Recorded at Radio X London by Chris Denman for John Kennedy’s X-Posure

Space Carnival (John Kennedy session)

The Comet Is Coming has possessed an air of inevitability almost from the word “Go”! Much like the trail-blazing name they originally lifted from a BBC Radio Workshop record, the trio has participated in a kind of Big Bang. Its immediately relentless sound demands a sense of being present in the moment yet lost within it, much like how visceral punk rock, interstellar jazz blasts, deepest dance-floor trances and real-time technological breakthroughs do. Octavia Butler once wrote that, “There is nothing newunder the sun, but there are new suns.” And on their third album, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, synthesist/studio-magician Danalogue, drummer-producer/intuitionist Betamax, and saxophonist/spiritual riffologist Shabaka bring her verses to life. They burn brightly, directly and confidently, soundtracking our epoch of change in ways their contemporaries simply aren’t trying to. Like great artists throughout the recorded century, they possess, in Shabaka’s words, “a sensitivity to the zeitgeist,” channeling their sound into both a mirror to our times and a potential healing process for it. If that seems like asking a lot, The Comet Is Coming is uniquely qualified. Because even by their own telling, that other-worldly power was almost instantaneous.

On Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, they turn it back onto the listener. Wish us all luck!