Now that enough time has passed, it's been interesting, as someone who came up in the '90s, to see what's transcended the decade and what hasn't. At that time, the mostly forgotten Flying Saucer Attack were important to a lot of people invested in underground psychedelia and noise. The Bristol duo of David Pearce and Rachel Brook, who were dating for a time, often slapped a somber landscape on the front of their albums—sunsets, dark trees, scattered cloud formations, blue moons—and the music matched the pastoral mood these pictures evoked.
On any given FSA album, lo-fi folk feedback and whispered vocals collided with delicate and spaced-out strums and just enough tape hiss. There was tripped-out forest-jazz stuff with bongos and horns. (Matt Elliott of the affiliated Third Eye Foundation contributed percussion, drums, clarinet.) They covered bands like Wire and Suede and did a seminal take on the old folk song "Sally Free and Easy", and later covered Skip Spence. The first record, a self-titled collection released in 1993, bore the phrase "Rural Psychedelia," and that stuck.
Flying Saucer Attack recorded most of their output at home, not in a proper studio, and you could tell, though you'd more likely think they're recorded it in their backyard at night. In any case, they'd remind you, with little messages on their albums like "compact discs are a major cause of the breakdown of society" and "home taping is reinventing music." Most of their early material was vinyl only.
Brook left the band in the 1996 to concentrate on her other project, Movietone, and the liner notes for the Chorus compilation from that same year featured the sentence: "This album marks the end of FSA phase one." In retrospect, the best material emerged from that first phase, when FSA was two people in a room. In fact, if you want a place to start with FSA, your best bet would be the 1993 self-titled debut and 1995's Further along with the two early compilations, 1994's Distance and the aforementioned Chorus. There was plenty of material after that, often in 7" and single form, but none had quite the same magic.
And, now, after a 15-year hiatus that finds FSA deep into "phase two" (or maybe "phase three"), Pearce is back with a FSA album recorded solo at home and entirely on guitar. It's his first proper release since 2000's The Mirror, which was a collection in the spirit of the earlier work. The 57-minute Instrumentals 2015, on the other hand, is stripped back and spare, a series of 15 untitled instrumentals that often feel like interstitials—bridges or ladders to something else. (The lack of titles is interesting for someone who always had so much to say, even if you couldn't really understand what he was singing half the time.)
The music is often reminiscent of the silvan Bay Area psych of the Jewelled Antler Collective, and the elegant, air-born recordings of New Zealand experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery (Dadamah, Dissolve), with whom Pearce collaborated in 1997 on a noisy three-song EP. The second song on that EP, the melancholy, meditative "And Goodbye", is echoed a bit here, though that older track featured buried drum rumbles and crashes and bigger explosions. Instrumentals 2015 is not necessarily about dynamics: it's pretty and sprawling, even when certain songs only last for a few seconds.
As far as the FSA canon, it bares some similarities to 1996's Hawkwind-echoing In Search of Spaces, which was pieced together by another underground New Zealand legend, Bruce Russell (of Dead C, A Handful of Dust) with tapes from live performances. Like the collaboration with Montgomery, though, it was weirder and noisier than this new set.
Some of these 2015 songs flit by without much of an impression, but then you'll get the sturdier drift of a piece like "Instrumental 4", which has the holy, ritualistic ambiance of FSA's best work or the clanging "Instrumental 6", a short, Harry Pussy-esque bit that adds imploded grit before the melancholic, majestic folk-drone of "Instrumental 7". But as the album goes on, the mood flatlines into a gentle, somber, not very compelling middle zone. The collection closes with its two longest pieces, the almost eight-minute "Instrumental 14" and the almost 10-minute "Instrumental 15" (which could almost be a new-school Earth track). Both are fine, but could've been shorter, which is something you could also say about the album as a whole.
The D-side of the 2xLP version of Instrumentals 2015 was etched by Rachel Brook, now Rachel Coe, a sweet touch, and maybe one justification for the record being so long. Otherwise, after a 15-year pause, it would've been nice to have a little less music that offered more to latch onto. The strangeness and slightness of Instrumentals 2015 is admittedly refreshing in our age of overdoing it, and it does fit with the whisper that is Pearce's overall career arc, but when placed next to Flying Saucer Attack's best music, it still comes off like a faint echo.
