When you read the name of Ken Camden’s Space Mirror, or take a look at the artwork, chances are the sounds that come into your head will be on the record. In this, Ken Camden second solo album, the Chicago-based artist explores the heavens with his guitar and effects, a transcendental array of cosmic sounds that cinema has told us are the soundtrack to space.
Far from being some expansive void, the space in Space Mirror is a landscape that is teeming with alien lifeforms, a whole host of strange things crawling and flying and hovering around in ways which we do not understand. This is space as an environment, a frontier for us to delve into and explore, with sights to see and lessons to learn.
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As well as being reminiscent of 60s sci-fi, there is also an aboriginal elemental to Space Mirror. Underneath the seething electronic environment there is a native American culture, a scene of people living off the land and seeing extraterrestrial beings above a dark Earth. Maybe this is the title’s mirror, a reflection of a human existence in the colossal expanse of space, one which takes centuries to bounce back to us.
Space Mirror is out on the 29th July on Kranky.