Someone once declared that, ‘in the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove. And from this groove came the groove of all grooves. And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldly declared, “Let there be HOUSE!” and house music was born. But before Jack had his groove, there was disco, and before disco, there was Krautrock… And like house music, this was an English appropriation of art from foreign lands. It was trance before Trance, and cosmic before Cosmic, (maybe even IDM before IDM) with layer upon layer of shimmering oscillations of swirling sound underpinned by the insistent 4/4 metronomic pulse of the motorik beat. This was music to lose yourself in, to mentally groove to, with space and depth and texture, with lofty ambitions and aims, and which looked beyond our own atmosphere for inspiration. It served as a bridge and a pathway from the psychedelic experiments of the 60s and early 70s to the strict rhythms made possible by early electronics – a bridge from something organic to something synthetic. It should come as no surprise therefore, that the biggest band to emerge from the scene, Kraftwerk, ran with an idea of a Man Machine throughout their entire career. Krautrock went on to directly influence David Bowie, with his Berlin trilogy of albums bearing the unmistakable European sheen of this elegant, otherworldly sound, as well as Joy Division, The Fall, Stereolab, Boards of Canada, and more recently, a whole new generation of forward-thinking producers and artists. Newcastle’s Flight Recorder label – home to modern interpretations of other European genres of dance music – Italo, New Beat, and EBM, in conjunction with Radio Oscillations on Intergalactic FM, brings together a collection of music by those producers inspired by these ‘krautrock’ pioneers of the early to mid 1970s on Obliged to Space – a heartfelt and beautifully written love letter to those cosmic sounds of the 1970s.