Doperider, the fourth release from The Utopia Strong, is mainly a record of great and giving calm. The cover’s lettering may suggest Hawkwind at their most planetary, but this record is not a full on, pedal-driven dive into deep space. Rather, Doperider often encourages an investigation of its immediate surroundings, by way of some lysergically-tinged soundtracks.
Opener ‘Prophecy’, maybe the most narrational track on Doperider, is also its lodestar in terms of what to expect. The pleasantly wriggling synth sounds initially suggest we are present at a secretive undertaking in a lab somewhere. The slightly mycological patterns formed by the synths suddenly give way after two minutes to a crunchy beat (one of the few on the record) which lends an altogether different atmosphere to the music. Now we are in some spy drama, the rough, braking beat suggesting some kind of car chase through country backlanes. Those who know Bernard Szajner’s equally claustrophobic (though much more gruesome) 1980 soundtrack, Some Deaths Take Forever, will hear marked similarities in atmosphere.
Matters take a softer turn from now on: ‘Spell of Seven’ uses a quiet thud for a beat that vies for our attention with some springy synth noises. It is a piece that suggests surveying a landscape guided by both psychic and topographical promptings. ‘Moths of the British Isles’, with its spotter’s series title, continues the pastoral theme. The blips and dips of the synth spell out a slow, revolving melodic arc that doesn’t need much augmentation: they conjure up the image of hyphae communicating with each other. With both these tracks, fairly recent psychogeographic sounds come to mind as a comparison: something from the Disposable Music series, for example, or Will Sergeant’s Things Inside.
Some tracks set out on deeper journeys. With an aortic thud that serves as a beat and that peculiar muffled piano sound, ‘The Atavist’ certainly has something of Harmonia’s ‘Sehr Kosmisch’. It’s a shame it only clocks in at three minutes. And ‘Harpies’, by way of some rich mid tones and a subtly employed glissando, suggests we are looking up rather than through a microscope. ‘Harpies’ is a lovely piece, in fact, enhanced now and again by a circular organ sound that is very late 1960s in feel. The music does encourage you to imagine a grainy 8mm colour film of some Head band of the period, maybe Floyd, or Van Der Graaf Generator, wrapped in First War pilot gear, alighting a hot air balloon and floating over the Sussex Downs. Voices float in at intervals: eventually – and softly – blowing the music to its conclusion.
Perhaps the most spacewards of all the album’s music is found on the supremely laid-back ‘Unity of Light’, a wonderful dark star of sound where banks of synth and guitar noises create a repeating melody of considerable melancholic charm. When it finally appears to add some structure to the cloudlike sounds, the bass notes only add more sehnsucht.
Finally the title track calls the rest to order: a beautiful, stately summation of the album as a whole that also imparts some of the mystery felt when listening to Holst’s Jupiter.
