Super Electric Voyage boils down over a 100 years of electronic culture. It sounds like the soundtrack to the transitioning of a new dawn for humanity.
Pure, meditative and healing
What a trip? This is like the audio equivalent to 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Fantastic New World” is a nine minute synth spectacular. I’m instantly reminded of Alan Sylvestres’ work on the Flight of the Navigator score—there are sound effects that are very much in that same realm. The front cover of the record shows two children sat on a carpet, presented as through they are watching television. Then I notice the Magic Square Records logo. A square with a colour, striped film effect oozing out from the box. I start thinking about television.
I was very young in the early 1980’s and remember how we were very much invited to learn and discover for ourselves—even though half the time that involved being plonked in front of the television with a jam sandwich. PBS73 could have created some awesome themes to some of our favorite TV shows. Track two, “Magic Carpet Ride” could be some sort of Middle Eastern or Bollywood production of the Airwolf theme—arpeggios cut through the air amongst sweeping melodic transitions. The sound climbs through hot, desert sandstorm currents, through a thirsty post-apocalyptic environment.
Two tracks in and we’re already totalling 20 minutes listening time! So far, nothing in the way of percussion throughout this recording. All focus on superbly tuned and timed syntheses.
“Fractals and Flowers” is a wide open piece of work. Cinematic in its sound, one can only envision the fractals of nature. Super is definitely the right word to describe the electric voyage the music is taking me on. Pure, meditative and healing, this music is just what I need.
Track five, “Vision in Technicolour” starts me off thinking about television once again. First the lightbulb, then radio, then television. Each new technological step bringing in its own revolutionary affect on the world. Now, we have the internet. Certainly for my generation, it all started with the television.
Play School was a TV show I was glued to at the time. At the end of each show we would be invited to look through a window. Which window would it be, the round window, the triangle window, or the square window? Watching this square box and having it reveal the world to you took virtually no effort on the part of the viewer. We were hooked.
This magic square has since transformed into a whole array of technological squares. Squares we present in front of our faces almost every hour of the day. Like the monolithic screen represented in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey 2001. This alien device has since evolved to become the ultimate tool to preserve and present information. If there is anything owing to humanities success, then it is the ability to store and relearn information at an ever increasing rate. Who knows, very soon we could become this technology. Everyone biologically and symbiotically connected to pure information.
Super Electric Voyage a mixture of both futuristic and retrogressive. “The Wondrous Unknown” is the penultimate track. It begins to sound like the journey is over. Very much a psychedelic album, and having experienced a death like finale with that track, we now start the circular process once more as “Drifting Home” ends this piece perfectly and in an almost fractal sort of way—ready to take on a fantastic new world with brand new magic carpet rides.
Summarising, I’d say that this album has boiled down over a 100 years of electronic culture. It sounds like the soundtrack to the transitioning of a new dawn for humanity. At least that’s what I got from it anyway. Perfect escapism.
Super Electric Voyage is available on Magic Square.
