VA / Soul Jazz Records Presents - Space, Energy & Light: Experimental Electronic And Acoustic Soundscapes 1961-88 (Yellow Vinyl)

total over a near 30-year time frame. These artists used electronic advancements in music technology as a means of exploring not only space and the idea of the future but also of looking inwards to the soul and of creating music in harmony with the natural world. From computer software and hardware experimentalists and sound pioneers such as Laurie Spiegel and Kevin Braheny, as well as Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company - the first synthesizer ensemble created in collaboration with Robert Moog - through to the earliest musique concrète experimentation of Tod Dockstader, the album shows how technological advancements and creative artistic expression went hand in hand. In the mid-1970s artists Steven Halpern and Iaxos were instrumental in creating proto-new age music, experimenting in both the healing properties of sound and its relationship with the natural world. These artists also pioneered a new self-contained and underground DIY approach to music, creating their own record labels, forming new distribution networks (with albums sold in meditation centres, health food stores and ashrams) far away from the commercialism of the mainstream music industry. In the early 1980s after the revolution of punk, these DIY attitudes and ideas appeared once more in the growth of the distinctly anti-commercial and underground cassette- only careers of artists such as Germany’s Stratis and Carl Matthews in Britain. Album artwork includes some of the earliest photography of the Plieades star cluster dating from the 1880s. “Listening to ‘Space, Energy & Light’ in one sitting is a bit like experiencing constellations exploding within constellations inside your brain.” - Record Collector