Space rock
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
A repetitive riff under a thick layer of synthesizers and cosmic whoosh. Lemmy went straight from here into Motörhead.
How it sounds
- A repetitive riff, often on a single chord, held for tens of minutes.
- Analogue synthesizers, oscillators and white noise as a permanent layer.
- Hypnotic structure with almost no harmonic development.
Hear what that means
- A pulse that does not develop from 39:20
The bass and drums hold absolutely still so the electronics can drift. Lemmy played bass here like a rhythm guitarist.
Open on YouTube at 39:20 - Oscillators as an instrument
Filters sweeping continuously, frequently untuned, providing the drift the genre is named for.
Open on YouTube - Repetition made a song
Spacemen 3 - Playing with Fire
One chord, sustained and fed back, for as long as it takes. The later wing kept the stasis and lost the science fiction.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 90-130 bpm
- Song length
- 6-20 min
- Tuning
- Standard, with the guitar treated rather than played — long delays, phasers and sustained feedback, so a single note becomes a texture.
- Production
- Wide, saturated and hypnotic, with synthesisers and oscillators filling the stereo field. Live recordings are central to the genre because the extended improvisation is the point.
- Written about
- Space and science fiction, Drugs, Transcendence, Repetition as a subject
What each part is doing
- Guitar One riff or one chord sustained and treated, with feedback held as a note. The playing is deliberately static so the effects can do the moving.
- Synthesiser Oscillators and filters sweeping continuously, frequently untuned, providing the sense of drift the genre is named for.
- Bass Locked and repetitive, holding the pulse absolutely still so everything above it can float. Lemmy played bass in Hawkwind like a rhythm guitarist.
- Drums A straight, unvarying pulse that does not develop — closer to krautrock's motorik than to rock drumming, and for the same trance-inducing reason.
What it isn't
That it is psychedelia with a science fiction theme. The structural difference is real: psychedelic records are songs treated strangely, and space rock records are single ideas extended past the point where song structure applies. Hawkwind's live album is a continuous piece rather than a set of tracks, and that formal choice — not the subject matter — is what the genre passed on to krautrock, stoner rock and post-rock.
Told apart from
- Psychedelic rock Psychedelia is built around songs and studio invention. Space rock takes one idea and extends it, and its records are frequently live.
- Krautrock Krautrock drives with a motorik pulse; space rock drifts. Both use repetition, and the difference is whether it is going anywhere.
- Acid rock Acid rock is louder, bluesier and built on jamming around a riff. Space rock is more static and far more interested in electronics.
- Stoner rock Stoner rock inherits space rock's fuzz and repetition and puts a groove back under it — Monster Magnet sit on the line.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Hawkwind played free outside festivals they had not been invited to, with projections and dancers, as a total science-fiction spectacle. Lemmy played bass with them until 1975, when he was sacked and founded Motörhead. In the 1990s, Monster Magnet and Spacemen 3 revived the idea with thicker fuzz.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Deathrock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Desert rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Post-punk 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.