Skylab – #1 – #2 1999 Large As Life And Twice As Natural
1994 was a benchmark year for electronic music, especially with a style journalists were labeling Trip Hop – a mixture of hip hop beats drenched in layers of acoustic and electronic soundscapes, sometimes with haunting and soulful vocals and other times purely instrumental. The year saw classic releases from Portishead – Dummy, Tricky – Maxiquenye, Massive Attack – Protection and coming out of the deeper cosmos was a debut album like no other, Skylab’s #1.
Skylab was the electronic super group consisting of the UK’s Matt Ducasse, Howie B. (U2, Bjork, Wim Wenders), and the Japanese duo Tosh and Kudo (also known as Love TKO of Major Force Records/Mo Wax). In early 1994, the four came together and discovered a mutual love for all things beautiful, beat laden, bizarre and pyschedelic. They embarked on the creation of fresh music to suggest new and undefined spaces. Throughout the Summer of 1994 they recorded #1. Tosh played guitars, Kudo played Fender Rhodes, pianos, and synthesizers, Matt sourced and flipped samples, while Howie B took all the elements and engineereed a cohesive sound from their created chaos. The result is an album so rich with moods, textures, and ideas that it still sounds relevant today.
The first single from the album was “Seashell.” Coiled around a whispering sample that curled you up in your headphones, Seashell’s Hawaiian Space Guitars conjured sensations of intimate immensity, abducted you inside a sanctuary of a roaring hush. The track immediately captured Skylab’s mirage moods, the way each track moves through different states until the previous mood feels like a mirage. Music heard just 30 seconds before suddenly seems distant and ancient.
Mid 90’s trip hop was rarely trippy, hardly ever psychedelic; rather it was mild and blunted. Its beats limped. This is why Ducasse was always unhappy with the label “One of the problems was that we were lumped in with trip hop when its much more expansive than that. I see it as outside of genre entirely. It has much more in common with collage music like things by Tod Dockstader, or soundtracks, the entire creative process was unique and inimitable”
#1 on the other hand is a disconcertingly psychoactive classic, full of imperceptible yet dramatic mood elevations and alterations. “When you use raw recognizable sounds everybody detects the whole sound. We want to make sounds unknown. All the sounds on the album are treated,” Kudo explains, “sometimes by Tosh, sometimes by me, sometimes by Matt. Everything has to be treated to give a Skylab sound.” Howie B. adds, “If you saw us in the studio, it was a really interesting dynamic. Matt at the time was going through some hard stuff. So he had a little bit of a destructive character. Tosh was deaf in one ear and had an ear infection in the other, so he wanted everything louder in order to feel it. Kudo, this delicate man, wanted to add melody and add some sort of structure to what we were doing. And I was there, trying to harvest all this energy and recording it. And then turning the three of them on. So that was the dynamic. It was a really, really powerful time!”
Fast forward to 1999 and Skylab releases their highly anticpated sophomore album titled, #2: 1999 (Large as Life and Twice as Natural). The quad becomes a trio as Howie B. moves on to releasing his solo record and producing U2. The unit now consists of Matt Ducasse, painter/part-time DJ, Toshio Nakanishi and Masayuki Kudo, conceptualists from fabled and fearless Major Force hip hop label, and freestyle vocalist Debbie Sanders, who is charged with interpreting the inner workings of Matty’s mind to uplifting results. The album was also highly praised by critics, but lacked distribution since the original label (Sven Väth’s Eye Q) folded just as the album was released.
Tim Love Lee, Tummy Touch’s head honcho and former Skylab Sound System touring DJ says,
“The origins of our record label can be traced back to Skylab’s #1 album. My business partner Matt Smith took his first job at a DJ promo company and his first project was to mail out vinyl of Skylab’s ‘Seashell’ single to me!” He adds, “We are proud and excited to be able to re-release this timeless music to a whole new generation of electronic music fans who might have missed it. Both albums were so far ahead of the time but they now fit nicely alongside contemporary acts like Tame Impala, Flying Lotus and Animal Collective who mix beat-driven music with psychedelic soundscapes.”
#1 and #2: 1999 (Large As Life And Twice As Natural) will be re-released on CD and digitally through Tummy Touch Records on June 8th, 2015.
