I’m not a fan of fantasy as a genre, per se. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, is a crushing bore. Why anyone would want to watch 9 hours of tracking shots of people walking over snowy peaks is beyond me. But I suppose the take away is that these movies are about the journey, not the destination.
On the cover of his latest release on his own Full Pupp label, Prins Thomas III, “space-disco” king Prins Thomas (nee Thomas Moen Hermansen) is shown walking across some crunchy, snow packed tundra.
The inside picture is a close up of his foot in the snow. The back picture is him walking away.
Minimalist and evocative, the images are analagous to the experience of listening to III. Although that may initially not seem like a ringing endorsement, it absolutely is.
This is SPACE disco (the second part being mostly a hint of disco, like when people say that something has a hint of ginger or lime or something.) This “space disco” is more of an update to Tangerine Dream’s gloriously emotive film score synth meanderings. This “space disco” is for the disco deep in your mind, which isn’t a John Travolta glowing floor club…it’s a cool, wide, possibly foreboding, possibly peaceful wide expanse to traverse where periodically off in the distance trains chug by and disappear into the snow flurries.
This stuff is super wavy. “Enmannsrock,” “Luftspeiling,” and “Trans” are remarkable examples of how much one, (well, Thomas) can accomplish with so little. In less than 2 minutes into it’s all too brief 6 minutes, “Trans” achieves exquisite psychedelic transcendence. It is frankly a journey I’ll forever want to take with him.
*If anyone wants to make a supercut of LOTR walking footage to III, I could probably get into 9 hours of that.