As we release Cosmic Neighbourhood’s album ‘Gatherings’ on our Rivertones label, Cally Callomon attunes his ears to its bloops and burbles.

Time is:
When lettering is fat and inflated,
When shaped star cartoons leap off the page with a long trail drawn behind them,
When disco is a word,
Where afternoon telly comes from Czechoslovakia,
When female TV presenters wear hot-pants and denim waistcoats,
Where ‘pop’ is a good thing,
When badges measure a good two inches across,
When radio DJs wear tight white flares and care about their hair,
When spectacles are huge and round,
When children wear dungarees and bounce about on pogo sticks,
When nature documentaries have the strangest of soundtracks,
Where iron-on patches look good on Brutus jeans,
When Universities are Open,
When scientific advances are pointed out using an expensive biro,
When spiros graph,
Where tapes run backwards,
Where things can come through the post in a plain wrapper,
When plastic comes in an assortment of fetching caramel hues,
When ‘o-matic’ is tagged onto space-age words,
When a single fat biro has a selection of twelve coloured inks,
Where the Wurly is Curly
Where the only noise is white,
Where the only slade is green,
..and the curious orange

This is the time of now from a land buried beneath swathes of synthesised bloops and burbles, where sounds are seldom sequenced other than by the press of a keypad, where Popcorn and Space are on Pye, where Moog, Casio, and Space-hoppers hold us riveted, where Bo Hansson once blazed a trail, and where the flute is electronically propelled.

There is no looking back,
this is no re-enactment,
it’s the pow sound of now,
the colours are vivid,
the sounds are wild
and the gathering cosmic.

(Cosmic Neighbourhood is illustrator Adam Higton plus several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict. His album Gatherings comes as a 14-song, two-sided record released on the Rivertones label around about now).

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Listen to / buy ‘Gatherings’ here.