Man... Or ASTRO-man?
Your Weight On The Moon

Man or ASTRO-man? originated in the early '90s, thanks to three Auburn (Alabama) college students determined to unite their two greatest passions: surf music and science fiction. The objective is to reinterpret the instrumental surf of the sacred monsters of the genre (Dick Dale, Ventures, Surfaris, Link Wray, and Astronauts, to name the most important) through a highly personal interpretation, marked by a genuine obsession for anything even vaguely sci-fi. For this reason, the band coined a perfectly fitting term to label their music: space-age surf.

Their records indeed feature a dense web of obscure references to even more obscure films or TV series (with a particular preference for the '50s B-movies), from which they sample a number of sound effects and snippets of dialogue, which are then inserted into the songs. Extraterrestrials, robots, UFOs, mad scientists, and even astronomical formulas (for example, “F=(GmM(moon)), (r^2)”, the formula for the law of universal gravitation applied to the moon, which provides the title for one of the songs present here) are the subjects around which all their works revolve. If we add to this the fact that they hide behind fictitious identities (claiming to actually be aliens landed on Earth for study purposes, later fascinated by surf music) and are known to perform live equipped with spacesuits, helmets, and all sorts of "retro-futuristic" knick-knacks, we can define them as a true concept band, in Devo's style (from whom they also borrow a certain comedic/bizarre streak).

This work, a 1994 EP, gathers ten songs from the group's early activity period and features Star Crunch (guitar and occasional vocals), Coco The Electronic Monkey Wizard (bass and samples), and Birdstuff (drums), joined by second guitarist Dr. Deleto, tackling an epileptic surf rock, made of fast and adrenaline-filled songs. The noise/synthetic drifts that will characterize their later productions, having evolved into something substantially different from their original sound, are still far away; here the imprint of the more classic surf style, full of reverb and vibrato, is still strong.

The first song is introduced by the voice of a speaker intent on describing an "ignition sequence" complete with a countdown, after which the beautiful “Rocketship XL-3” takes off, marked by the lightning-fast guitar accelerations of the inventive Star Crunch, giving us a generous taste of the remarkable technical and compositional abilities of the group. It's worth mentioning “Taser Guns Means Big Fun” as well, a sort of western-themed diversion (and who can help but smile when, in the middle of the song, the music suddenly stops and a little Martian voice announces “we interrupt this supersonic program to bring you this message!”) and “Destination Venus”, the only sung track on the record, a cover by the Rezillos, a late '70s English new wave group (another formation with a sci-fi craze).

It's hard not to be struck by Man or ASTRO-man?, this crazy crew of surf nerds (also extremely prolific, having released around fifteen EPs and LPs), who are to be counted among the prominent exponents of the contemporary surf scene, both for their ingenious creativity and for the irresistible visionary touch that permeates all their compositions.