Real Gone Music have reissued the highly sought after “Voyage – A Journey Into Discoid Funk” an album that was originally released as a solo venture from Shadows drummer Brian Bennett, a session musician and a library music man who was associated with work for labels such as KPM and Bruton Music among others. He composed music for films and TV and during the 1980s was awarded two Ivor Novello awards and wrote music for a wide range of television programmes including Dallas, The Sweeney and for the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. In the 1970s, Bennett Released Four Albums, the last of which Voyage came out in 1978 and was his first concept album to date, a spaced out and ambient body of music that taps into a world of funky extra-terrestrialism.
“This was music to complement or invoke visual imagery and I had this idea of the Earth in space, it was around the time of ‘Star Wars’ so this space fantasy thing was very much in vogue. I was also listening to a lot of Brian Eno and I wanted to see if I could write some material along those lines. I was given the go ahead by the label DJM and the concept was a voyage around the Earth. All the drums and synths were played live and we were experimenting with all the latest sounds and technology”
Initially receiving an absolute pummelling from critics being released during the height of the Punk scene in the UK, the album was incredibly ahead of its time, receiving little to no attention nor critical acclaim at the time of its release, instead garnering a greater fandom later in life combining a wide array of musical influences spanning from Rock, Funk, Disco, Prog, Library Sounds and Electronic, thus creating a record that could’ve been made a good 40 years after the fact. Rightly so, it is seen as a pioneering classic, certainly an album that has been made more famous through sampling and beat making in later decades than in its original carnation.
By the LP HERE
Check out the tracks HERE
