Once Around The Sun

Here’s another wonderful cultural artefact I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. ‘Once Around The Sun’ is a strange and visionary soundtrack to a forgotten Australian post Woodstock counter culture film. Filmed by sculptor and experimental filmmaker Gordon Mutch, a well known figure in the late sixties Sydney underground,the film set out to document the Australian freakout fraternities first foray into mass open-air festival. As far as I know, the film never made it off the cutting room floor which is a shame as the resultant soundtrack by John Sangster is masterpiece of beautifully restrained pastoral instrumentation and deep, dark, passages of hallucinatory orchestration. This is no cheap soundtrack of low budget psych exploitation but a fully formed cosmic suite of ambitious proportions. Cosmic tones of avant free form improvisation,jazz noir and interstellar big band swing collide. Imagine Stockhausen conducting the Arkestra and your halfway there. At times, the music is strangely propulsive, as strolling basslines percolate up through the deliriously shimmering dissonance and reverb saturated discordance. There are also oddly expansive, staring at the sun moments of peaked outsiderness as home made percussion, tabla, electronics and sitar echo and reverberate in the noon day breeze. Another fine archaeological resurrection by the stellar Australian label Roundtable.