Flying Saucer Attack

Flying Saucer Attack

In Search Of Spaces

Vhf

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.

Flying Saucer Attack

Mirror

Drag City

***REISSUED ON VINYL!!! The distance between albums only increased between New Lands and Mirror. Mirror arrived wrapped in a vibrant, multicolored cover designed by SAVAGE PENCIL—but the opening sequence of songs offered some of the quietest, most refined FLYING SAUCER ATTACK songs committed to tape. The violent spells of New Lands had given way to a flattened drone on the electric pieces “Space 1999,” and “Islands” and “Dark Wind,” while the glittering acoustics of “Suncatcher” and “Tides” highlighted an incredible fragility within the songs. DAVE PEARCE seemed to be further away in space than ever, a wispy presence over streamlined hard beats and loops of “Chemicals,” and Mirror’s second side. Particularly when considering the silence that followed, this impression makes Mirror a distressing encounter at times, though certainly one of the most enervating listens of the FSA catalog.

Flying Saucer Attack

New Lands

Drag City

***REISSUED ON VINYL!!! After what felt to be an extended wait, “New Lands” arrived in late 1997, marking phase two of FLYING SAUCER ATTACK as an ostensible solo act for DAVE PEARCE. New Lands presented a foreboding atmosphere, with coarse electric textures from the very top of the record, as well as an unanticipated rubbery bottom and the implied physicality of such on several songs. These developments hardly implied a newfound peace of mind, as had been suggested by Further; instead, an encroaching darkness spreads out over side two of New Lands. Both “The Sea” and “Forever” conclude the album with a feeling of anything but accord; glacial floats that might seem placid in other contexts are enervated with jagged rhythms and teeming guitar textures, all of which seem to affirm our uneasy desire to cleave the skin from our bodies as being a perfectly acceptable plan. The highly palpable psychedelic shadows of the debut Flying Saucer Attack album flicker throughout New Lands, albeit in a much altered form.

Flying Saucer Attack

Chorus

Drag City

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received an 8.0 Best New Reissue rating from Pitchfork. It was in the year of ’92 that they were first sighted, high over the western skies of Bristol, UK. FLYING SAUCER ATTACK originally manifested in the form of 7" singles, shot through with noise sheets and touches of eastern-tuned psychedelics, hooded with shoegaze-inspired somnambulance. In 1993, the first Flying Saucer Attack LP hit, and hard. Dubbed by some as “Rural Psychedelia”, the eponymous album exploded the sound of the singles into a full-length trip. This set the bar for FSA impossibly high, but in the following year, a collection of singles sides called Distance provided a companionable listen—and still without a personal appearance in support, the audience for Flying Saucer Attack continued to expand. In ’95, the nebulae aligned, the red giants went supernova and the black holes issued forth onto the Drag City label: the second FSA album, Further, delivered deeper-focus textures with an increased acoustic presence that traded in new ways on the “rural psychedelia” label, sharing an encompassing access of space in doing so. Later in that same year, Chorus emerged—an icy blast of electric-band FSA that in no way revisited the wild-eyed pastures of the first album, but instead found refinements and experimented in new directions. Further has been out of print on vinyl for the past decade. Chorus has been unavailable on LP since the golden days of CD (1998)!

Flying Saucer Attack

Instrumentals 2015

Drag City

***NOW AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE!!! Something thought lost forever re-enters your life. How do you respond? How do you even begin to negotiate the vortex of mixed emotions whipped up by such a reappearance? The world shifts sideways. Logic is confounded. The uncanny takes a hold. West Country feedback outfit FLYING SAUCER ATTACK are a case in point. In recent years it’s become clear that the Bristol based group 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. Enter Instrumentals 2015. Comprised of 15 fresh DAVE PEARCE solo performances recorded in characteristically lo-fi manner on tape and CD-R, Instrumentals 2015 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. (STREET DATE - 8/28/2015)

Flying Saucer Attack

Distance

Vhf

First ever US vinyl of the second album by Bristol’s Flying Saucer Attack. This edition of the LP is produced in full collaboration with FSA / Dave Pearce. Originally released on VHF as a compact disc at the end of 1994, this was the second FSA album, compiling five tracks from impossible-to-get seven-inches with twenty minutes of previously unreleased (and good) material. Similar in blend to the band’s first LP (also newly issued in the USA on deluxe vinyl), the songs hang together as a collection that improves on the individual singles. The two proper singles that make up half of Distance — “Soaring High” / ”Standing Stone” and “Crystal Shade” / ”Distance” were instant collectables upon their release, so this album was compiled to make the songs permanently available. “Soaring High” and “Crystal Shade” are jagged bits of fuzzed-out pop genius; tracks like the mutant concrete “techno” of “Distance” and the two lengthy glissando workouts on “Oceans” and “Oceans II” offset the more conventional tunes, upping the overall impact as a whole album.

Flying Saucer Attack

S/t

Vhf

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  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 farout 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).