Sukia
Contacto Espacial Con El Tercer Sexo

"Experiments in mood changing"

In the overwhelming tide of samples and citations that bring this album, in its own way, to an enormous life, there is one that particularly marked me: Giorgio and I were, how to say, in the period of altered states of consciousness, and we spent afternoons at home letting ourselves be pierced by music, thoughts, and substances. This album opens with Feel’n’Free and its obsessive doorbell sample (to which a voice responds “Spank me”). Well, the doorbell at my house was, or seemed to us, very similar to that sample and every time we heard it, one of us snapped out of the stupor: “I’ll go.” This must have happened, I’m not exaggerating, two hundred times since the CD was on repeat, and we were too mesmerized to change it. The joys and pains of psychotropy.

But “Contacto Espacial Con El Tercer Sexo” does just that: it enters your world and for a couple of hours slightly tilts it, changes its axis a bit, offers the opportunity for those “mood experiments” for which its creators say it was made. And to do so, it doesn't skimp on the elements: a shapely Mexican lesbian vampire and her testosterone-fueled sidekick Gary Supermacho, Robert Moog, the Dust Brothers, Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville’s Dream Machine, hypnotic records - or hypnodiscs -, plus a myriad of amusing samples to listen to and perfectly assembled in the wide variety of sound material offered. Sukia is a guy who calls himself Dj You Dj Me (and under this moniker released something untraceable) along with three other characters from the Californian avocado county (whatever that may be) with a penchant for vintage and neo-retro sounds.
What holds the whole thing together is the irony and intelligence of the operation, besides the mastery of the Dust Brothers, and the genius of Sukia, who after this effort, exhausted, decided not to release anything else – and there was no need because this album finds its alpha and omega within itself.

Calling it exotica would be reductive, trip-hop wrong, lounge ridiculous. It’s all these things together, in addition to dirty and pumped beats - the magnificent Gary Supermacho with its incredible synthetic crescendo and the heavy bass drum and the distorted Moog - , swinging and sick atmospheres – the dream machine, present in no less than four versions in my meticulously curated Mo’ Wax reissue - , crazy and hilarious samples (and for those who don’t know English…) taken from the aforementioned self-hypnosis records, NASA announcements, 1960s advertisements, but also skillfully created to “seem” like samples (that woman's whisper “ay dios mio…dáme mas, tesoro…por satánas…” in Gary Supermacho is simply brilliant). The other tracks are slightly inferior, in my taste, although “Touching You Touching Me” has quite a few admirers among my acquaintances, and the only real drop of the album is “Mr Robot”, where it seems the four Sukia members were really a bit too far gone.

Even if they are very different records, the comparison I feel like making is with Dj Shadow’s Endtroducing for the retro taste that animates both works and for the collage technique of the compositions, only where Shadow is academic, Sukia is brilliant, and where Shadow indulges in pure citationism, Sukia never loses sight of the purpose they set for themselves at the time of putting together this sabbath: “experiments in mood changing.”