Spacemen 3 – Dreamweapon – 2XLP, Reissue, Superior Viaduct, 2018

Double vinyl LP pressing. August 1988, Spacemen 3 embarked on one of the strangest events in the band’s already strange history. Billed as An Evening Of Contemporary Sitar Music (although consciously omitting the sitar), the group would play in the foyer of Watermans Arts Centre in Brentford, Middlesex to a largely unsuspecting and unsympathetic audience waiting to take their seats for Wim Wenders’ film Wings Of Desire. Spacemen 3’s proceeding set, forty-five minutes of repetitive drone-like guitar riffs, could be seen as the “Sweet Sister Ray” of ’80s Britain. Their signature sound is at once recognizable and disorienting – pointing as much to the hypnotic minimalism of La Monte Young as to a future shoegaze constituency.