It's a unique situation in its ability to spook the hell out of both claustrophobic and agoraphobic character types.

Aspera's Birds Fly EP is a terrific musical simulation of the above conditions. This is a weird little disc, full of moonboot synthesizers, short snatches of eerie, reverbed guitar, and the kind of overwhelming drum sound I tend to associate with latter-day Flaming Lips. Of course, the Flaming Lips are an obvious comparison-- as is Spiritualized! But where those bands cultivate sound so thick it could swallow you whole, Aspera pulls back just at the moment you expect a thunderous chorus. This is not bad; in fact, the relative sparseness of some of these songs creates a serious sense of weightlessness. For a psychedelic band leaning ever closer to space-rock with each subsequent release, this, for me, is a desired result. But just as a single body, drifting through the vastness of space, seems awfully tiny and insignificant, the vast majority of these songs suffer from their disproportionate ratio of instrumentation-to-silence.