SOUNDTRACK: ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE & THE MELTING PARAISO U.F.O.-Cometary Orbital Drive (2008).
Cometary Orbital Drive was one of three albums that AMT released in 2008.
It features the same lineup as the other releases around this time.
- Tsuyama Atsushi – bass, voice, cosmic joker
- Higashi Hiroshi – synth, guitar, voice, dancin’ king
- Shimura Koji – drums, Latino cool
- Kawabata Makoto – guitar, voice, speed guru.
This album has four songs on it although they are more or less variations of the same song. They released a similar album in 2013 called Cometary Orbital Drive to 2199 which featured about 70 more minutes of variations on this theme.
“Light My Fire Ball” is thirteen minutes long and opens with slow ringing bowls (I assume). It’s very serene. Then Tsuyama, adds vocal sounds and squeaks and noises. The band starts playing a groove and Tsuyama sings in an over the top kind of crooning way. The middle more mellow psychedelia and then it gets wild again with strange vocals noises and weird synth sounds as it segues into track two.
“Planet Billions Of Light-Years Away” is almost 27 minutes long and it introduces the six note melody that will play in one form or another for the next 50 minutes. As the guitar plays, the synths soar to the heaves and the drums plays a slow beat with lots of hi hat. It gets slowly faster and faster and then at 10 minutes Kawabata takes off with the start of an interstellar solo. The bass starts meandering and pumping and by14 minutes, the tone of the six note riff changes, becoming more of a lead riff as the song is now propelling pretty quickly. By 17 minutes you are totally absorbed in this hypnotic melody and then Kawabata takes off with more soloing. By 25 minutes the song is just soaring away faster than anything–the songs pummels away until the 26 and a half minute marks when the guitar fades out and the synths start until they resume once more in track 3.
After a 30 second intro, the seventeen minute “Circular System 7777777” resumes that same six note melody. This time slow and ponderous and echoing. After a few minutes the new beat enters and it’s got a kind of disco feel to it. The song starts pumping faster for a bit then it slows and picks up once more. After ten minutes things pause before resuming again, this time more intensely than before. With four minutes left things start to slow down again and then the guitars fade out and a synth line (and echoing percussion) segues into the final track.
“Milky Way Star” is only 13:32 and it opens with a thunderous snare drum fill and then the fastest rockingest version of the six note riff yet. Kawabata solos madly, the bass and drums rock out and that riff repeats throughout the track. The song zooms along getting faster and faster while Kawabata goes nuts. Somehow around 9 minutes they pick up the tempo even faster until around 11 minute when whole things collapses on itself with some wild noise and a new outro guitar riff buried under the chaos. The chaos clears and the outro riff shines through until it too fades away leaving only a synth chord to show you the way out.
[READ: May 1, 2021] And Then She Vanished
This book came across my desk at work and I thought it sounded really interesting.
When Joseph Bridgeman was young (pre-teen, I believe), he went to a Fun Fair with his sister, Amy. She encouraged him to try his luck at the rifle range (she wanted to win the big prize). While Joseph was shooting (and doing very ell), Amy disappeared.
There was no trace of her.
And it has haunted him for his life these last twenty years or so.
I happened to see on the back of the book that this was listed as Joseph Bridgeman Book One. This made me a little nervous, because while I don’t mind a series, I didn’t want to read a book that finished on a cliffhanger.
Fortunately, this book does not end on a cliff hanger. Rather, Book Two is set up as a kind of next stage, which makes the story even more intriguing.
So anyhow, Joseph is an antiques dealer and he has the gift of psychometry, which means that he can discover facts about an event or person by touching inanimate objects associated with them. That’s a pretty good skill to have for an antiques dealer.
But lately he has no motivation to do any work. He has been plagued by recurring nightmares about his sister. His mother is suffering from dementia. His father is not around. The only help he has is his father’s friend who agreed to look after him and his business.
The friend also encourages Joseph to go to a hypnotherapist.
Having just read the Bernard O’Shea book where he scoffs at Mindfulness (and then winds up embracing it), I was amused to have Joseph Bridgeman also scoff at Mindfulness and then embrace it.
I have to say, if you have psychometry you should be open to hypnotherapy.
Alexia Finch is the hypnotherapist and she is pretty great at it. He feels comfortable wit her instantly and for the first time in ages he feels relaxed and rested. He even feels like he went somewhere else while in her office.
When he gets home, he tries some of her relaxation techniques and discovers that he doesn’t fall sleep. He time travels. That’s right. He was thinking about the day and while he was focusing, he wound up appearing a few hours earlier and watched himself come home.
Obviously he is freaked out about this. And, of course, he knows not to let his earlier self see him, because that’s bad news.
But after a few drinks, he tries again and he is able to go back a little further. He decides that when he goes back again, he is not going to mess with the past, although he does acquire some funds to keep the money-collectors at bay.
And then when he finds an object of great importance from when he was younger, he is able to travel back about ten years.
He decides that he is going to try to go back to 1997 and find his sister. But it seems that the further back he goes, the less time he has there. He goes back a few days and he gets many hours, but when he goes back to 1997, he only has a few seconds.
What is he going to do?
Joseph has two friends who I really enjoyed. Vinny of Vinny’s Vinyl is an old mate who is into sci-fi and whom Joseph feels like he can trust with this preposterous notion. Joseph is also a big fan of The Beatles and I enjoyed the way Jones included songs that were related to what he was doing or thinking–a nice touch. As was the whole idea that time travel is kind of like moving a needle on a record.
There’s also Mark, an old school friend. He and Mark were great friends until they had a falling out (psychometry was involved). But Mark is a super-smart scientist guy and although Joseph thinks he’ll never believe him about time travel, if he can convince Mark, then Mark is the guy who can work out the science of it.
And then finally, there’s Alexia. He doesn’t know how to tell her that he thinks she’s the reason he can time travel. But he is sure that she can help him finetune his skills. Can she keep him focused enough to do this?
Now, I must say that there is a LOT in this book that is, if not taken from other sources, then is certainly commonplace. A little sister getting lost at a fair? Seen it. And it’s hard to do anything original with a person first discovering time travel, but Jones has made Bridgeman an interesting and open minded character, so he doesn’t fall into many of the pitfalls that makes some time travelling characters initially irritating. I won’t give away of the spoilery parts, but if you are familiar with the genre you can see some of them coming before Joe can.
Having said that, though, the story was really enjoyable and a really fast read. It’s barely 250 pages and I flew through it. Couldn’t put it down, in fact. And, while some of the events were familiar, the writing really kept it fun. Plus, there are plenty of unexpected things that happen.
And the end has a number of very cool surprises.
It’s in the epilogue that we find out why the book is book 1. Book two is apparently coming out next month and book 3 is being finished right now. I don’t know if its a trilogy or more, but I’ll definitely read number 2!
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Incidentally, on Goodreads, the author tells us that this book was originally published under a different name:
It was previously, independently released as ‘The Unexpected Gift of Joseph Bridgeman’. The series was then bought by Blackstone Publishing and this book has been through an intensive editing and proofing process. The core story’s the same, but this new edition has brand new chapters and deeper character development to enhance Joe’s journeys into the past. There’s more Vinny, more Amy and more plot. It’s now called, ‘And Then She Vanished.’ If you have read it before, you could pick up the series on book 2 and be okay, although many readers are enjoying the revisions and extra stuff. Up to you. Hope that helps.
Wonder if it’s worth looking for the oirginal?
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