The label responsible for the Sky Girl and Oz Waves/Echoes comps return to the format with another collection of outsider sounds, this time turning their focus to early cosmic Americana. Compiled by Ivan Liechti, an archivist with an on-going interest in post-war/birth of pop culture paraphernalia and iconography (see his photography of engraved lighters from the Vietnam war), Ghost Riders seeks to traverse the outerzones of rock and roll and in doing so, details an alternative narrative of America's Golden Age. As you'd expect from a compilation of this nature, the majority of the songs originate from obscure or obscured sources and locales - teenage dreams from nowheresville to beyond! - though the sounds themselves are quintessentially mid-century America, a combination of British Invasion fantascism and the overlapping worlds of blues, surf, soul and country adorned with a dreamy glaze. It's revealing of an extremely fecund period in American music history, an era of garage bands and private press records that presupposes the DIY action of punk but trades out the ideology for a focus on escapism, longing, and the transcendence of youth. You can hear a lot of Haight Ashbury and Alex Chilton's Memphis in here, and there's even elements of the Velvets softer side in a song like Autumn Days by The Prisners Dream (it's not for nothing that Pete Kember provides some liner notes), though this is music making outside of the big centres, one-and-done regional expressions that document a scene inbetween (in space as well as time). Immaculate presentation and accompanying reportage from Efficient Space as usual, and a near-perfect record for anyone taken with the Down & Out and Sad About The Times collections (and arguably the best of the lot).
