Future Clouds and Radar | |
---|---|
Origin | Austin, Texas, United States |
Genres | Rock, psychedelic rock, art rock, pop rock, experimental |
Years active | 2006–present |
Labels | Star Apple Kingdom |
Members | Robert Harrison Josh Gravelin Hollie Thomas Kullen Fuchs Darin Murphy |
Future Clouds and Radar is an American rock group from Austin, Texas. It was founded by Robert Harrison after the dissolution of his previous group, Cotton Mather, and features several of the same musicians.
Following the commercial failure of The Big Picture, Cotton Mather quietly ended in 2003. Harrison stepped away from the music world for some time to focus on raising his family. When he returned to making music in 2006, he assembled a collective of musicians and set about "creating music that couldn't be boxed in". [1] Although the music was recorded by a vast array of musicians with Harrison as the only constant member, he still chose to present it as a band to emphasize the contributions of the other musicians. [2]
The first release from the group, and the first release on Harrison's Star Apple Kingdom label, was an eponymous double album, released in 2007. Future Clouds And Radar was much more experimental and varied than the work of Cotton Mather, incorporating genres as wide-ranging as reggae, psychedelia, avant-garde, and ambient music in addition to pop and rock. The following year, the group released a second album, Peoria, which continued in the same musical vein. Also in 2008, a single-disc distillation of the debut album was released in the UK, removing eleven tracks and adding three otherwise unavailable acoustic performances.
The group never officially disbanded, and occasionally still plays around Austin, but have not released anything since 2009. Although Harrison's now-defunct blog stated that the "Songs from the I Ching" project would feature music from both of his projects, [3] everything that has been released as of 2019 has been credited to Cotton Mather.
Nickelodeon animator Keith Graves was chosen to create a video of the song "Dr. No." [4] Other videos include: [5]
Austinist described the group as "Beatles-esque psychedelia", [6] while The New Yorker described the music as "sprawling orchestral art rock." [7] NPR wrote ""Audacious? Sure. But undeniably impressive." [8] [ better source needed ] Texas public radio station KUT listed it among the best albums of the year 2007, [9] while Pop Narcotic listed it in its top 10 of the year. [10]
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written primarily by John Lennon with assistance from Paul McCartney, and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. Lennon's son Julian inspired the song with a nursery school drawing that he called "Lucy – in the sky with diamonds". Shortly before the album's release, speculation arose that the first letter of each of the nouns in the title intentionally spelled "LSD", the initialism commonly used for the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide. Lennon repeatedly denied that he had intended it as a drug song, and attributed the song's fantastical imagery to his reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books.
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