Alien conspiracies! Faces on planets! Unearthed DATs! Yes, it’s all here. A bit of a special broadcast, this one (aren’t they all?) as Coldcut go offworld with the Alien Sphinx. Strictly Kev is your flight director at mission control, take a close read as he guides you through the Solid Sphinx story. ‘Return Of The Alien Sphinx’ is downloadable from bosbos.net, ‘More Than An Alien Sphinx’ streamable via the Ninja Tune site, home to Solid Steel. Blast off in t-minus 3… 2… 1…

Periodically in the early to mid-nineties Solid Steel would give up it’s traditional mix/talk/ad break/mix… format and morph into a Sphinx for two hours. The first time I ever heard of this was when I turned up to do one of the regular Friday pre-records at KISS FM one evening and Matt said that tonight the show was going to be a ‘Solid Sphinx’. What the hell was that I asked? ‘That’ meant minimum chat and no ads, just two hours of straight mixing, usually erring on the ambient and electronic side of things. ‘Great!’ I thought, as the usually 15-20-minute-mix-then-break-for-ads format was restricting - just as you were getting into the flow you had to stop for the commercials.

Ranging in title from Alien Sphinx, Return of Alien Sphinx and More Than An Alien Sphinx (and probably a whole host of others besides), they were sprawling soundscapes inhabiting similar territory to the Orb and FSOL at the time. I always had an inkling that the name came from the supposed Sphinx face that had been ‘discovered’ on Mars but never asked Matt about it until recently:

“Yes, its from the Alien Sphinx ‘Face on Mars’ thang. I was turned onto it by Fortean Times. Just thought it was a wicked concept, though the images of it never convinced me…humans see faces everywhere, we are optimised for it. We first used the name on the full length Video ‘Global Chaos’, a Hex project. Rob Pepperell and I made a 3D character called ‘Alien Sphinx’. I guess the idea morphed into an inscrutable ancient mystery sound trip after that!”

Some background on the Alien Sphinx

1976: The Viking Mars probe caused a sensation when NASA and the public eventually discovered a 1,500 foot high “face” staring out into space from the surface of the Cydonia region on Mars. This image was initially dismissed as a trick of the light by NASA . Other images were discovered which had been taken by the Viking probe at a different sun angle… and the face was still there.

Also present on these photographs were additional anomalies perhaps even more impressive than the face itself. One of the greatest of these, a five sided pyramid nearly two miles wide arranged exactly 1/360th of the martian polar diameter from the face. This pyramid was also pointing to the face. There was also discovered what appeared to be a city complex so oriented that all three structures arranged to form a perfect equilateral triangle.

The face on the Cydonia region of Mars was itself rather strange, apart from being on the surface of Mars to begin with… it seemed to represent a human being, wearing a head dress. This embellishment is strikingly familiar to the headdresses worn by Egyptian and Mayan royalty. There was also a conspicuous absence of facial hair on the effigy, implying that it was either a young man, or a woman. The androgynous Cydonia face has a stylized leonine headdress, and computer enhanced photos of the face show that the darkened side seems to be that of a lion, according to Richard Hoagland.

Well, yes, quite - judge for yourself. Anyway, on to this week’s unearthings -

First up we have an hour extracted from a two hour ‘More Than An Alien Sphinx’ show broadcast on an unknown date in November 1993. This takes in Latino Hip Hop, thunderstorms, Steve Reich, storytelling, The Irresistible Force, cicadas and the Orb on one of their remix excursions. The second hour is a complete one hour ‘Return of Alien Sphinx’ mix that was made specially for a Festival Radio 87.7 FM slot sometime in 1994 and has probably not even been heard by the Solid Steel faithful before. This ploughs similar territory but was recorded in the Ahead of Our Time studio as it features much extra-curricular activity on various synths and delays. In fact, at some points, it sounds like the entire mix is being put through various FX and filters and they stray into music concrete at points, complete with distortion on the original DAT. I had to do a lot of cleaning up on this hour actually, levels were up and down, left and right, there were glitches and bad clicks on some of the vinyl used but I think it was worth it as it’s one of the more ‘out there’ live mixes I’ve heard in a while. Sadly tracklists are not available for either, although we have uncovered a lot going back to the early to mid nineties.

Strictly Kev

[Coldcut - Return Of The Alien Sphinx] (1hr, 84MB)