The Legendary Pink Dots - Chemical Playschool Vol. 15

Spaced Out

I’m relatively new to The Legendary Pink Dots, an Anglo-Dutch ‘band’ formed in 1980 and now essentially the work of Edward Ka-Spel, Phil Knight, Eric Drost and Raymond Steeg. Their psychedelic proclivities are embraced by this wonderful array of genres named on Wikipedia: 

Avant-garde rock

Experimental

Neo-psychedelia

Ambient

Post-punk

Industrial

Noise

Synthpop

Industrial rock

Noise rock

Their latest Chemical Playschool Vol 15 is most of these at some point in each of the five tracks lasting between three to nineteen minutes. The best over-arching genre would be Space Rock. Whilst I quite like the electronic instrumental/noise journeys, I enjoy most the broken ballads of Edward Ka-Spel where the planetary pulses, echoes, found sounds, spatial distortions and other effects work around these narrated postulations/poetics - with opener Immaculate Conception most closely sounding songlike. But that’s because I now write stone cold sober rather than stoned. Were it the later and listening as I am currently to second and longest track Sparks Fly – Museum, you’d have to send out the space rescue team to find and bring me back home. It would be a long search.