The Musical World Of Metal And Science Fiction - Edouard Scotto

Yes, from the title you’d expect Spinal Tap pomposity, perhaps, with hard Rock riffs accompanying a greasy, long-haired Brummie singing about cosmic trips in a silver machine – except that the title is too formal for that, and one look at the sleeve tells you otherwise.
   The title is actually so right in its dry description, as befits a librarian, and he could not have known that Metal would become a genre in...whenever. I like to think he was referring to Bill Burroughs’ Heavy Metal Kid, thus making a space-age connection with machine music and Bill’s Nova Trilogy, but this is not soft machine music, far from it – there are fantastically brittle elements, all arranged in a stunning fashion so as to give that full ‘science fiction’ feeling whilst, headphones on, you drift off to colonise Neptune and set up speakers on every street corner playing this album all day, every day.
   There will be street corners when we colonise Neptune, and Tesco outlets, of course. There will also be insects, small ones, like ants, but with jaws that can bite through metal, and they will eventually overrun the human colony, eating everything we’ve built. The only good news being that Tesco will also fall victim to them and subsequently hesitate to open branches on the next planet we colonise. Coincidentally, Scotto has provided the perfect soundtrack for the insect’s domination with ‘Insect’s World’, an amazing piece that electronically mimics the sounds we hear when we drop microphones into their world (that chatter of clicking pincers, wings, whatever). Ever since watching ‘The Hellstrom Chronicle’ I’ve been keeping an eye on insects.
   A great album, which you can get here.