The Imajinary Friends / Spectrum
Come Out To Play / Interface

THE REVIEW

In the end, this combined release of Peter Kember's Spectrum with the Imajinary Friends was bound to happen: it was an inevitable encounter between two musical entities that somehow influenced each other and shared the same space rock and experimental attitude, which in this case is taken to its extreme consequences by both bands. It’s no coincidence that the members of both bands suspended their activities indefinitely afterward to focus on other projects: perhaps they knew that at that precise moment they had achieved as much as possible and couldn't push any further. The record was released in April 1999 by Space Age Recordings and contains five tracks by the Imajinary Friends and two tracks by the Spectrum. The recording sessions took place in two different locations: the Imajinary Friends naturally recorded the album in San Francisco and around the USA between 1995 and 1996; the Spectrum recorded at the Cabin Studios in Coventry, UK.

The Imajinary Friends, this time around, restructured the band. Ricky Maymi, Travis Threlkel, and Tim Digulla remained. Completing the roster is Jeremy Davies, who is the brother of Jeff Davies, a long-standing fixture of Anton Newcombe's The Brian Jonestown Massacre. After their first LP released in 1994, the band here breaks all hesitation, and in the five tracks included on the album, they offer a minimalist and obsessive music that revisits themes typical of Martin Rev and Alan Vega's Suicide ("Glitch") alternating with alien meditative sections ("Hadjimiradji," "Yojii"), sidereal blues played on the corner of 52nd Street by the ghost of Robert Johnson ("Cheap Thrills") and noise electric discharges from a futurist manifesto ("Syndrome"). For his part, Peter Kember ups the ante with the Apollo 11 glimpse of "Against The Grain" according to Kubrick's recreations in NASA's secret studios and the ten-minute "Taste The Night," a true space odyssey that's acid and minimal which, if you close your eyes, seems like you're walking on the ledges of a skyscraper completely stuffed with acid. When you open them again, you are still there, balancing in an unspecified point in the future.