Terr(right) fights an Om in the 1973 French animated film "Fantastic Planet"

By now most children of the 60’s and 70’s have seen this one, but for those of you who may have missed it, “Fantastic Planet” is a classic in both storyline and visual presentation. The original French version, titled “La Planét Savage” (translates to the savage planet) was the masterwork of French animator René LaLoux, whose work includes “Time Masters” (1981) and “Gandahar” (1987). The use of muted tones and pencil line contours rather than the hard-edged outline of most conventional 2d animation in the art give it a very soft appeal. Nice incidental music, mild nudity and a lot of hidden trivia for those who venture to study that sort of thing (case in point; Oms, the name of one of the races in the movie, was supposedly derived from the French word hommes, meaning men)

The story is based around two races of beings; the Oms are a small feral race of individuals who reside on this planet amidst the giant race known as Draags. The Draags are a telepathic race who treat the Oms like pets (or pests) and soon fall prey to the uprise of the oppressed Om race, led by Terr. I enjoy watching this one from time to time as a reminder of how expressive the visual artform of animation can be.

Since I mentioned the wide release film that would conquer the weekend’s box office last week, Friday, I might try again this week: Twilight: New Moon. Ugh, since it’s the lead, there’s a pic of it, but, again, I ain’t seeing it.

Need I say why? I expect it to be just a contrived teen melodrama dressed up with the mythos of such archetypical characters of vampires and lycanthropes (not that all those movies are bad, it’s just a watered down version for the romance novel crowds). The worst part about it is that this new Twilight Movie is it helmed by the Hollywood hack Chris Weitz, who, along with his writers, offer the blind idealization of Hollywood’s interpretation of teenage life. It’s ironic that the first film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke, made her mark directing Thirteen, a movie about the complicated relationship between a young teen and her wannabe-cool-but-ultimately-messed-up mother. She just so happened to have co-written that movie with then 15-year-old Nikki Reed, an actress in the two Twilight movies.

As a matter of fact, none of the wide release movies this week appeal to me. The Blind Side, looks like another schmaltzy underdog sports story that doubles as a star-vehicle for Sandra Bullock. I’d expect to be a predictable torture, which is what I hate most about those kinds of movies. I take no pleasure in watching a movie where I know exactly how a story will not only turn out but how it will develop.

Then there’s Planet 51, which (by the trailer that I had to endure too many times to count alone) I can tell is just another CGI excuse to condescend to children. Dumb CGI movies like these (the last one I actually made it to the theater to watch was Shrek 2) insult the intelligence of children. What’s worse is that many of those children have not developed the aesthetic sensibility to know this. It’s crap filmmaking serendipitously designed to indoctrinate young minds to want to watch simple-minded Hollywood crap. As if this writing, the flick is dropping hard on the Tomato meter (at 15% as of this writing).

Planet 51’s “ingenious” idea to depict a human astronaut as an alien in an alternate planet stuck in the nostalgia of 50s American culture is just an excuse to retell the same old stupid jokes through some simple-minded twist in telling the story. One of the great similar animated sci-fi films of the last century is the French-Czech production Fantastic Planet, which, at least according to the experience shared by one of my film-loving friends, would blow the minds of any child headed to boost Planet 51 at least to number two at the BO this weekend. Watch the opening scene here:

This friend, when much older, told me about receiving a video tape of this movie and recalling, as a child, how it so disturbed him, as well it should have.Imagine humans on some strange planet whose dominant humanoid inhabitants are actually so large, that a human fits in the palm of its hand. These creatures then treat them either as pets or trivially toy with them in the wild as humans do in the real word with ants and flies. It was presented then as a criticism of the oppressive communist regime that then rules Czechoslovakia.

Before I digress more, let me just say Fantastic Planet is one of the greatest sci-fi films of the 20^th Century, and deserves a look if you have not seen it.

There are interesting movies coming out this week, at least in limited release. Master Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar is set to release his second consecutive movie starring Penelope Cruz, Broken Embraces, a combination that resulted in one of his best ever films, 2007’s Volver.

Then there is my favorite German filmmaker currently working Werner Herzog, who
has his second Hollywood film coming out (after the Christian Bale-starrer
Rescue Dawn): Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans of a bad cop to the Nth power, Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel. I’d even be keen on seeing what sounds like a nice departure for John Woo. Red Cliff is set in China during the rule of the Han Dynasty.

OK, so two predictions for this weekend’s BO: New Moon, of course, number one, and Planet 51, number 2. Hey, if anyone plans to see them let me know and what merits you might actually find in them…

In the meantime I am left to hunt out Almodovar’s and Herzog’s new releases… Anyone know where they’re playing in Miami?

Múm’s video for Rhubarbidoo (off Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, their latest album) is one of the most re-enchanting videos that I’ve seen for a long time.  If, as Max Weber has argued, Enlightenment rationalization, especially as it manifests itself in the bureaucratized capitalism of Western society, results in a disenchanted world where we are locked in an “iron cage” of social alienation and meaningless production, surely the 20th-century fascination with fantasy, science fiction, and the imaginative worlds brought to life by animation effectively functions as a kind of antidote.  Rhubarbidoo is the work of Jason Malcolm Brown and Aya Yamasaki Brown, a pair of illustrator/animators who seem to specialize in re-enchantment.  Their Overture project is just as otherworldly and beautiful as Rhubarbidoo and also foregrounds a represented natural space inhabited by creatures that are not of this world and yet, in their alien guises, somehow end up appearing as natural as nature itself.

Early 20th-century animation is rife with the idea of bringing things to life — not only inanimate objects like household objects or urban spaces, but also nature itself in a special kind of re-animation where life is brought back to life.  Disney’s 1932 cartoon Flowers and Trees is a perfect example of this type of animation.  It seems fair to wonder whether or not the deep fascination with nature evinced in these early animations is actually symptom of a society that is rapidly becoming so urbanized and industrialized that direct contact with the natural world has become a thing of the past.  In this case the ability of animation to bring this world to life as ’second nature’ is deeply ironic since it’s an artifact of the industrial revolution — the toothed-gear — that allows for the existence of the stop-motion technique in the first place.  There are more sophisticated readings of this dynamic that are possible as well, of course.  Marx would probably say that what we see when we see cups and saucers singing in Disney animation is the voice of alienated labor expressing itself in another register; the Adorno and Horkheimer of Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the other hand, might view the re-animation of nature as a kind of mystificatory screen that serves to block the fact that the animistic stage of society is long since dead and instead there is only the fact of nature as a purely objectified resource for human exploitation (including the pleasurable exploitation of nature in its cartoon form).

MGM’s Honeyland is a fantastic case study for the idea that animation that seems to be about natural space is actually about the social unconscious that’s at work behind the scenes.  The cartoon begins as a kind of pastoral idyll; the bee society is figured as a classic rural community with an economy based on cultivation and gathering.  By the middle of the 1850s, however, the mechanization of agriculture had already started in the United States — the McCormick reaper, the threshing machine, and a practical mowing machine were all in use well before even the invention of the horse-drawn combine in the 1880s.  By 1935, when Honeyland was made, agriculture in the U.S. was, for all practical purposes, fully industrialized.  The kind of rural life envisioned in the cartoon — a life of pleasant labor and natural bounty — was already nothing but a nostalgic fantasy.  This nostalgic fantasy, however, can’t maintain itself and soon we’re introduced to a second fantasy — the hive as happy factory.  At this point the (worker) bees are still depicted as deeply content, and they obviously have a large amount of autonomy and free time for pleasure.  It’s toward the end of the cartoon, when the spider attacks, that the social unconscious reveals itself in a manner that’s a bit more sinister.  What started off as a pastoral idyll has now devolved into industrialized militarism — the bees are controlled en masse via the electronic call of the centralized public announcement system and form themselves into single living klaxon within which all individuation has completely disappeared.  This may seem like a stretch, but perhaps it’s not as much of a stretch if you consider that the rationalization of industrial production has its roots in the standardized manufacture of interchangeable rifle parts.

All of these anxieties about the role of human agency within the highly commercialized and industrialized landscape that we’ve erected around ourselves and come to inhabit are at the forefront of this brilliant montage that combines scenes from the Fleischer Studio’s 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels and stock footage of the construction of what I think must be the World Trade Center buildings.  The way in which Rockwell’s video for Beholden juxtaposes the Lilliputians with scenes of the construction of the WTC raises the question of whether or not we have, in fact, created something that we can’t control.  The image at the end of the video is the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 treatise, Leviathan, which argues for the total control of (a willing) society by an absolute sovereign.  Ending the video with this image makes clear that the question being raised is one of control and sovereignty; as a society we may have the ability to construct wonders, but in the end isn’t it those wonders that control us?  Clearly there is another version of Weber’s iron cage at work here.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to subscribe to the view that somehow all attempts to re-enchant the world are, in the final analysis, nothing but an empty compensation for the fact that the disenchantment of the world we know has been made complete.  There are always gaps and fissures where enchantment can happen, despite the pessimism of theorists like Weber and Adorno.  The excess in homo ludens will always escape, at least partially, the clasp of the iron cage.  The force of play and invention, the possibility to explore and investigate new social potentialities and possibilities, is at least as much of a feature of any creative work as our inability to escape the social unconscious that must inform it in at least some way.  The playful space of vegetable fantasy in Rhubarbidoo is one form that this type of exploration may take, but another form that may be more directly useful for raising questions about the type of society that we might someday want to become can be found in lengthier works of animated fantasy and speculative fiction.  Although it’s not a particularly incisive film when it comes to unpacking the deep-seated contradictions of society as we know it, René Laloux’s 1973 film Fantastic Planet does a remarkable job of thematizing the human propensity to resist totalizing systems of control, while at the same expressing the force of the imagination at play in the form of the wild and surreal images that explode across the alien landscape presented in the film.

This video for Múm’s song “They Made Frogs Smoke ’til They Exploded” is by Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, and it embodies the idea of play in deeply interesting ways.  Firstly, the video is about child’s play and as such is as much about violently exploratory creative destruction as it is about the wonder of discovery.  Childhood feelings of powerlessness — of literally being overcome and torn apart by overwhelming emotional states — are expressed through images of disembodied limbs, bodies being opened up and bleeding, and animals that are both menacing and at the same time objects to be cut open and destroyed.  The play expressed in the first part of the video is dark and indicates thetransference and acting out of violent emotions onto a creative stage that’s filled with blood and crumpled paper.  And yet, as with all childhood imaginings, the cat that loses its head is able to be magically stitched back together and return to life.  The crux of this video, for me, is the sequence with the child holding up the drawing of a swan.  The image of the swan is filled with swathes of brilliant color at the same moment at the child’s teeth fall out, precipitating a full-scalerain of teeth.  The dream of teeth falling out is, of course, classically supposed to indicate a fear of the loss of control.  And yet, at the same time, the falling out of baby teeth is one marker of our entry into adulthood.  In this sequence the creative and wild imagination of childhood, including all of the horrors that come along with it, is represented as the necessary basis for the move to aesthetic maturity.  After this scene the types of creative images that appear are much more benign — flowers emerging from the swan’s mouth, leaves filling the soul-space of a child, and paper that turns into butterflies that fly away.  Perhaps the most delightful aspect of this video is the use of common classroom materials — those things we mostassociate with childhood and its attendant confusions and power struggles — as the medium through which the question of childhood imagination is realized.  It may be the case that as a whole our society has veered far from any real contact and understanding with nature — we may have become too good at making frogs explode — but there’s a second nature at work in all of these videos, a second nature that demands a space for play and exhibits an irrepressible desire to resist the final isolation of total alienation.

If you’re looking for something next level to attend
this week, peep “Cinesound presents ‘Anime Noir’”
this Wednesday @ Mandrake. Production crew
The 5signs will be rescoring animated films live!
These films are: The Animatrix, Fantastic Planet
and Rennaissance. This is a great concept
for an event and it is sure to be
LAzers. See you there.

∆

Since I have accumulated no experience with drugs of any kind (save pain-relievers and the caffeine in my Irish Breakfast tea), I don’t think that I could honestly undergo the intended experience of the 1973 French film Fantastic Planet. I found this little number at my local library after picking up some old Clive Barker books, mistaking the dvd case at first for that of the classic Forbidden Planet. Still, I was intrigued. The animation looked more like some peculiar hybrid of children’s book illustrations and a surrealist art exhibit. Scanning the back cover, I noticed that the movie was based on a Czech novel, involved a human uprising against their 40-foot-tall Traag overlords, and was only 73 minutes long. Figuring that an hour and thirteen wasn’t too long to sacrifice to a film, I went ahead and checked Fantastic Planet out. After all, it was free. The plot was pretty entertaining and revolved around some pretty blatant political and cultural criticisms. There was some animated nudity, which is always a little bizarre to behold. I guess that’s the byproduct of a childhood brought up to associate the art form with Disney and other youth-centered products. The nudity in this film, as opposed to something gratuitous like Heavy Metal (which I couldn’t get five minutes into turning it off), has more of a “tribal” connotation, for lack of a better word. It denotes some basic difference between the tame humans (used as pets) and the “feral” wild ones, though the divisions become blurred as the plot progresses.

Anyway, Fantastic Planet is pretty much the French equivalent of Dali and Pink Floyd getting loaded on one substance or another and collaborating on a music video based on the concepts of revolution, knowledge, and gigantic blue aliens with fish-like fin-ears. It’s certainly no Anastasia, but I don’t guess that every movie needs to include a zombified Rasputin. The last half of that sentence is clearly a lie, but I’d still consider grabbing Fantastic Planet from the library if you have the option.

Its getting close so time to post. Hit up The Jewish Mother for one of Halloween’s sickest parties by FANTASTIC PLANET AND NOAH LARMZ.

Please believe there will be cash !!!!!!!! 500 HUNDY FOR BEST COSTUME. LETS GET IT!

Via NOAH LARMZ

Noah Larmz got some shit coming up…

If you’re in Richmond be sure to make it to the monthly FP joint on Saturday… I added some dimension to the flier this time too for those that notice these things..

…AND….

If you’re in Virginia Beach on Halloween, be sure to come out to Fantastic Planet at the Jewish Mother:

The Jewish Mother staff will be judging the $500 costume contest, so make sure you bring your A-game… Photos by Tarpey.

FP Site / FP Myspace / Noah Larmz Facebook / NL Twitter

bv

If you have nothing to do Saturday night…HELL if you have something to do cancel those plans and hit up  FANTASTIC PLANET’S 1 Year Anniversary … Presented by NOAH LARMZ!

The entire film Fantastic Planet is up on YouTube. This is so awesome:

I sort of remember seeing this movie when I was younger, especially the big blue folks with the huge eyes. It’s always been linked in my memory with David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

"Dude..."

A review at the AV Club describes Fantastic Planet this way:

Fantastic Planet, adapted from a novel by Stefan Wul, was inspired by the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Russians in the late ’60s. On the planet Ygam lives a race of giant, alien beings called Traags. These Traags, who are prone to hallucinatory bouts of group meditation, keep the oddly human-like Oms as pets, often treating them with the sadism and perverse maternalism humans frequently inflict upon their own pets. Never underestimate the ingenuity of an Om, though: When one absconds with one of the Traags’ knowledge devices, he uses the tool to foment a wild Om uprising against his captors.

This is from a review in the NY Times in 1973:

The story itself is a sci-fi honey, with tiny earthlings “from a destroyed planet” dominated as pets or outcasts by huge, robot-like rulers. This is somber, dead-earnest stuff. And when a Lilliputian revolution explodes, brilliantly evoked, the planet Ygam rocks.

[Found via io9 and A Journey Round My Skull; Album cover from FilmTracks, and DVD cover from this Fantastic Planet wiki]

Come out and join us at the Jewish Mother this on this Saturday, Sept 5th to celebrate 1 year of Fantastic Planet in Virginia Beach. For more info visit our site: www.fantasticplanetrock.com

myspace / facebook / twitter

ELABORAZIONE CURATA DA FANTASTIC PLANET

If you are in Va Beach this weekend definitely check out NOAH LARMZ PRESENTS FANTASTIC PLANET. They put on dope parties with sick dj’s and the atmosphere is like being back at a college house party. Sparce approves!

Flier by Noah Larmz

fantasticplanetrock.com

myspace.com/fantasticplanetrock.

myspace.com/longjawnski

raideradio.blogspot.com

I watch this shit like everyday. 

Fantastic Planet – Directed by René Laloux 

Since I didn’t take any photos of this past weekend, I’ll just insert related pyramid images in between for sequencing purposes. Everyone likes seeing pictures anyways, right? Who likes an all-text post? No one. *Let’s see if this works… Hopefully you’ll catch on.

*Let's See if this Works

Took a trip to Richmond (hence the title of the post, for those of you who don’t punderstand) this past Saturday with Josh and Walter. Best time I’ve had in Richmond in a while, hands down…

Some highlights of the trip:

• Lunch at Joe’s Inn
• The weather was great, minus a few sprinkles here and there.
• Being able to get into United Blood for free thanks to Josh’s brother Nate, and Jeff(?) from Converge. I probably spent a total of 3o-45 minutes inside Alley Kats, and 3 hours outside. Had a better time outside tho, just hanging out with everyone. 
• Seeing new things with Chopper and Walt… Pause.
• Walking over to get $1 PBR drafts and play *pool at Marz Bar during the show.. Drew Snyder was in the **building!
• Meeting up with Sam K, Joji, Marshall, Jesse, and some other people for Kate’s B-Day dinner (Happy Birthday again, Kate!)
• Seeing everyone at FanPlan at Ipanema… Doddie the Wizard was working his ***magic playing the ‘I-don’t-give-a-fuck’ feel-good set, dropping all types of bangers and classics.. 
• After hours chillin at Long and Bwoods spot… Kool Kev came thru with some treats.
• Late-night microwave burrito from 7-11
• Sleeping on Joey Russo’s (WHOA?!)  hard-wood floor with no pillow
• Big ass burrito from Bandito’s for lunch

*Pool (not a pyramid, but click it to see the cool animation)

**Building

***Magic

I really regret not bringing my camera to Fantastic Planet this past Saturday… I packed it any everything, but somehow managed to totally forget about it. I had a blast (weird, I don’t usually use that adjective to describe ‘good times’) and it would have been nice to take some photos that night because a lot of old friends (and new) came out that I haven’t seen in a while, and it was so a lot of fun just seeing everyone *under one roof again.

*Under One Roof

The last few times I’ve visited, things seemed so surreal in a way, and felt sort of like an *outsider, being that it just wasn’t the same as it was around the time I left. It really makes me wonder where I’d be, what I would be doing, who I’d be doing it with, etc., had I not left the city back in July. Would it have felt that way?  Who knows…. 

*Outsider

For me, this trip was pretty much the first time that I actually felt like nothing had changed, and really made me miss living up there. It’s good to know that if I do decide to move back, there’s still a piece of it that’ll always be there, the people, the places, and all that..

More trips to come. 

ttfn,

BV

“Fantastic Planet” (1973)
also known as “La planète sauvage”

Why haven’t I seen this?!

Rating: C-
Score: 7.0

interesting is not always good. but at least it’s interesting. and interesting just means that, well, there’s something that lulls you in, that keeps you listening. it might grab you and smash you over the head once and be done with you, it might shake you around pretty consistently for multiple listens over a longer period of time, or it may
stir you more distinctly for a very long time. it could be that record, or one of those, say, top 25 records, that stick with you for life.

chances are good that why there are mountains by cymbals eat guitars is not that record. for a number of interesting reasons, this record fails to stack up, but unlike some records, it wasn’t released with the expectation that the merits of its members alone would produce a measure of quality that you can count on. artists are unpredictable and chaotic and go off of deep ends, and with pre-histories untold and cymbals eat guitars trying to make nuanced, early 21st century indie rock work from staten island, one could guess that their either starting at a distinct disadvantage or they possess the magic powder that translates into genius under the right weather conditions. unfortunately, neither dramatic conclusion is true, and we are left with a puzzling, fizzling half-start that has potential but which suffers from some serious design and vision errors that cripple the band before they can further screw it up in the execution.

upon first listen, you might take cymbals eat guitars as a fairly arbitrary press-testing of williamsburg hipsters clawing their way through cheap drugs, public transportation, scuzzy coffee joints, and cold pizza down a bedazzled road of bad short documentaries and that unavoidable air of slight superiority that comes from spending too much time in williamsburg. you’d be close geographically, but well off the mark. cymbals eat guitars know their way around the indie rock canon, and they aren’t afraid to mix together a broad range of influences and comparatively non-conventional pop structures to show off their fluency.

unfortunately, fluency isn’t the problem here, it’s complexity. why there are mountains suffers from too much happening in too little space, which results in some beautiful, panoramic stories being told through an exploding camera lens. the band misses the lessons of chemistry and playing from within, and manage to hyperintellectualize the shit out of what could have been some good songs. sadly, about half of the record suffers from this phenomenon, and the result is a record filled with promising pop and experimental phrasings strewn through distancing feedback, structures, and blunt mixtures of solid form, while only rarely finding true nuance and beauty in their ill-calculated math rock.

the band is most successful when they are able to mix their influences well, and reach a fluid sound that approaches the new. it works when they take their sense of ambiance and the gibberish and portmanteau in drifting, cloudy vocals and map and take us into a future that feels a lot like late 20th century classical music in the striking “what dogs see”, or the shimmering skip-beat, glockenspiel bop of “wind phoenix (proper names)” and its evocative use of horns that hearkens some great late 20th century craftmasters like the cure (“friday i’m in love”), xtc (just about anything from “oranges and lemons”), prefab sprout (“steve mcqueen”), or even jellyfish (“the king is half undressed”).

sadly, while the signatures of these bands appear on other tracks, the essence is usually lost. the opening track, “and the hazy sea”, nods to old and new shoegazer acts such as my bloody valentine, flying saucer attack, and deerhunter, and holds its own. tracks that follow fall into a patchwork of unfinished blocks that feel more cut-and-pasted than composed or borne organically. “some trees (merritt moon)” shows a knack for surprising arrangements but the melodies and harmonies within those blocks feel aimless and get lost without touching upon the sublime or the poetic, and both “indiana” and “cold spring” could be stephen malkmus throwaways.

“share”, which divides the record in half, is a fine mix of off-kilter vocals and arrangements which again brings pavement, my bloody valentine, and the affected instrumental trimmings of various less frequently observed indie rock bands (e.g., godspeed, p:ano, prinzhorn dance school) to mind. it’s disappointing; their ability to mix influences seems out of reach when they want it. “share” comes close at points but is ultimately a near miss; “what dogs see ” and “wind phoenix (proper names)” seem to capture the ineluctable moments that we all want to produce. upon multiple listens, it’s easy to get the feeling that the band was happy with about 1/3 of the record and was hoping to feel that deep click with the six tracks that didn’t quite hit the sweet spot, but didn’t quite get there.

it’ll be interesting to see how this record fares. i can’t justify a high rating here mainly due to the scarcity of gold, not due to the band’s inability to produce it nor because of a lack of ambition or ideas. cymbals eat guitars are overflowing with talent and need strong and broad channels to receive and challenge them, and get them to work harder at letting things happen naturally and see what happens the next time around. with a rewired (not necessarily re-thought) approach to writing and performing songs, they may find a deeper source of their true essence. if they continue along their current path, they will likely fall into a deeply forgotten but not really despised pile of bands like failure (anyone remember their 1996 record, fantastic planet?), who weren’t a bad band but despite some acclaim, decent sales, and a steady career of releasing multiple records and touring, never jettisoned much past a lukewarm mediocrity and ultimately disbanded with a whimper. cymbals eat guitars are well-versed in their chosen grammar to write better, more affecting songs.

recommended tracks
and the hazy sea
what dogs see
wind phoenix (proper names)

on lala

Here are some photos I took with my phone if the process. I wish I had shot the flier as a photo rather than scanning. There are some nice shadows that would really make this thing pop. I added the half inch white letters later on.

I remember when I was a high school kid, about 15 years old or so – I heard the song Stuck On You on the local rock radio station. For those curious, it was the now defunct Rock 103.5. I had no idea what it was and they didn’t announce the name of the song. There was no internet (at my house) in 1996. There was no bit torrent. No iTunes store. I had no way to find this.

I spent weeks listening to that station at night just to hear that song one more time. Finally I heard it. I managed to scrap together enough lunch money and headed to the local record shop and got my first copy of what has ended up being one of the best albums I have ever listened to in my entire life: Fantastic Planet.

Failure was a short-lived band, but they burned bright if they burned at all and Fantastic Planet was their high point.

Saturday Savior starts the album off with what sounds like a bike ringer stuck on a loop. And we’re off. While at first listen, it sounds like a really good rock song – something is different here.

The production on this album is unbelievable and creates textures that I didn’t know were possible for this kind of music. The tuning is so strange. It sounds like it might be off, but it turns out that it’s perfect. I have no idea how to explain it, but it works better than anything my young ears had heard at that point.

Pillowhead has some of the most vivid lyrical content on the album. For some reason, I was always able to picture exactly what was happening as the song played out. I saw blazing apartment walls painted red and deep orange by the fire consuming a man lying in his bed. Unable to talk or move or say anything to the firemen coming to his aid, he just lays there. The flames consume him and he falls back asleep and dies.

Then you hit Blank and you’ve entered another dimension. The first segue is a hint of things to come, and Blank is when things arrive. The song sounds like it was recorded as a normal song, then put through a drug binge before being pressed to record.

In between Segue 2 and Segue 3 things are starting to fade. While the album started out at a good pace, now things are starting to get a little heavier and a little more drugged out. Dirty Blue Balloons was the first time I really realized (even before Blank), when listening to this album, that the whole thing was essentially an ode to heroin. I was young and naive. I’m still naive, in fact, but this song was obvious and I was starting to get it. Ken Andrews was one messed up genius. Aren’t they all?

Solaris sounds like The Police in outer space and I instantly fell in love with the song. It’s most likely about an old Russian movie of the same name, but it’s a great tune even without having seen the movie. I really started to get the idea that I was being carried away to somewhere special at this point.

Leo woke up in his bed again.

Segue 3 takes us into some of the most brilliant, spaced out music I have ever heard. What was once a semi-normal rock album was melting and twisting into something unrecognizable and yet entirely too awesome in front of my very ears. It is not unlike a film strip being lit on fire and crackling and tearing away, still clinging to the reel.

From the metaphorical The Nurse Who Loved Me into Another Space Song, it turns out we’re no longer on Earth.

She’ll always be what I can’t find
She’ll always be where I break down
She’ll always hide behind a star
I’ll always dream she can’t be far

Stuck On You comes next and it was the song that got this whole thing started. Just like the title, it got stuck on me immediately and I was hooked. Despite the fact that this song was a minor hit at best, it managed to suck me in and I’m ever so glad that it did. Had I missed those few minutes of radio I may have never found out about this album.

Heliotropic is the sixteenth track on this album. Yet somehow, it surpassed all of the songs before it. Again, I wasn’t totally convinced that this whole album was about heroin addiction, and frankly I didn’t want to believe it was. I wanted to believe this album was about being lonely. I wanted to believe it was about not being sure what the hell is going on. About being confused and hurt and feeling weird and misplaced. In a sense, it was about those things. Just not in the sense that a suburban teenager could ever understand completely. This song talks about hearts disconnecting, getting lost, escaping thoughts, forgetting meaning and faith and feeling numb. These were heavy emotions but when I was a teenager I was feeling all of them at some point. I wanted to feel them. Sometimes I still do.

The music was dark and heavy, the drums were intense and processed to seem larger than life. The splashing of the snares hooked me in and the lyrics sucked out my soul.

I know my faith has meaning
but I’ve forgotten why
it’s so important to me
I can’t remember why
seem’s like I’m fucked forever
seem’s like at least for now
but I forgot why
I need to feel these things

That damn alarm comes back and becomes Daylight. It starts off harmless and feeble. Andrews is singing of sleep and catacombs and hiding from the daylight. It grows into an outro that becomes bigger, takes it shape and carries the album away back into outer space. Back where it came from.

The genius minds of Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards brought this album to all of us, but there were a lot of people that ignored it and have still ignored it to this day. I listened to this album for almost six months straight, all the way through; lying on my bedroom carpet, on my belly, with my headphones on, reading books. I can remember it as if it was yesterday. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an album that long without putting it down quite like I did with this one. Every single time I play it I am brought back to that time and place.