Flying Saucers are a Myth!
The mix created by Dasha Stish, who explored the New Composers archive, is a story of love told by a spacecraft’s onboard computer. It reflects forgotten dreams and new hopes, flying saucers and space cowboys.
The New Composers were pioneers of Russian electronic dance music. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Valery Alakhov and Igor Verichev’s group created the first local house tracks, topped the UK charts, and collaborated with Brian Eno. One of their first musical experiments was the audio collage «I Love You When You Take Off,» made up of excerpts from radio broadcasts about Yuri Gagarin, noise effects, and music. It was part of the first album by the group, Cosmic Space. Other New Composers projects are linked to the theme of space. In the late 1980s the group founded the Science Fiction Club at the Leningrad Planetarium, organizing lecture-performances and techno parties. This mix is dedicated to cosmic romanticism. It is a story of the lostness, emptiness, and darkness of space and how to learn to love it.
«It was a long time ago, in the 1980s. We docked with a Soviet spacecraft. One of the cosmonauts gave me this cassette. I wonder what he’s doing now? It’s a cassette about cosmic love.»
Tracklist
- 01New Composers and Pete Namlook — Part XIII
- 02New Composers — discovery
- 03New Composers — phantom ships and strange voices
- 04New Composers — ta ra ra
- 05New composers — globster
- 06New Composers — yastreb, ya chaika
- 07New Composers — love me
- 08New Composers and Brian Eno — Sirens of Titan
- 09New Composers — she’s so beautiful!
- 10New Composers — the evening bell
- 11New Composers — Don Juan
- 12New Composers and Bahadur — Figure
- 13New Composers — Aladdin
- 14New Composers — a third type of contact part 1
- 15New Composers — tans-tanzevat! 92 demo version
- 16New Composers — I love
About the Author
Dasha Stish is a researcher of experimental aesthetics, music producer, and selector. She is a resident on the British radio station ROVR. Her debut cassette album A Gastronomic Guide to Musical Harmony was written for a dinner to mark the opening of the Signal Festival and released on the label Tape to Tape. It is partly inspired by the Izhevsk scene and post-Soviet intellectual electronic music.