Reviews

Everybody seems to presume that the sound of outer space should be floaty, only slightly eerie and perfectly symmetrical. From Pythagoras to Gustav Holst, theorists, musicians and artists alike have posited some kind of harmony of the spheres or gently pulsing or undulating rhythm.
But I believe that Hiroshi Hasegawa (of CCCC) is much closer to the poetic truth. As Astro he has constructed two complementary, chaotic concertos, "Shell Star" and "Spica", and for me he is right on the ball. This is sound before it got tuned in "properly", sound searching for meaning and meaning searching to make itself coherent. Which it isnīt necessarily going to be able to do.
It is noise, but not like the noise of CCCC or other Japanese noiseniks, like Merzbow or Aube. Their noise is at home on this planet and they are at ease with its technology. Astro is lost and looking for a channel, screaming to be heard and recognized in an unrecognizeable place which, to make matters even more disconcerting, is still expanding.
This is thoroughly liberating noise for people who donīt necessarily like noise. Cipher Productions of Tasmania has made readily available a double three-inch CD edition released five years ago in a miniscule edition of only one hundred and has decorated the cover with some of those impossible and beautiful photographs the Hubble Telescope sends back to us.
Taken from Sonomu

Composed by Hiroshi Hasegawa (of C.C.C.C.) this is a re-release of a double 3inch CDR. Arriving with suitable Hubble telescoped imaged photographs it contains two tracks of analogue synthesized waves of cosmic sound effects drenched in reverb. I guess from his myspace site and all to familiar modulated waves that a Synthi AKS is playing a significant part in this very 60s sounding spacey sci-fi offering. It has that strange unsophisticated sound of Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett, and fireball XL5, and I guess should be listened to dressed in a cheap polythene space suit. Apart from what one could call ideological simplicity there is perhaps in the underlying nostalgia the idea that the past offered a future quite unlike this present which resembles evermore the cold materialism of the 1950s.
Taken from Vital Weeklt