- Rich, spacey techno and electro that tells an alternate-universe story of Yuri Gagarin fomenting a righteous interstellar rebellion.
- Tony Neptune's Twelve Comets label chronicles an alternate universe Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who was famously the first person to ever reach outer space. Though he was later banned from space travel and died unceremoniously (or, some would say, suspiciously) in a plane crash in 1968, Twelve Comets imagines a different scenario: Gagarin swapped for a body double and blasted off into the heavens, spending the rest of his life encountering new worlds and alien lifeforms.
The releases come adorned with beautiful, detailed paintings for the artwork, like this number two. The cover for The Long Gallery depicts a planet called Toierra where wealthy people have enhanced themselves with cybernetics and enslaved the poorer, normal citizens "of a mind that is pure and untampered with." For this release, Gagarin lands on Toierra in the midst of an uprising, and joins the resistance against the "Clinks," as they are pejoratively known.
Yes, that's a lot of info, and The Long Gallery can just as easily be summed up another way: two long, immersive tracks that hew to the kind of colourful yet often uneasy techno and electro made famous by acts like Underground Resistance and Model 500. The ten-minute title track is the prelude to something momentous, with swampy wobbles and cinematic synths that portend an ominous future, gradually growing into a bassy groove that wouldn't be out of place on Permanent Vacation. It's a real journey of a track, loaded with Krautrock-y synths and a sense of pacing that befits its length.
"A Rude Awakening" is probably the one that DJs will reach for, a rough-and-ready electro cut with a buzzing synth lead that's somewhere between excited and triumphant. The textures are fantastic, with sounds shooting off like space-age lasers and sloshing liquids. It's nearly as evocative as the text and art that accompanies it, and while the music doesn't feature any kind of storytelling in itself, The Long Gallery pairs great music with excellent art in a special, thoughtful way that makes it more than just another techno 12-inch.
Tracklist01. The Long Gallery
02. Rude Awakening