"Quite possibly the best Kosmische album never to have come out of Germany."
Terrascope
"Unheralded purveyors of timeless cyclical repetition and trance-inducing soundscapes."
Psychedelic Baby Magazine
"Gorgeous piece of kraut and psych, layered and extremely trippy."
Fuzzy Sun
"Mysterious sounding danceable recurring rhythms and jazz influences."
New Underground Music
"Most original, most beautiful, most interesting and engaging record I have heard."
Sonic Magazine
Today sees the digital release of the incredible album 'Twenty One' by the Swedish collective Nova Express.
Sadly, like our other recent release by Smote, the album has been caught up in these horrendous manufacturing delays that are plaguing us at the moment. However, we do hope this delay will only be a few weeks and we hope 'Twenty One' will be hitting the shelves in mid November.
In the meantime you can still preorder the album on red vinyl via the Bandcamp link below or via your local record shop:
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Somewhere along the rich lineage of Swedish psychedelic music – the type forged in communes and smoky rooms alike on a kosmische continuum that spans over half a century, lies Nova Express – unheralded purveyors of timeless cyclical repetition and trance-inducing soundscapes. Torbjörn Abelli of national icons Träd, Gräs Och Stenar was even heard to remark in 2001 on the release of ‘One’ - their sole album - that “This album will mature and be perfect twenty years from now”. Somewhat serendipitously, two decades on, ‘Twenty One’ – the remastered and resequenced version of this maverick gem on Rocket Recordings - make it clear he wasn’t kidding. These free-flowing extrapolations take minimalist shapes and expand them into dizzying spirals of improvisatory abandon and heat-haze atmospherics. Redolent of the serene celestial shapes of Can’s ‘Future Days’ and the summer sunset climes of Cluster’s ‘Sowiesoso’ alike, tracks also blossom from mechanical.
Casio rhythms into Terry Riley-esque bursts of beatific abandon (as on the fifteen minute long title track) not to mention Organic Music Society style exaltation. On the closing ‘Spektra’, a majestic drone-odyssey even takes flight that connects the interstellar dots between the classic earthy strains of International Harvester, the droogy bliss of Spacemen 3 and the devotional mind-melt of Catherine Christer Hennix.
Yet at all times, Nova Express essentially sound like no-one but themselves - an unassuming band (whose members have also reared their heads before and since in outfits like The Janitors, Klotmystik, Audionom and Josefin Öhrn & The Liberation) whose ability to alchemically transform simple ingredients into psychic monuments has only gained potency as the years have rolled by. Indeed, the buried audial treasure that is ‘Twenty One’ - like all truly transcendent music - exists beyond time and space alike.
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