Description

French pressed music cassette. Grey cassette with coloured paper label.

One of the real tragedies of this life is that, often, the albums that will pass under your radar are exactly those albums which most deserve your attention. This is because complexity, nuance, and ambition (three traits which are almost essential for true musical and, indeed, artistic greatness) tend to create works which are inherently hard to decipher and appreciate at first glance. Thus, you flit over them and often don’t find a point of purchase, moving on instead of delaying further, missing out, perhaps forever, on something great. But, sometimes, you get to go back and fix your mistakes, looking deeper and finding that spark you didn’t notice when it first came around. That’s exactly what happened to me with Dallas Campbell‘s The Seven Sisters And The Serpent. We’re talking about an album which takes synthwave and runs it through a David Lynchian mirror before spinning it back up across John Carpenter lines. Think Dune but even more of an acid trip; think the vastness of space and the mind stretched out over fifty minutes of electronic beats and rich, undulating synths. That’s what this album is like, a deep dive into a Chris Foss drawing in glorious 4D. It utilizes various electronic sub-genres to get that feeling across and create a tapestry of sound that’s hard to grasp at first but promises plenty of places to explore for the intrepid listener. “Ulker Cerig” would be a good place to start, its initial build up giving you that kind of “what if space but on drugs” feeling while the main synth line delivers visions of a neon drenched future right to your lizard brain. But while you’re exploring theme and metaphor, listen also to how carefully the different synth tones are produced and to how they bleed beautifully into each other by the time the big synth hook rolls around, just before the two minute mark, joined by that beautiful bass line. Other points of interest include the reggae/dub influenced, and aptly named, “Spice Flight”, and the gorgeously freaky “Harnessing Local Quantum Spookiness”. With these waypoints in mind, give The Seven Sisters And The Serpent a try; it might not catch you the first few times, but I promise that if you let it, it will sink its slow-release hooks into you.

Track list:
1. Terra View E2112
2. Rebellion Of Hyades
3. Ulker Cerig
4. The Pleiades Hustle
5. Spice Flight
6. Lunar View J2857
7. Head Of The Snake
8. Electras Telekinetic Breakout
9. Encounters Beyond The Magnetic Highway
10. Harnessing Local Quantum Spookiness
11. Interstellar View X3444
12. And Everything Continues