Kosmose

  Kosmose were a Belgian cosmic collective formed in Charleroi and active across the 1970s, a loose and more or less leaderless group of local players anchored around multi-instrumentalist Alain Neffe (later of Insane Music and the Belgian wave underground) and bassist Francis Pourcel, with the young Guy Marc Hinant, later a co-founder of Sub Rosa, among their number. First Time Out captures a session recorded and mixed in March 1975, entirely unreleased until now.

By this point the band had drifted from their earlier cosmic, raga-leaning playing toward something rawer and noisier: long improvised pieces made with a handful of synths, flute, bowed bass, primitive rhythm boxes and no drummer. Cosmic, certainly, but dirtier than clean and homemade rather than high-tech, the music arrived wrapped in a full spectacle of strobes and abstract slide projections. A vivid relic of a lost Belgian underground. Clear coloured vinyl.