WED., MARCH 22, 2006
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A Saucer Full Of Seekers
by Robert Phoenix
The first chapter of the modern book of Genesis for UFOology began in the Summer of 1947, when a number of UFO sightings were reported, none with as much historical and mythological impact as the one that occurred just prior to that July 8, when a press release about the recovery of a crashed disc in Roswell, New Mexico was released by Lt. Walter G. Haut, the public information officer at the Roswell Air Force Base. A day later, that press release was modified slightly — it now stated that the "crashed disc" was instead a fallen weather balloon. But the proverbial cat had been let out of the bag, and UFO's and extraterrestrials have become part of a new creation myth, that's one part X-Files, one part cosmic rapture (see the Heaven's Gate cult) and one part channeled new age network.
What better place to start than at the beginning; UFO Crash At Roswell: An Audio Documentary contains many of the eyewitness accounts of the event and the subsequent unfolding of the story, including key material from Walter Haut and Jesse Marcel Sr., both retired military. Rumor has it that the government had recovered one of the beings that was on the ship, kept it alive and began to communicate with it. They named it "EBE" (extra-terrestrial biological entity); many in the UFO community believe E.T. was based on EBE.
From that point forward, UFOs began to appear in various forms throughout our culture. From the ovum and sperm snatching varieties described in great detail by the likes of Whitley Strieber (Communion: A True Story), deceased Harvard psychology professor John Mack, and a host of abductees, to the lizard-like reptoids and a race known as the "Nordics."
In the New Age community, channeled works by Barbara Marciniak (Pliedians) and Patricia Cori (Sirians) offer up information of humankind's secret past, our distressing present and our potentially boundless future. Another popular new age manifestation of the E.T. connection is Ashtar Command, a supposed group not unlike the federation from Star Trek, helping us through our evolution. And let us not forget those rascally Raelians from Quebec, who claimed to have cloned a human and base their community on "free love."
Two strains of modern music have embraced the E.T. ethos perhaps more than any other; electronic music and new age music. What's fascinating is how the E.T. experience is expressed quite differently in both genres. Take for instance Pete Namlook and Jonah Sharp's 1993 classic on Fax Records, Alien Community. It's anything but warm and fuzzy — over sixty minutes of pulsing and undulating synths and sequencers spewing out a hyperkinetic chatter, comprised of sine waves compressed into packets of sound bursting and receding over and again. This is the sound of the inspection room, where a table made of an unrecognizable alloy glistens with a soft metallic glow, while industrious little figures perform delicate operations with surgical swiftness and ease, oozing happy thoughts, mentally projecting pretty pictures. (Namlook and Sharp released a sequel, Alien Community 2, in 1994.)
Compare that with music from Stephen Halpern's Higher Ground (1994), which features titles like "Communion" and "Plieadian Consort." Like Namlook and Sharp, Halpern and former NASA scientist Fred Bell use synths, but the results couldn't be any different. Halpern and Bell opt for soaring arrangements and airy synths that tug at the heartstrings. Therein lays the big difference: Electronic music relates to the E.T. phenomenon from a mental, almost paranoid perspective, while the new age relationship to alien culture and imagery is much more rooted in a romantic tradition, idealizing the experience in Arcadian proportion.
Another electronic music artist that sources the E.T. experience in a number of recordings is Don Falcone, a.k.a. Spaceship Eyes. His 2001 release Kamarupa, on his own Noh Poetry label, is a unique hybrid of electronic jazz ("Satori"), Asian inspired ambience ("Kamarupa"), out-there electronics ("Alien Heat"), and spoken word space suites ("Resubmergence"). Bordering on the boundary of surreal and sensual, Falcone's little record is a minor masterpiece as it straddles the obligatory strangeness of the electronic music/E.T. fusion and the warmth and accessibility of new age music.
Goddess Trance's Electric Shiatsu (1999) comes the closest to a pure hybrid of electronic music and new age mythology. Comprised of Gong's Gilli Smith, her son Orlando, Daevid Allen, and other members of the extended Gong family, Electric Shiatsu reaches deep into Earth's pre-history, when whales were the planet's first inhabitants, from the dog star, Sirius. "Journey of the White Whale" is a twenty-minute opus that uses Cetacean recordings in conjunction with shimmering guitars, deep synths, and strange chants. It's eerie, yet incredibly peaceful at the same time, and the record as a whole casts a dreamlike spell woven by astral voices, singing whales, acidy 808 beats, and trippy sitar — it's psychedelic, new age trance.
But the ultimate alien personification in new age music has nothing to do with little greys, or ancient whales. Perhaps the ultimate alien is us — hurtling through the unknown of space. New age composer Jonn Serrie has launched a musical pathway to the stars on albums like And the Stars Go with You (1995) and Century Seasons (2000). These are triumphal recordings that soar with liberation and the escape of gravity, the soundtrack to our own ascension into the galactic firmament, occupied not by our extraterrestrial brethren by the enormous phenomenon of the cosmos itself.
In the famous words of Michael Carpenter, "klaatu barada nikto."
What better place to start than at the beginning; UFO Crash At Roswell: An Audio Documentary contains many of the eyewitness accounts of the event and the subsequent unfolding of the story, including key material from Walter Haut and Jesse Marcel Sr., both retired military. Rumor has it that the government had recovered one of the beings that was on the ship, kept it alive and began to communicate with it. They named it "EBE" (extra-terrestrial biological entity); many in the UFO community believe E.T. was based on EBE.
From that point forward, UFOs began to appear in various forms throughout our culture. From the ovum and sperm snatching varieties described in great detail by the likes of Whitley Strieber (Communion: A True Story), deceased Harvard psychology professor John Mack, and a host of abductees, to the lizard-like reptoids and a race known as the "Nordics."
In the New Age community, channeled works by Barbara Marciniak (Pliedians) and Patricia Cori (Sirians) offer up information of humankind's secret past, our distressing present and our potentially boundless future. Another popular new age manifestation of the E.T. connection is Ashtar Command, a supposed group not unlike the federation from Star Trek, helping us through our evolution. And let us not forget those rascally Raelians from Quebec, who claimed to have cloned a human and base their community on "free love."
Two strains of modern music have embraced the E.T. ethos perhaps more than any other; electronic music and new age music. What's fascinating is how the E.T. experience is expressed quite differently in both genres. Take for instance Pete Namlook and Jonah Sharp's 1993 classic on Fax Records, Alien Community. It's anything but warm and fuzzy — over sixty minutes of pulsing and undulating synths and sequencers spewing out a hyperkinetic chatter, comprised of sine waves compressed into packets of sound bursting and receding over and again. This is the sound of the inspection room, where a table made of an unrecognizable alloy glistens with a soft metallic glow, while industrious little figures perform delicate operations with surgical swiftness and ease, oozing happy thoughts, mentally projecting pretty pictures. (Namlook and Sharp released a sequel, Alien Community 2, in 1994.)
Compare that with music from Stephen Halpern's Higher Ground (1994), which features titles like "Communion" and "Plieadian Consort." Like Namlook and Sharp, Halpern and former NASA scientist Fred Bell use synths, but the results couldn't be any different. Halpern and Bell opt for soaring arrangements and airy synths that tug at the heartstrings. Therein lays the big difference: Electronic music relates to the E.T. phenomenon from a mental, almost paranoid perspective, while the new age relationship to alien culture and imagery is much more rooted in a romantic tradition, idealizing the experience in Arcadian proportion.
Another electronic music artist that sources the E.T. experience in a number of recordings is Don Falcone, a.k.a. Spaceship Eyes. His 2001 release Kamarupa, on his own Noh Poetry label, is a unique hybrid of electronic jazz ("Satori"), Asian inspired ambience ("Kamarupa"), out-there electronics ("Alien Heat"), and spoken word space suites ("Resubmergence"). Bordering on the boundary of surreal and sensual, Falcone's little record is a minor masterpiece as it straddles the obligatory strangeness of the electronic music/E.T. fusion and the warmth and accessibility of new age music.
Goddess Trance's Electric Shiatsu (1999) comes the closest to a pure hybrid of electronic music and new age mythology. Comprised of Gong's Gilli Smith, her son Orlando, Daevid Allen, and other members of the extended Gong family, Electric Shiatsu reaches deep into Earth's pre-history, when whales were the planet's first inhabitants, from the dog star, Sirius. "Journey of the White Whale" is a twenty-minute opus that uses Cetacean recordings in conjunction with shimmering guitars, deep synths, and strange chants. It's eerie, yet incredibly peaceful at the same time, and the record as a whole casts a dreamlike spell woven by astral voices, singing whales, acidy 808 beats, and trippy sitar — it's psychedelic, new age trance.
But the ultimate alien personification in new age music has nothing to do with little greys, or ancient whales. Perhaps the ultimate alien is us — hurtling through the unknown of space. New age composer Jonn Serrie has launched a musical pathway to the stars on albums like And the Stars Go with You (1995) and Century Seasons (2000). These are triumphal recordings that soar with liberation and the escape of gravity, the soundtrack to our own ascension into the galactic firmament, occupied not by our extraterrestrial brethren by the enormous phenomenon of the cosmos itself.
In the famous words of Michael Carpenter, "klaatu barada nikto."
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