Spacemen 3
Dreamweapon

Minimalist psychedelia.

The so-called sound of the Spacemen 3 remains something unique today: they were able to leave a mark of undeniable importance on the music of the '80s, while simultaneously restoring and renewing a certain type of psychedelic music, avoiding the risk of falling into clichés. An excellent offering, without blemishes.

Hypnotic minimalism disguised as melodic distortions that leads to mental trance. Their compositions are monolithic phrases imperceptibly altered. Their music is transcendent, often bordering on ambient, in which harmony blends with the atmosphere created: something that disperses into the air like rarefied gas. The sounds embrace in their incessant elongation, as if wanting to keep safe during the psychic overdose that one of their albums can induce.

Slow and calm advancing rhythms create fictitious accelerations in the listener's mind. Noisy and hypnotic distortions cradle the listener. In this way of making music, the Spacemen 3 link their style to that of the Suicide, and thus to the Velvet Underground, as well as to the Jesus and the Mary Chain, and thus to the Stooges. Surely, this is a group that does not hesitate to idolize its influences.

Their discography over the years has been marked by a linear rarefaction in style: increasingly vague and elusive, they express themselves in litanies of pure drug music, where melodies are supported by an increasingly transparent structure. Dreamweapon is a semi/live album released in 1990, which besides documenting a late '80s concert, shows how far this evolutionary process of sound rarefaction could have gone had the band not dissolved. The drums have been abandoned for a while, the singing is absent, leaving only a volatile jam to cover the 45 minutes of music of the first track (live), emitting weak and almost non-existent musical elaborations: the approach to a certain kind of drone is evident. Along with another jam recorded in studio, with this performance the Spacemen 3 create one of the most experimental and avant-garde experiences of their career, where the intangible abstraction that had grown until then reaches its peak. Various reissues add considerable length to the main (50 plus) minutes of music from the original version.

For those who don't know them: don't start here.
For the veterans: dive in.

08/19/1988: almost 27 years ago this live album was recorded, forgive me for not waiting for the anniversary.

Ecstasy in slow motion.