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  • Now-Again Records

The Heliocentrics are one of the most interesting groups currently drawing inspiration from the shadowy world of library music, a realm in which elite, versatile studio musicians cut tracks to spec for TV, film, ads, and radio interstitials. I'm comfortable telling you that all of the Heliocentrics' releases are essential. The UK band now has a new full-length due out Oct. 7 on Stones Throw subsidiary Now-Again, The Last Transmission. It's a collaboration with cult filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, who recites a poem he wrote over music by Heliocentrics members Malcolm Catto, Jake Ferguson, and others. The press materials describe The Last Transmission as "an interplanetary space/love odyssey told in twelve chapters." You can hear a track titled "Cavern" (not a Liquid Liquid cover) from the bonus instrumental record here. It's an ideal specimen of the Heliocentrics' patented stealthy jazz-funk fusion, redolent of subterranean intrigue.

Press release after the jump.

It’s been a while – six years in fact! – since we first mentioned the collaboration between maverick filmmaker/songwriter/author and all around baadasssss Melvin Van Peebles and Malcolm Catto and Jake Ferguson’s Heliocentrics ensemble. We’re happy to finally set a street date and offer a sample of the madness to come.

The Last Transmission is an interplanetary space/love odyssey told in twelve chapters; it comes nearly ten years after Van Peebles’ appearance as the third member of Quasimoto on Stones Throw Records’ 2005 release The Further Adventure of Lord Quas. For the Heliocentrics, The Last Transmission represents their third Now-Again album, following Out There in 2007 and 13 Degrees of Reality in 2013.

Van Peebles makes for the Heliocentrics’ ideal foil: he did graduate work in astronomy in Holland in the 1950s and maintains an avid interest in cosmology. The Heliocentrics, as their name conveys, draw inspiration from both the philosophic leanings of the likes of Stephen Hawkings and interstellar mysteries, like those surrounding the Malian Dogon tribe’s knowledge of the Sirius B star hundreds of years before it was discovered. Their music is as indebted to Sun Ra’s interstellar jazz as it is inspired by psychedelia’s spiritual expanse.

The Last Transmission, presented as a vocal album and an expanded instrumental selection on a bonus disc, can be taken as both the band’s interpretation of Van Peebles’ poem and a musical voyage inspired by Van Peebles’ vivid imagery. The band considers it their defining work, the result of more than a decade of playing and recording together. They’ve found a voice as a band, one that meshes with Van Peebles,’ as he weaves an intergalactic “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

In between producer/drummer Malcolm Catto’s thunderous syncopation and producer/bassist Jake Ferguson’s bellowing bass lines, amidst the analog electronics and atmospheric interference naturally accorded by their organic analogue process, Van Peebles’ voice floats in and out, spectral in its tone, complete in its conviction in the unfathomable sense that life’s eruption in the cosmic expanse made, and in love’s ability to transform and transcend death.

The Last Transmission will be available to our subscribers at Now-Again Deluxe two weeks prior to the album’s release date.