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Yuri Gagarin in space flight @ B10live
May 24 @ 8:00 pm – 11:59 pm
“For buzz fans, metalheads, prog addicts, space nerds, DIY fans, big riff aficionados, or just those who just love listening to old school rock, we’ve got something for you, it’s damn good Incredible psychedelic music… The sweet and melodious rhythm guitar fills every dead space in the airtight vacuum, leaving no room; the spaced-out synthesizer sound wave lines meander under the solid bass and drum base. , explodes at the end – not to mention the ecstatic guitar theme, if you don’t pay attention, you will have a decompression attack… It’s like you are trapped in a ship orbiting the earth! The rocket was filled with a dose of acidic psychedelic liquid, and it was like being trapped in the distorted and sensory-destroying box in “Doctor Metamorphosis”, gradually losing consciousness, and the synthesizer sound waves full of hypnotic atmosphere thundered. The heady rhythm section creeps cautiously behind it, connected by a twisting guitar pulse that launches the eerie riffs into the darkness of space like an atomic kinetic rocket.”
——It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine interview with band Yuri Gagarin, Roman Rathert, February 2014
In 2012, a space rock band named after Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut in human history, was established in Gothenburg, Sweden. Compared with Swedish psychedelic bands such as GOAT and Dungen & Woods, which draw nutrients from folk and world music, heavy and progressive rock players represented by Yuri Gagarin, Our Solar System and Lamagaia drive spaceships to the vast depths of space. The long instrumental music and high-speed marching rhythm carry the grand and dangerous theme of interstellar exploration; the classic wah-wah and fuzz pedals are their brushes to depict extravehicular meteorites or the passing of laser beams; Those alien civilizations hidden in deep space unfold with fierce guitar riffs, leaving eye-catching exclamation marks on their passionate journey.
Astronaut Yuri Gagarin never visited China during his lifetime, but half a century later, this space rock band from Gothenburg, Sweden, will set foot on this land in his name. They even claimed to be looking for Wan Hu, a Ming Dynasty scholar who was said to hold a kite in his hand, sit on a chair tied with 47 homemade rockets, and try to fly into space. This retro and even “fantastic” journey may start with “space rock”.
, 1961, contains live recordings of astronaut Yuri Gagarin’s interviews, speeches and songs.
From space to rock and roll: the language of an era
In August 1955, the United States and the Soviet Union announced plans to launch artificial satellites within just four days, marking the beginning of the space race during the Cold War. In this intense competition that has lasted for twenty years, a satellite has been launched every few months, and manned spaceflight, space station and planetary exploration plans have emerged one after another, showing a kind of rapid development that is about to escape the gravity of the earth at full speed. In addition to promoting the rapid development of industry and technology, this trend also quickly spread to fields such as architecture, art, literature, and music, and the aesthetics of the “Space Age” emerged.
Since astronaut Yuri Gagarin successfully launched into space, human exploration of outer space not only provided rich creative themes for rock music at the time, but also inspired the experimentation and application of new sound effects in music. Inspired by the blurred boundaries between Earth and outer space, Soviet musicians such as Eduard Artemyev and Vyacheslav Dobrynin began to create or use futuristic music. electronic sound effects. As one of the pioneers of psychedelic rock and space rock, Pink Floyd also made pioneering attempts in their early albums – such as Astronomy Domine, Pow R. Toc H. and Interstellar Overdrive, as well as singles such as Let There Be More Light from their second album A Saucerful of Secrets .
Hawkwind, founded by Dave Brock in 1969, is one of the early hard rock bands dedicated to the space theme. The fourth album Space Ritual records the band’s tour in Liverpool and London, England in 1972. The slogan is “88 minutes of brain-damage” and is regarded as a classic in the history of space rock. The performance combines band performance, dance and poetry recitation, and the ever-changing light show presents all kinds of psychedelic space images, attracting all kinds of hippies, science fiction fans and motorcycle riders to enthusiastically participate.
Urban Guerrilla released in Japan in 1973
Around the 1970s, as the space race intensified, space-themed music also reached its peak: in 1968, “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by Stanley Kubrick became the basis for David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity” Source of inspiration: In the early 1970s, “Kosmische Musik” (Kosmische Musik), which used instrumental music as a means and focused on exploring space and atmospheric soundscapes, appeared in West Germany. At the same time, heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath and Deep Purple also began to use some “spacey” distortion sounds. In the 1980s, metal bands represented by Iron Maiden absorbed more progressive rock styles, and themes of space, future society or other worlds began to appear more in the works of metal bands such as Saxon and Voivod.
In fact, compared to the metal music that flourished during this period, space rock is more ideologically intertwined with the works of the 1960s: the exploration of new sound effects and the utopia of space in progressive rock around the 1960s Starting from imagination, space rock often uses synthesizers to pave the way for a psychedelic outer space atmosphere, and uses fuzzy tones and distorted guitar lines to render the grandeur and weirdness of the universe as an unknown realm. At the same time, it uses heavy repetitions to The section combines melody and intense rhythm to depict the magnificent interstellar voyage. However, these characteristics are no longer found in space rock at the end of the Cold War: as the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union gradually died down, space-related trends also gradually subsided, and the word was later used to describe a series of 1980s music. At the end of the decade, alternative rock music was more atmospheric and melodic; after entering the 1990s, stone rock/drum metal bands like Sleep had a free attitude, but were good at building a noisy gravity circle with slow and deep guitar and bass. , and injects a more sensory interpretation into the concept of “space music” with the psychedelic atmosphere and hypnotic effect that are amplified to the extreme.
