Dabbling in 1970s rock, R&B, and reggae when not holding down the throne in a Yes cover band, the Chicago-based drummer-for-hire Larry Heard must’ve caught director Ridley Scott’s Alien at his local Cineplex at some point in 1979. While the influence of that claustrophobic horror film about the dread of deepest space didn’t quite manifest itself doing nightly covers of “And You and I,” when Heard invested in new-fangled synthesizers and drum machines in the early '80s and struck out on his own, his love of sci-fi moved to the fore in his own music.
With tracks like “Distant Planet", “Mystery of Love", “Washing Machine", and “Can U Feel it", released under monikers like Mr. Fingers, Gherkin Jerks, Disco-D, The It, Blakk Society, Fingers, Inc., and more, Heard set the template for house, techno, deep house, and more for generations of electronic music producers—be they in Chicago or Detroit, or overseas in London and Berlin. Heard’s fundamental house music blueprints like Fingers, Inc.’s Another Side and Mr. Fingers’s Ammnesia are agonizingly long out of print, but slowly, portions of his back catalog are finally getting reissued. Last year brought about a reissue of his incredibly rare Gherkin Jerks’ EPs and now follows Alien, Heard’s third full-length under his own name, originally released in 1996.
While the two volumes of Heard’s Sceneries Not Songs, released in the early '90s, retained their deep house music underpinnings, with Alien, Heard ventured into unknown sonic terrain, fusing together styles that had long influenced him while largely jettisoning his telltale house beat. Wielding sci-fi soundtracks, slippery jazz fusion, progressive rock cues taken from personal favorites like Gentle Giant and Return to Forever, Heard ended up with an amalgam that in the hands of a lesser musician would be disastrous, if not tedious.
Alien is not quite a house album with its beats scrubbed off, nor is it exclusively a chill-out soundtrack, and this reissue asks the question of just who the album was originally intended for. The sophisticated club kid wanting bachelor loft music? Adult-oriented jazz for househeads? Fusion for fusion aficionados? People who want the relaxing ambient version of the film Alien? Eighteen years after its original release, it remains a singular entry in Heard’s influential catalog, with the man composing the entire album on a Korg O1/W workstation keyboard, a Roland d550 and Oberheim Matrix 1000.
Opener “Faint Object Detection” is the album’s most menacing and dramatic track, reveling in the peculiarly juxtaposed ominous and relaxing moods conjured by Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. The ten-minute “Micro-Gravity” is the first of three expansive, suite-like epics contained on the album that blatantly evoke Heard’s prog-rock fixation; the opening two minutes of the track are full of dread before a pinging melody arises, leading into an bossanova-eque middle section, buoyant and melodic before swerving back into darkness near the track's end. Another double-digit excursion, “Galactic Travels Suite”, moves from space age musing to New Age meditation to downtempo nod, carefully avoiding the sonic trappings of all three.
You could mistake other album tracks for lite-jazz, while elsewhere, there are abstract electronic musings that could get mistaken for something off of Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest album, last year's R Plus Seven. The album only feels dated on the hip-hop moves of closer “The Beauty of Celeste”. Overall, the fact that Heard, one of the most important electronic musicians of the 20th century, could step away from the genre he built his legacy on while exploring the outermost reaches remains a remarkable feat. A Red Bull Music Academy lecture esteemed Heard for “[putting] deepness into house music and [teaching] the machines some soul", but on Alien, Heard also sent house music into deepest, darkest space.
