Tag Archives: space rock

August 6, 2015 · 7:41 pm

The Holy Mountain – with a brand new Asteroid Deluxe rescore.

Holy_Mountain

The original film poster

The space rock band I play with, Asteroid Deluxe, have a great new commission: To perform a live soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain at the Greenman festival this summer.  This 1973 cinematic masterpiece is a surreal tale of a thief who through an encounter with a mystical alchemist gets led on a spiritual journey along with seven business people (each representing ugly human traits) to the fabled “Holy Mountain”.  The film is unquestionably psychedelic in its visual design but also in its underlying meaning.  This makes it an ideal film for Asteroid Deluxe!

Here is a brief trailer for our show:

We have written a brand new score for the film and have tried to avoid mimicking the original soundtrack which coincidentally has just been issued on vinyl for the first time recently by Finders Keepers.  Our rescore features nearly two hours of brand new music and contains much variation ranging from pulsating beats and acid dripped guitars to introspective acoustic moments all played live with no sequencers or backing apart from the dialogue track. The imaginative, vibrant and violent scenes in the film, have inspired us to come up with a heady brew of different influences and musical intensities.

There is a good feature about the film here but beware it contains spoilers!

8 Comments

Filed under Performances

Tagged as , , , ,

December 2, 2013 · 2:20 am

Asteroid Deluxe

a short extract from the Cube performance by Asteroid Deluxe

I played a cool gig last Friday night with Asteroid Deluxe, the free form kraut rock inspired space rock band that I setup with my great friends and musical collaborators Andy Taylor and James Phillips. Dani Landau and Mat ‘DJ Dinnermoney’ Wigley are also sometime members but this gig was just the three of us initially. I was using my Roland GR55 midi bass for all sorts of odd brass, detuned flutes and distorted cellos as heard in the video extract. Dani was up at the back of the auditorium mixing the whole shaboodle when he sneakily started playing along out of sight on his bass clarinet. Andy the guitarist naturally assumed it was me on my midi bass!

We played this non stop 45 minute warpathon to a small but dedicatedly frazzled crowd at Bristol’s venerable Cube Cinema. This is a real jewel of a venue as it is run by an enthusiastic bunch of volunteers and has an always inspiring combination of films, music and art events happening.  There is an attempt to buy the freehold for the building which would be great of Bristol ensuring that it will keep running the way it is not cowed by commercial concerns. Read about that here. The performance was part of an evening called ¡hen~do which was a multimedia event of much mayhem curated by Dani Landau and Mr Hopkinson. The XYZ Saw Ensemble, Attacked by Wolves and The Da Da Workout were just some of the performers taking part in this good natured and completely batty event.

IMG_1445

The XYZ Saw Ensemble

Asteroid Deluxe’s mission statement is to play the most mindbending, psychedelic and freaky music this side of Alpha Centauri!  We recently recorded a suite of tunes called The Moons of Jupiter at The Manic Street Preachers’ Cardiff based recording studio. This will hopefully be ready for release early next year.
Here is an excerpt from Callisto.

http://soundcloud.com/gazgoldstar/callisto-extract-by-asteroid/s-mHYd7

5 Comments

Filed under Performances

Tagged as , , , , , ,