Utopia Strong, The – Doperider [Blue Vinyl] – New LP

The Utopia Strong – Doperider (2025).  Once the average cerebral wanderer finds themselves a stoned skeleton on a motorbike, they’re going places.

 

“When recording we tend to have books, bits of art and interesting things lying around the place. (Kavus) had recently bought the Paul Kirchner compendium, Awaiting The Collapse. Paul’s character Dope Rider (the skeleton in question) drives around the desert, getting into all manner of high jinx and spouting cosmic philosophy, highlighting the absurdities of life, death and the American mythos. Certainly, we were looking at the comic strips while listening to it and something about its wide-screen vibes and the beautiful desert seemed to marry together." Serendipity has always played a strong role in The Utopia Strong, with the improvisatory approach of Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Mike York.  The band has summarily found ways to evolve its approach to facilitate the most adventurous exploratory missions possible. In this realm, the band’s formidable history - Kavus as a psychedelic and progressive polymath in the like of Gong, Cardiacs et al, and Mike in his work with Coil, Current 93 and as one of the UK’s foremost bagpipe makers - is transcended and usurped by their combined psychic chemistry. “All the pieces on Doperider began as purely electronic pieces, with Mike and Steve on modular synths and Kavus on an analogue synth” the band relate. “We were deliberately trying to not repeat ourselves and, for this reason, made a point of changing the model a little.” Doperider does indeed take the band down a variety of auditory pathways previously unexplored, and further into the realms of more surrealistic visions akin to the systems-built bliss of Caterina Barbieri, the unforgiving noisescapes of Hiro Kone or the alien soundtracks of latter-day Laurie Spiegel. “Certainly Steve's listening habits have changed somewhat since the first album, he has gone deeper into abstract electronica and musique concrete as well as becoming increasingly adept with his modular set up. This seems to have formed a backbone to how the music developed” reflects Kavus.  ‘Harpies’, which features the vocals of Katharine Blake (Miranda Sex Garden/Medieval Baebes) Elsewhere curveballs strike such as the strident and stentorian curtain-raiser ‘Prophecy’, which utilises the influence of Magma and Zeuhl music. “It sits better at the start of the album as otherwise it would disrupt the decent into the beautiful hell hole that unfolds” as Steve notes. Essentially however, the mission of The Utopia Strong remains intact - to offer a transformative pathway to wonders anew. “Well, we are making psychedelic music or, if you will, head music” reflects Kavus. “It's certainly not minimalist. Often after our shows people will remark that we had made them feel like they were on drugs. That's the idea really. Hopefully we’ve done justice to the comic book character Dope Rider and that he’d have loved riding along on his Harley, with the wind blowing through his rib cage, listening to this album. If the audience choose the psychonaut road, then we are delighted to have been of service.”