About This Item
Double vinyl LP pressing. UK collection. By the turn of the 80s, the impact of David Bowie's ground-breaking Berlin recordings - the synths, the alienation, the drily futuristic production - was being felt on music across Europe. What's more, the records being made were reflecting back and influencing Bowie's own work - 1979's InchLodgerInch and 1980's InchScary MonstersInch owed a debt to strands of German kosmische (Holger Czukay), new electronica (Patrick Cowley, Harald Grosskopf), and the latest works from old friends and rivals like Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel and Scott Walker, all of whom had been re-energised by the fizz of 1977. Compiled by Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley and the BFI's Jason Wood, InchFantastic VoyageInch is the companion album to their hugely successful InchCafé ExilInch collection, which imagined the soundtrack to David Bowie and Iggy Pop's trans-European train journeys in the mid-to-late seventies. InchFantastic VoyageInch is what happened next. Bowie's influences and Bowie's own influence were rebounding off each other as the 70s ended and the 80s began, notably in the emergent synthpop and new romantic scenes as well as through the music of enigmatic acts like the Associates and post-punk pioneers such as Cabaret Voltaire. Like InchLowInch and InchHeroesInch, some of the tracks on InchFantastic VoyageInch are spiked with tension (Grauzone's 'Eisbär') while some share those albums' sense of travel (Simple Minds Theme for Great Cities', Ryuichi Sakamoto's 'Riot in Lagos') and others find common ground with InchLodger'sInch dark, subtle humour (Thomas Leer's 'Tight as a Drum', Fripp's 'Exposure'). This is the thrilling, adventurous sound of European music before the watershed moment when Bowie would abandon art-pop for America and the emerging world of MTV with InchLet's DanceInch in 1983. InchFantastic VoyageInch soundtracks the few brief years
