Album Notes

“Why can't anybody play music like that? Why can't you or I? What makes them so special? Well theoretically anybody can play like that. All it takes is insane persistence and a total disregard for everything but getting that yawp out if you gotta howl at the moon, and most folks aren't going to howl at the moon just to prove a point. You probably ain’t got the balls to do it.” - Lester Bangs, December 1971

Born out of 100 years of passionate listening and a shared love of Coltrane, Krautrock and the many and varied eccentricities of English Psychedelia, ‘From Above’ is a record with many antecedents but precious few contemporaries.

Jetting off from Iker Spozio’s other-worldly cover painting (itself redolent of the Nubian utopia created by Mati Klarwein for Miles Davis) through to the final idiot funk spasms of ‘Scatter’, the Lunar Dunes’ debut album is that very same pagan yawp – seventy five minutes of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies that would have Bugs and Tweety cranking up their JBL 100s at the drop of an ACME anvil.

It is wholly fitting that what is, at times, a confusingly contradictory record should be created by three people whose shared personal histories go back thirty years, but who had barely spent thirty hours playing together before making their debut album. In fact, as power trios go, Lunar Dunes is a somewhat unlikely aggregation. A lifelong music biz factotum with a bass player's pluse was persuaded to abandon an earthbound desk and travel the spaceways with a guitarist whose love of feedback is matched by the delicate touch of the raga master. They were soon to be joined by a global music trailblazer determined to kick out not only his own, but just about everyone else’s jams from the pilot's seat behind the drum kit.

Needless to say Lunar Dunes clearly know their ‘Live Evil’ from their ‘Wolf City’ but this record offers no hiding place for the oldies fetishist. Recorded in three days, edited and mixed in four, the Lunar Dunes come out sounding at once wholly modern and thoroughly European. Shifting from cacophonies of noise and horror to elongated drifting cadences where time becomes space, here is living proof that the making of truly psychedelic music requires less the ingestion of hallucinogens and more by way of imagination, a love of the form and a daring disregard for the rulebook.

With three hours of music on tape the selection process that produced 'From Above' was pretty straight forward – anything that sounded too much like something they had heard too often before went straight on the cutting room floor. In the words of John Sinclair, a man with more than a passing acquaintance with rock and roll as chaos theory, they will either “make you feel it or leave the room” .... or galaxy.

If you can detect some Faust here, a little of ‘The Who Live At Leeds' there and the simultaneous holographic presence of Elvin Jones, Tina Weymouth, Naushad Ali.and even Mick Bolton’s UFO then you too are riding down Titan’s magic mountains with Saturn’s rings visible just out the corner of your eye.

‘From Above’ - Space Rock without the simulator and available right now from a kosmische kiosk near you.