Outer Space Space Music From Outer Space

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2561

  

Nothing quite sounds or looks quite so unusual as a forgotten piece of popular culture from a different generation, something that was stretching the boundaries in potentially cringeworthy ways.  Of course everything is removed from context, so the historical/cultural part isn't immediately neuronally available, though with just a little bit of digging into memory or archives these things would fit the thing nicely in place and time and would recover their sensibilities.

But as stand-alones, these exemplars of outre thinking might do little more than raise a surprised eyebrow to their unexpected appearance.

So, while searching for exotica/tiki music online, I stumbled upon and over "The Spotnicks" (read "Sputnik"), a groovy 1961 Swedish band that I guess was a semi-equivalent to a 70's hair band, except these guys appeared in space suits there at the hot part of the space race.  And:  they were actually very proficient musicians, though, proficiency (and even giftedness) don't necessarily a good band make.  Never having heard of them before (I grew up in the era of The Rock and the Roll, though the music never really appealed to me much) I came to learn that the band is still around, and has made 42 albums, and sold 18 million copies of their music, which I would never have guessed to be the case.  So, while the music might not necessarily be the stuff of which memories are made, it wasn't bad, and the players certainly seemed to have some chops.  (And their movement as they played seems to have come a decade or more before Devo.) 

 

It turns out that space--themed music was a popular bit in the late 1950's and into the 1960's, though it seems from my brief dip into that genre that not a lot of it was outery-spacey, though the album covers were.  (Sort of like "Atomic Cafe" or "atomic cupcakes", where the idea of the "atomic" part was present but had nothing really to do with anything at all except for the name and signage.)  That this, I did find this album from 1967, produced and sold while Star Trek was experiencing a small spike in the ratings.  There are space-related themes here, present in Mr. Nimoy's poetry and spoken word, so this at least has something to do with the music:

If you'd like, you can listen to it a bit, here: http://www.maidenwine.com/lps.html

So in my limited walk-about experience, genres like Exotica and Tiki seem to live up to their name beyond the album cover design; the sub-category of "outer space" Exotica  music probably does not, though that might not matter so long as the album design is wicked good.  

Comments

[JonMarkWrites]

Very cool. Past relics are great because it's a lasting impression of that era's state of mind. Just the other day, I was watching a movie that was the espionage thriller of the day called "The House On 92nd street" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037795/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) and thought about how their technology could be seen as late nineteenth century, to today's standards. The way I looked at it, it was more than just pointing out the fact that it was old, but more about the people and the mindset of that era.