your life that first night. Waking up, shaking it off like you were Hollywood and driving on, on the 190 to the snowy mountains of Tahoe. All of that is in 4.41 minutes of fuzztones and echo-rinsed melodica. Wow! It’s great but its not even the greatest elevation above sea level on this record.
Magisterial probably gets redefined by ‘Camper Cals’, layers of Gary Brooker-esque organ sounds underpin lugubrious whipping rhythms. These guys make the prospect of a flailing feel welcome.
On a day when Jonathan Thornton has reappraised Rain Parade’s 40-odd-year-old classic 'Emergency Third Rail Powertrip' it’s good to know bands like Inner Space Quartet are still authoritatively planting their flag on the psychedelic planets.
I don’t know what makes records important any more. I guess they all are to someone. Generally the person who makes them. But Inner Space Quartet's Transmitting From Higher Altitudes is an important record. It’s important to me and it’s important to me that you listen to it. It’s important. It’s cool. That’s important.
Essential Information
Transmitting From Higher Altitudes is streaming on CD/Vinyl and streaming on Bandcamp
