Time & Space Machine – Turns You On review

It appears the re-edit scene is on its last legs. What was initially a trickle of high quality tweaks has become a flood of mediocre reworks. There are, of course, still good edits out there, you just have to wade through a sea of sameness to find them. A big factor in this creative downfall is the source material lazily chosen by most would-be re-editors. Big disco hits don’t need reworking by and large; obscure Balearic moments, weirdo pop records and strange rock wig-outs do. It’s better to rework something odd and interesting than something people already know.

This is the premise behind much of Richard Norris’ work as The Time & Space Machine. As he initially did with Erol Alkan as Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve, Norris has spent the last few years cutting and splicing a deliriously odd selection of psychedelic rock records, putting them out in very limited quantities on vinyl.

Now, Norris has collected together the best of those reworks and whacked them on a CD. For those interested in the possibilities of the humble re-edit but bored by the disco edit scene, Turns You On should be essential listening. None of the edits themselves are particularly revolutionary in their construction – they tend towards the dancefloor-friendly extension – but they sound refreshingly freaky. The 12 tracks featured offer a range of quite delightful reworks of weird and wonderful records from the late 60s and early 70s.

There’s plenty of acid-fried rock riffage, delay-laden percussion, backwards tape loops, quaint vocal samples, uneasy listening grooves and folk-rock oddness. It is in turns epic (“Through Your Mind”), anthemic (“La La La”), intense (“Odyssey”) and other-wordly (“Psychedelic Circus”). Really, you couldn’t ask for more from a collection of re-edits.

Matt Anniss