Imagine it’s the summer of 1988 (sorry, but bear with me). You’re in West London, at the Watermans Art Centre, waiting in the lobby for a screening of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (see? It’s already better). In a corner of the room, four skinny boys, smelling strongly of hash, splay amid a pile of guitars and practice amps. From that corner a droning E note pulsates, filling the space. Another guitar, cleaner and more pellucid, gently ranges over the pulse, constructing simple melodies that repeat, modulate, and wander, never sustaining a structure, but never ceasing their exploration of ways to respond to that insistent E. A third guitar is only occasionally audible, but adds to the density. The drone would become part of the room’s furniture, but it’s too loud.
That’s the story of Dreamweapon, Spacemen 3’s August 19th, 1988, 44-minute performance, which was originally billed as “An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music”. As has often been noted, there was no sitar. Pete Kember, Jason Pierce, Will Carruthers (who had just joined the band), and Rugby friend Steve Evans provided the sounds — though Carruthers, who has been credited with “bass vibrations,” has subsequently confessed that he was too stoned to remember to turn on his amp.
Superior Viaduct has given Dreamweapon the deluxe-vinyl-reissue treatment, and it sounds great. Recordings of the performance have always had the lo-fi warmth of an audience tape, and it’s especially palpable here. A phone rings. People chat. An announcement invites the crowd to take their seats in the cinema. A toddler cries, and later laughs a bit. It’s the sound of music happening in a room, in which people are also busily living. Longtime listeners of Spacemen 3 will hear other things: most prominent is the Vox Starstreamer that Kember had recently acquired. Its built-in delay would soon play a key role in “Repeater” and “Suicide”; you can hear him feeling his way through its rhythms here. There’s also the melody of “Honey”, which is suggested at minute seven, and then even more strongly in the 16th and 38th minutes.
Those sonic details help to situate the performance in the period in which the band was creating material for Playing with Fire, which they would release six months later. Pierce and Kember’s friendship had already begun to sour, though they could still bear to be in the same room that summer, and they were still writing together. Their former intimacy can be heard in “Spacemen Jam”, a practice recording bundled with the reissue. The piece is two guitars, trading riffs and talking. It purportedly dates from the recording sessions for The Perfect Prescription—an imprecise designation, as the band worked on that record for eight months of 1987. It was a more amicable time for the men. The jam is a pretty naked affair. The guitars are free of effects, the chords are simply strummed, the leads simple and reflective. There’s a bit of laughter at the song’s close.
Dreamweapon is more single-mindedly repetitious. If you sit with it quietly, it can transfix, producing the sort of aesthetic trance that La Monte Young attempted with his days-long drones and Dream Syndicate experiments. There’s a strongly registered genealogy there, from Young to Angus MacLise and John Cale, from Cale to the Stooges, from the Stooges to Spacemen 3’s first swampy, noisy recordings. The title Dreamweapon can be traced to MacLise’s mid-1960s musical collaborations with a number of veterans of Young’s milieu: Tony Conrad, Jack Smith, Sterling Morrison, Hetty MacLise (née McGee). All of those names ring out, in their various ways. What’s more important here is MacLise’s aesthetic project, an attempt to fuse the surreal (hence the weaponizing of the dream) with Eastern philosophies of consciousness and with Young’s emergent interests in Fluxus, Neo-dada, and immersive media environments.
With a bit of happenstance, the Spacemen’s Dreamweapon assembled those elements. Wenders’ film, the hash smoke, the sounds of life creeping into the music, the long drone—it’s a late-1980s recursion to the avant-garde of the mid-1960s, from Thatcher’s London to NYC post-beat bohemia. All of that might seem too highfalutin, but we should recall the stringent, anti-art dispositions that issued in Smith’s cinema, in the Velvet Underground’s first songs, in MacLise’s seamless join of artistic praxis and living. Perhaps Spacemen 3 didn’t show up at the Watermans Centre with the intent to create art, or Art—they wanted a paying gig. But because they showed up, and played, we have a piece of art to listen to, to vibe out to, and to think about. Dreamweapon continues to mesmerize.
