superman

Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass. I remember exactly where I first heard it. There was a club in Leeds by the Corn Exchange called Liquid that hosted Haywire, an underground electro night. A group of us had turned out to see Andy Weatherall, a DJ of some repute, and towards the close my friend leapt out of her seat as the opening bars of the final song began to play. Everybody else there soon did the same, all throwing slinky robot shapes to that weird pinging melody with an incomprehensible sinister vocoder voice, a record beamed in from a galaxy far far away, utterly unlike anything from what passed for a rather parochial music scene back then. Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass was made by one Ferenc E. van der Sluijs, better known as I-f. Over the next ten years much of the music I listen to each day could in some way be traced back to this man. He would have made it, played it, influenced it or broadcast it through his online music projects (the Cybernetic Broadcasting or the new Intergalactic FM), kickstarting the Italo disco revival a full ten years before Hoxton hipsters were even aware that a bandwagon existed.

Here he is delivering a rare lecture as part of some corporate-sponsored soft drink junket, and if you’ve a spare few minutes you’d do well to take in at least a part of what is a very interesting and inspiring talk: LINK