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 | Various Artists:Amberdelic Space (Dressed To Kill - 1996) Buy in bulk and SAVE!! Four discs, 44 artists, almost 5 hours of varying degrees of space music. How much would you expect to pay for this collection? $75? $60? $50? Guess again. |
| I picked it up for $25 in St. Louis, MO, and I have to admit it was money well spent. The packaging and approach may reek of K-Tel, but the content is generally pretty good over its wide range. Familiar names like The Orb ("Little Fluffy Clouds"), Future Sound of London ("Cental (sic) Industrial") and The Black Dog ("Cost II") mingle with literally dozens of lesser known, but appropriate and competent, acts.
Sure, there are a few relatively dull moments within this collection. Some pieces are weak, repetitious and/or underproduced. At least one track is guilty of being criminally heavy-handed... Space by Jupiterhead in which some fairly adequate synth noodlings are overlayed by a deep voice repeating the word... "Space". Hmmmm... must be some of that, uh, "space" music? I'm not going to give this one the track-by-track treatment. I'm not even going to list all the artists; let some of these unknowns remain mysteries until you buy your own copy. Half the fun is in rooting around through this overstuffed bin of delights. I will point out a few notable tracks tho... On Disk 1 we find the muted trumpet and smooth beat of Catalonia by Pentatonik; the opening track, this had me from the start. The second track is The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds which I'd never heard before. (I understand that it's a sampled Ricki Lee Jones interview...). Disk 2 includes the desolate Lost (Is that Annie Lennox being sampled?) by Max 404, and A Quiet Passing, a tranquil, new agey piece from David Caron. From Disk 3, I really enjoy the rumbling, orchestral nature of Arc by Scanner (no pirated phone conversations mixed in here, though). Luke Slater's 7th Plain provides Seeing Sense, which rumbles too; its beat is muffled yet insistent, throbbing behind the sparse electronics. (On the downside, extreme left/right oscillation pretty well ruins Another Green World's track, Global Horizon for me, anyway; with headphones, the rapid, incessant panning effect makes me almost ill!) My picks from Disk 4 include Black Dog's amazing, rhythmic yet dreamy, contribution, Cost II and an edited version of On Earth by Woob, the nature & tribal flavored piece that closes out this whole shebang. One minor complaint is that this collection could have been better documented. The artist name, writer and label are given; album titles and dates of release would have been nice. I could pick on the packaging, but that'd be too easy ("In space no one can hear you dream"... yeah, yeah... oooh, spacey!). |
| Amberdelic Space is a mixed bag, but it's a very, very full bag, and an inexpensive one at that. You'll love some, you'll hate others, but there's a lot of music here, and I gotta give it One Thumb for that alone. |  |
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