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Weird Dreams - Choreography (album)

Crocodiles - Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9) 7”

The Hairs - I’ve Been Working Out 7”

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins - Third Swan single

Cate Le Bon - Cyrk (album)

Tashaki Miyaki - sings the Everly Brothers 7”

Antony Harding - The Birds Sing Goodnight To You And Me (album)

Veronica Falls - My Heart Beats 7”

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Single/Download Review

Vostok 5
Vostok 5 Strelka Records

Article written by Ged M - Sep 6, 2011

Vostok 5, the Soviet spacecraft, set the endurance record in 1963 but had a waste collection system problem that made Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky’s 5 days in space quite unpleasant. Vostok 5, the band, is a shorter and sweeter smelling ride. A collaboration involving Darren Hayman, Robert Rotifer, Fever Dreams, Hexicon and Tigercats (with some Wave Pictures and Allo Darlin also embarked) each song muses on aspects of spaceflight, from animals in space to Yuri Gagarin’s ashes and the cosmonauts who train but stay in reserve.

Rather than being tunes tangential to the race into space, these are well-researched space tales, including Tigercats’ and Hexicon’s exploration of Nazi rocket-boy Werner von Braun’s emotions. Rotifer sounds distinctly Bowie-esque on ‘The Cosmonaut Who Never Flew’, giving his tale of Austrians in Space City a classic catchy chorus, while Darren H focuses on four-legged space pioneers. The sound of ‘A Breeze and A Piece of Coal’ reminds you of his electronica side projects but the pick of his doggy brace is the tale of Strelka and Belka, ‘A Little Arrow and A Little Squirrel’. The best track here, however, is Fever Dream’s straight-up-and-clear-the-gantry ‘Poyekhali’, a wonderfully explosive blast of uber-rhythmic post-punk.

The limited edition CD comes with a space art fold-out sleeve and the music seems to gain another dimension when the music and art are experienced together; heard alongside the paintings on their website, or better still at the Shoreditch exhibition, the concept of men and animals fired off into the unknown takes on a lovely, otherworldly glow.

Links:
http://vostok5.tumblr.com/
http://www.hefnet.com/shopuk.htm