Possible Futures: 20 Mind-Expanding Ways to Start Your SF Album Collection
As the pages that have gone before should prove, science fiction and popular music, while sometimes being uneasy bedfellows, have shared more than the odd one-night stand. And got up to some mighty imaginative funny business between the sheets too.
This means there’s plenty of music out there for anyone who wants to build a music collection devoted to visions of the future. Indeed, in the digital age, one of the main problems is editing down the sheer amount of material available – just how do you choose between Sun Ra and early synthesizer albums?
Let Adventure Rocketship! help. Without in any way claiming the 20-album list that follows has been systematically compiled, it’s intended as a primer. Some of the albums are familiar (Ziggy Stardust), some are obscure (U.F.O.), some are fascinating if of dubious artistic merit (Spock’s Music From Outer Space) but all in their different ways are impeccably science fictional.
Over to you. Jump in your own rocketship, and go explore. There’s a universe of music out there…
JOE MEEK & THE BLUE MEN
I Hear A New World (1959)
This brilliantly bonkers outer space fantasy album by Telstar maestro Joe Meek (our very own Phil Spector) and London skiffle group The Blue Men would give Sun Ra a run for his money. Listed in The Wire as one of the “100 records that set the world on fire (when no one was listening),” it’s said to have inspired the likes of Saint Etienne and They Might Be Giants, although thankfully the influence doesn’t stretch to the rather disturbing Pinky and Perky vocal effects that Meek seems to have taken a shine to on tracks such as Entry Of The Globbots.
The album was recorded in Meek’s Holland Park flat as well as Landsdowne Studios, and became a labour of love for the troubled producer. He was fascinated by space and aliens, and was quoted as saying the album was an attempt “to create a picture in music of what could be up there in outer space.” His down-to-earth sound effects approach included blowing bubbles in water with a straw, draining water out of a sink, shorting out an electrical circuit, and banging partly filled milk bottles with spoons. All recorded in brand new stereophonic sound. Phil Meadley
SUN RA
Art Forms Of Dimensions Tomorrow (1962)
Sun Ra’s music seems science fictional to everyone but Sun Ra. By the time of his death in 1993, the jazz keyboardist had recorded dozens of albums as the leader of his Arkestra, an intrepid ensemble of spacetime explorers with their ears trained on the event horizon of reality. But Ra had long maintained that he had visited Saturn, at least astrally, back in the 30s after a particularly intense bout of transcendental meditation. He brought back visions of his voyage and attempted to translate them into sound – one of the most compelling being Art Forms Of Dimensions Tomorrow.
Like most Sun Ra records, the 1962 album bears cosmically conscious song titles such as Infinity Of The Universe and Lights On A Satellite. Many of them aren’t anywhere near as far-out as Sun Ra’s subsequent, free-jazz trances. But on tracks such as Cluster Of Galaxies and Solar Drums, Art Forms dips into frigid, zero-gravity minimalism – tapping into a tape-reverb atmosphere and studio-as-spaceship aesthetic that presaged the innovations later made by everyone from Hawkwind to Scientist. Sun Ra would go on to create intergalactic epics on a vaster scale, but the hushed, echoing mantras of Art Forms hauntingly evoke the space oddities of the future. Jason Heller
LEONARD NIMOY
Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr Spock’s Music From Outer Space (1967)
William Shatner’s attempts to redefine music are justly infamous, but if you want to hear an Enterprise crew member having a proper crack at singing, this LP is more rewarding. The first of five albums released by Leonard Nimoy, it’s a rag-bag collection of instrumentals, monologues with musical accompaniments and proper songs. Certain choices are obvious, like a Hammond-heavy take on Alexander Courage’s Star Trek theme tune; some are tenuous (Music To Watch Girls By is given added keyboard shimmers and rechristened Music To Watch Space Girls By); and other inclusions, like a take on Where Is Love? from Oliver!, are downright baffling.
The actor doesn’t totally disgrace himself. Sure, he’s no Scott Walker or Lee Hazlewood, but when he sticks to a narrow range his baritone is not displeasing. However, whenever he strains to hit a high note you may find yourself wincing… The real highlights are Nimoy’s narrations, thick with hippy pseudo-profundities. “Am I the you that you will be tomorrow? Perhaps in me you see your destiny?” asks the Spock self-portrait Alien (er, no actually), while closing track A Visit To A Sad Planet sees him reporting from the ruins of a world of “beauty and plenty” destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Can you guess its name? (Clue: it begins with an E…) Ian Berriman
JIM SULLIVAN
U.F.O. (1969)
Folk-americana cult artist releases 1969 album called U.F.O. and then vanishes into thin air in the New Mexico desert. The legend behind Jim Sullivan is a west coast psychedelia X-Files episode all of its own. Sullivan was an obscure folk singer in a Malibu bar, who got himself a small part in Easy Rider and made friends with Harry Dean Stanton along the way (which somehow adds to the weirdness of his tale). A friend hired Phil Spector’s session band (more weirdness!) and Jim recorded U.F.O., a hip, downbeat sunny slice of pop/folk punctuated with sublime strings. Sullivan’s deep, chilled vocals giving it an air of intimacy. The album disappeared without a trace.
Six years later Jim drove from Los Angeles to Nashville. He was stopped by cops in Santa Rose, found to be sober and sent to a motel to rest. The next day his VW bug was found 26 miles away, abandoned. Jim was never found. Had the unidentified flying object of his album taken him? A more mundane explanation may come from the fact that Sullivan’s car was found on land belonging to the Genetti family, they of alleged mafia connections. Jim left behind only his guitar, his wallet his clothes – and a great debut album. Rob Williams
TONTO’S EXPANDING HEAD BAND
Zero Time (1971)
This album of early synthesizer music was suggested by Killing Joke bassist/producer Youth. It’s by British duo Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. They only released two albums in the 1970s (this being the first) but became better known for their session work with Stevie Wonder. Tonto is an acronym for ‘The Original New Timbral Orchestra’, a reference to the largest multitimbral polyphonic analogue synthesizer in the world, designed by Cecil.
With titles such as Cybernaut, Jetsex, and Aurora, the album wears its SF influences on its sleeve. Stevie Wonder was so impressed with the album that he used Tonto on his iconic 70s albums, including Innervisions and Music Of My Mind. The album was re-released in 1996 alongside successor It’s About Time (1974) and Wonder was quoted as saying: “How great it is at a time when technology and the science of music is at its highest point of evolution, to have the reintroduction of two of the most prominent forefathers in this music be heard again. It can be said of this work that it parallels with good wine. As it ages it only gets better with time. A toast to greatness… a toast to Zero Time… forever.” Phil Meadley
DAVID BOWIE
The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972)
The album that finally propelled David Bowie towards the stardom he so obviously always craved has been endlessly analysed, contextualised and just plain poked at for the sake of it down the years. So can there be anything new left to say about Ziggy? Actually, possibly not, but if you try to forget (impossible, but try…) all that’s followed – the then shocking arm-round-Ronson androgyny of the Spiders’ appearance on Top Of The Pops performing Starman, the legend of Bowie as ch-ch-changing chameleon and his most recent reinvention as cultural elder – and return to the source material, it remains an extraordinary album. From the foreboding Five Years through to the mournful yet somehow celebratory Rock’n’Roll Suicide, there’s not a duff track on it.
That’s not to say Ziggy doesn’t have moments of hokiness. For a start, its overarching sto
ry – Earth, it’s announced, is “really dying,” rock star communes with black hole-jumping aliens, communing doesn’t end so well for flying-too-high rock star – is pure 70s concept album. But where the era’s prog-rockers would have made such a tale gloomy and dull, Ziggy Stardust glitters and thrills. One of those rare records that changed everything. Jonathan Wright
YES
Close To The Edge (1972)
Yes are possibly unique in the world of science fiction-related music in that their music is less important than their sleeve designs. Or rather, their sleeve designer. Listening to Close To The Edge for the first time (I was previously embargoed from hearing it under the punk rock 40-year rule), I am struck how avant-garde and original a lot of it is, beginning with the harnessed cacophony of Close To The Edge itself (that brilliantly sudden “AAAHH”) and ending with off-kilter keyboards on the funky Siberian Khatru. Even the lyrics seem fairly low on hobbits (although Jon Anderson seems almost literally unable to string a sentence together).
I was occasionally bored and pleasantly surprised. This is a record, like the best prog, from a future that never quite happened, and it’s shored up by its great Roger Dean artwork, which offers up alien worlds, epic landscapes and the bulgiest band logo of all time (even more bulgy than Budgie’s, which Dean also did). I wouldn’t want to live there, you understand, but somewhere there’s a galaxy where elves ride laser-guided dragons and relax at home on bulbous modular furniture. David Quantick
HAWKWIND
Space Ritual (1973)
Space Ritual is a trip. Back in the early 70s, acid was going to bring about the revolution, and it was only a matter of time until we were out there, up amongst the stars. The raw, driving energy of Hawkwind’s guitar/drum/keyboard combination peaked in this period, and was never more in-yer-face than on this live double album.
After the frantic riffs and groundbreaking electronic noodling of the opening tracks we drop into elegant doggerel with The Awakening, an account of a starship landing on a new world, delivered in a dark monotone over eerie space sounds. This sets the tone for the album, as wild psychedelic rock alternates with bleak SF poetry exploring the vastness of the universe, and humanity’s insignificant place in it. Nowhere is this contrast more delicious than between the desolate beauty of 10 Seconds Of Forever and the madness of Brainstorm – from whimsy to panic in a couple of bars. Think this sounds a bit prog-rock-up-its-own-arse? Then listen to the chillingly contemporary Sonic Attack, lyrcs by Mike Moorcock: a Cold War anthem if ever there was one. Or the slyly humorous Orgone Accumulator: this track is a tribute to the work of psychoanalyst and free love inventor Wilhelm Reich. C’mon, who wouldn’t want a “cerebral vibrator”? Jaine Fenn
DAVID BEDFORD
Star’s End (1974)
I first came across the composer and arranger David Bedford on an epic collection of Mike Oldfield recordings called Boxed, which featured Oldfield playing on a quite scary orchestral piece of Bedford’s called First Excursion. Star’s End is even scarier, featuring both Oldfield and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on a 45-minute piece which began life as The Heat Death Of The Universe before stealing a new name from Isaac Asimov. It’s a wonderful piece of music, spiky and epic, that makes you feel you are witnessing something actually genuinely huge and terrifying.
I’m also particularly fond of Mike Oldfield’s guitar work here, which is sometimes unintentionally jarring owing to a rather rough sound mix and often lurches out over the orchestral backing in an unexpected manner, and sometimes adds a strange science fiction twang predating Eno and Daniel Lanois’ country-and-western music for Apollo. And it all adds to the exciting sense of imminent doom and thrilling entropic decay of the music and makes Star’s End an incredibly powerful piece of music that’s not like anything else. David Quantick
PARLIAMENT
Funkentelechy Vs The Placebo Syndrome (1977)
It’s hard to imagine today, but in 1977 funk was endangered. Disco was on the ascent, and while rock music seemed to feel the most threatened, there was also resistance in the funk world to this new offshoot’s symphonic, cellophane sounds. Parliament triumphantly turned that disco paranoia into fuel for Funkentelechy Vs The Placebo Syndrome. Balanced between space age noises, science fiction fantasia, and the deep, hard funk the band helped pioneer, the LP drew from the same grab-bag as Parliament’s 1975 breakthrough Mothership Connection.
Funkentelechy, though, is sharper and shinier. Trimming some of the looser, more organic sounds of the past, the album probes the cyborg-like extremes of what would soon emerge as electro – in particular, Bernie Worrell’s chrome-plated, synthesized bassline for Flash Light set the stage for 80s electro acts like Jonzun Crew and Newcleus. But it’s the album’s epic, 10-minute track Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk that truly launched Parliament into tomorrow. The turning point of the record’s gonzo narrative, it begins with alienised voices and clipped, precise grooves that give way to the song’s titular villain, a funkless trickster who warns his heroic nemesis, “Starchild, you have only won a battle, I am the subliminal seducer.” The seducer, of course, is the slick, narcotic sound of disco itself, which dwells in “the Zone of Zero Funkativity” – a place that may as well be Studio 54. And when, in the 11-minute opus Funkentelechy, Parliament leader George Clinton rails against “mood control” and the forces that would “program, deprogram, reprogram” America, the anti-disco tirade suddenly becomes downright Huxleyan. Jason Heller
BRIAN ENO
Before And After Science (1977)
Brian Eno’s music has always been far too cryptic to fit squarely into any pigeonhole, science fiction or otherwise. But there’s a shimmering, speculative aura to his 1977 album Before And After Science. The final – and often overlooked – of his four semi-conventional rock albums of the 1970s, it takes Eno’s emerging obsession with ambience and uses that atmosphere as a filter for edgy, angular pop. Everyone from U2 to My Bloody Valentine would subsequently adopt this approach, but on Before And After Science, it comes across as a wildly mutating anachronism.
On Backwater, Eno sings of “sailing at the edges of time” before dipping into a hallucinatory scenario that’s half Lewis Carroll, half Thomas Pynchon. And the ebbing, recursive rhythms of No One Receiving recalls the fiction of M John Harrison with such quantum-reality sentiments as: “Nobody hears us when we’re alone in the blue future. No one receiving the radio’s splintered waves. In these metal ways, in these metal days.” And when, on Here He Comes, Eno warbles about “the boy who tried to vanish to the future or past,” it feels like a fabulist short story left tantalising hollow. Jason Heller
KRAFTWERK
The Man-Machine (1978)
Prior to Kraftwerk, the burgeoning krautrock scene was a nest of spacey, hippie-centric kosmische musik, a pulsing, sprawling metaphor for imagined interstellar oscillations. Kraftwerk too dabbled in this stream of sonic consciousness before cutting their hair in the middle of the 1970s. The band’s sound evolved into a synthesized, industrialised whirr. But that was nothing compared to 1978 album The Man-Machine. Radically re-reinventing themselves as android versions of their previously clean-cut incarnations, the German band flirted dangerously with future-fascist imagery and the bloodless worship of an antiseptic tomorrow.
There are subtle, tricky layers of satire and subversion embedded in this aesthetic, but most immediately and shockingly, The Man-Machine rocked. Albeit robotically. Subsumed in a clone-like collective, Kraftwerk imbues clattering, blip-driven songs such as Spacelab and Metropolis with icy, retro-futuristic elegance – a Weimar Republic for the 24th century in which decadence is just another lab-grown, factory-stamped commodity. And in the album’s sumptuous centrepiece, The Model, social norms of beauty and sexuality are crystallised and presciently reduced to so many ones and zeroes. Jason Heller
JEFF WAYNE
Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds (1978)
“No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th cen
tury, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.” And no-one would have believed that one of the best versions of HG Wells’ ur-invasion story – better and odder arguably than Orson Welles managed – would be made by the man behind David Essex’s early success. But Jeff Wayne used all his Stardust money to fund this brilliantly ambitious project, which melded contemporary disco with steampunk terror, Richard Burton with Justin Hayward and everything else with the kitchen sink.
I can only remember two songs, the above-quoted The Eve Of The War, which begins with Burton’s ominous rumble, and Hayward’s brilliant rendition of Forever Autumn, the last gasp of 60s prog pop. But that’s all you need. It’s a disco remake of an HG Wells classic, and no amount of awful reworkings with Gary Barlow or stage performances with holograms of Liam Neeson can dull its peculiar edge. War Of The Worlds transcends its cheesiness, partly because the music has all the energy and passion of true commitment and partly because, even now, Wells’ original story is terrifying. “The chances of anything coming from Mars” – ready? – “…are a million to one…” – all together now – “HE SAID!!!!” David Quantick
Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco Page 15
