In the press release, the record company wishes the reader good luck in categorising the album, probably not without being a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Despite the jazz revival in recent years, the 2007 début by the Heliocentrics is still hard to grasp today. The British collective has in the meantime won listeners over with more tightly focused works like their 2020 »Infinity Of Now«, but the full range of their fascinating, difficult-to-describe sound is already present and astonishingly formulated on »Out There«. Space jazz in the line of Sun Ra is the fixed star and sun around which everything resolves on these impressive 24 tracks, while instrumental big-band hip-hop, cinematic retro-funk and ethnic music orbiting around samples from old sci-fi series also glow on the firmament. No wonder Madlib is as big a fan as he is a promoter. At times Ennio Morricone, at others James Brown come to mind, often on one and the same track. Additional influences come from pretty much every musical culture on the planet, ranging from Central Africa through to Persia and India, so that a category – as a new subgenre, so to speak – is almost inevitable: (Non-)world music. The Heliocentrics are truly »out there« and I mean far out. I can only wish you lots of fun on this 68-minute interplanetary music ride.
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