Odd things happen to a man after eleven years away. Readjusting back into regular society can be a painful process, but eventually you need to just suck it up, slip off the over-sized helmet and step outside the capsule.
Now electronica veteran Kevin Foakes hasn’t been stuck on the Mir Space Station since 2000 (of course not – it was decommissioned in 2001), it’s just taken him eleven years to get a new DJ Food album done. After such a lengthy hiatus you really need to bounce back with a bang, and so – as is often the case with those on the forward-thinking Ninja Tune label – he’s looking up.
Foakes – better known as Strictly Kev – conceived ‘The Search Engine’ in an air of sci-fi (“cosmonauts, astronauts, whatever you want to call them, the image kept recurring”), and commissioned one of the standout pencillers at long-running sci-fi comic 2000AD, Henry Flint, to design the suitably spacey artwork you can see on these pages. Then work began on the launch event: a gig at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, although ‘gig’ is hardly the word.
It’s a full-on audio-visual affair utilising the venue’s mighty dome and its mightiest brains. Several of the on-site astronomers will “sift through their archive and adapt and encode my own graphics to suit the music,” he says. So, we have to ask, what did those astronomers think of the album? “I’ve not had any negative comments but maybe they’re being polite,” he laughs. “There are several Ninja fans in the organisation already it seems though, as they were very enthusiastic for us to do the show.”
They’ll be hoping to get electronica geeks interested in astronomy along the way, as between Food’s three forty-five-minute sets (he’s doing the same set three times due to the limited capacity) punters will be encouraged to peruse the planetarium galleries. Providing everything is finished in time, of course. “I’ve sort of written the score first and now have to make a film to go with it,” he says.
During that long break between albums Foakes did another new soundtrack, for The Monkees’ splendidly trippy movie Head. Is there a sci-fi film he’d love to rescore too?
“That’s a great question,” he says, before having a lengthy think. “Not exactly sci-fi in the strictest sense, but I’d love to do something with Mad Max 2 actually: really ramp up the weirdness of it.”
Expect that to emerge in about 2020.
‘The Search Engine’ is released on January 23rd, and the Planetarium gig is on jan 19th.
