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2LP
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DC 489LP
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2024 restock, released in 2015. "In recent years it's become clear that the Bristol-based Flying Saucer Attack were prescient to a considerable degree. The amplified pastoralism of the group and its various offshoots might have seemed out of step with the times during its initial emergence at the height of Britpop, but the rural has since emerged as a rich source of inspiration for numerous artists in the fields of experimental rock and electronic music. Artists such as Alexander Tucker, Richard Youngs and Boards Of Canada have taken similar pathways through the fields. Since FSA's last official album (Mirror, 2000) all that has been heard of the group's guitarist and mainstay Dave Pearce is his collaboration with US artist Jessica Bailiff as Clear Horizon, whose self-titled album was released by Kranky in 2003. Instrumentals 2015, comprised of 15 fresh Pearce solo performances recorded in characteristically lo-fi manner on tape and CD-R, is an album that will appeal both to FSA diehards and those wholly unfamiliar with the outfit's recorded output. The 15 tracks present an impressionistic narrative which transports the listener through the excoriating dronescapes and rueful introspection of the album's early pieces to the more redemptive cadences of its closing half. Given its sense of momentum, maintained through Pearce's thoughtful sequencing, this is an album that should be experienced in its entirety, the better to appreciate its deliberate emotional arc. The songs gathered on Instrumentals 2015 inform and enrich each other, themes manifesting in one form to reappear, modified, elsewhere, as though impacted and altered by experience. FSA's music has always been very much alive and organic, and this is most definitely true here and now. This is music that ebbs and flows with the impermanence of mood itself, graspable on first listen yet revealing of additional overtones on each successive visit. Even at its most distressed and distorted, Pearce's playing is intuitive and expressive, communicative even, translating inner and outer landscapes simultaneously until the two are indivisible, woven into a single language. In this respect he should be considered a pioneer of the kind of elemental atmospherics recently purveyed by the likes of Richard Skelton and Kemper Norton. Yet these pieces are distinctive and characteristic of their author, exhibiting the same windblown drift and dreamlike melancholy that billowed through FSA's work from 1992?2000, filtered through a new maturity gained during Pearce's twelve-year absence."
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2LP
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VHF 145LP
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"First ever reissue and first time on vinyl for this unique Flying Saucer Attack live album, expanded with additional material and a new side four mix from Jim O'Rourke. Produced in collaboration with Dave Pearce / FSA and Bruce Russell (compiler of the original CD release for his Corpus Hermeticum label), featuring new artwork by Bruce Russell as well. While rightly known for the folk-influenced songs and spacey instrumentals of their proper albums, the briefly active live version of FSA unexpectedly delivered a blistering wave of electric sound. Recorded at various shows in 1994, In Search Of Spaces heaves with long passages of feedback guitar racket, broken up by sections of surging rock music. The live band focused almost exclusively on visceral, trebly guitar noise-- which, while always a key element in their sound, was greeted by audiences with total mystification (and often disapproval). Following a few brief attempts to settle a lineup and play songs from their records, Dave Pearce / FSA abandoned live performance altogether, leaving behind this album (and the barely available P. A. Blues CDR) as the sole document of his in-person delivery. Originally compiled and released in 1996, this reissue adds several minutes of music back to the original program that had been edited out by FSA for being 'too rock.' For side four, Jim O'Rourke revisited the original 1994 live tapes and has made a spooky and brooding new mix of music exclusive to this release."
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LP
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VHF 011LP
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"First-ever US vinyl of the debut album by Bristol's Flying Saucer Attack, and first vinyl edition of any kind since 1993! This edition of the album is produced in full collaboration with FSA/Dave Pearce. Aka Rural Psychedelia, Flying Saucer Attack's first album was released in 1993 after a couple of instantly sold-out singles. Released at the height of the shoegaze boom, the album is a blend of memorable fuzzed out songs and far-out instrumental doodles, sidestepping the rock bombast of many contemporaries in favor of a home-made aesthetic. FSA's blend of razor-edged static, softly sung melody, and echoing atmospherics builds a dour beauty that sustains itself over the course of the entire program. 'My Dreaming Hill,' 'Wish,' and 'The Season Is Ours' are couched in fuzz and whispery reverb, but are beautiful and accessible tunes, able to stand on their own in any context. 'Popol Vuh 1' and 'Popol Vuh 2' are straight up tributes to the now much better known German masters, steeped in the hushed atmosphere of the best Vuh records (if not exactly the sound)."
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CD
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DC 177CD
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"The word on Mirror. After the ragged New Lands, Flying Saucer Attack finally get sensible, learn from their mistakes and spend two years fine-tuning their most diverse and yet most coherent album to date. When you listen to Mirror, you hear eleven proper songs, no instrumental filler, better recording, better melodies, better singing, and yet, perhaps sadly for some, no sell out. 'Proper' song stylings include: some straight acoustic, one traditional folk melody rewrite, one Chemical Brothers pastiche, one Can rip off, one Tom Rapp tribute, and two jungle rhythm-based songs, all balanced together to sound like a whole journey from one end of Mirror to the other."
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