In Search of Spaces

Released

If the early Flying Saucer Attack albums hovered between songs and instrumentals, their concurrent live shows were a different beast entirely – a free-form howl of improvised noise, mainly. In an interview from 2015, David Pearce of Flying Saucer Attack claimed, “the idea of going onstage and doing the middle of (Pink Floyd’s) ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ – I’d wanted to do that for years.” In the shows documented on In Search Of Spaces, you get to hear some of those formative attempts at live sorcery, though edited together and recombined by The Dead C’s Bruce Russell, who ran the Corpus Hermeticum label that initially released the album. Certain recognisable elements of FSA appear, from time to time – the haunting, four-note refrain from “Popol Vuh”, for example – but they get swallowed back into the primordial goop quickly enough. One for noise heads – this is a surprisingly joyous, free-wheeling ride.

Jon Dale