In Search of Spaces and a Disappearing Act
Flying Saucer Attack don't really enter the room. They're already there when you notice them. Their records don't announce a position or propose a future. They don't feel like interventions. They feel like something that was happening anyway, and happened to be recorded. That's part of why they still feel intact: nothing in them was optimized for discovery, misunderstanding, or revival.
It's tempting to situate them between shoegaze and post-rock, because we like timelines and bridges. But that framing tends to make them sound like a transitional object, a step between named things. In practice, they were never in a hurry to arrive anywhere else. If anything, they sound like they're standing still while categories drift past them. The music doesn't build, doesn't climax, doesn't resolve. It persists. That persistence isn't defiant. It's unbothered.
What's striking, especially now, is how little the music invites technical curiosity. There's haze, distortion, repetition—but not in a way that asks to be decoded. You don't find yourself wondering how it was done. The sound doesn't point back to its tools. It doesn't reward gear literacy. It doesn't perform its own construction. Whatever process got it there has already disappeared into the result, like weather into ground. The effect isn't mystique; it's irrelevance. The question simply never arises.
This is where the usual narratives fall apart. Flying Saucer Attack aren't anti-rock in a polemical way. They don't reject spectacle because spectacle is bad. They just don't seem to recognize it as a requirement. There's no virtuosity to admire, no emotional lever being pulled, no sense that the listener is being guided toward a takeaway. The music doesn't flatter attention. It doesn't punish inattention either. It just keeps going.
Later records shed some of the mud, but not the indifference. Acoustic elements don't introduce intimacy so much as exposure. Rhythms borrowed from elsewhere don't integrate or energize; they arrive slightly wrong, and remain that way. There's a sense of adjacency without assimilation. Signals from the city drift in, but they're not metabolized. The contrast isn't dramatized. It's simply allowed to exist.
This is maybe the quietest lesson in revisiting these albums now. Not that we should sound like this, or work like this, or go back. But that it's possible to make work that doesn't explain itself, defend itself, or angle for longevity, even if it does persist decades after the fact. Work that doesn't treat endurance as an achievement. The records don't feel preserved; they feel unattended. Which is different.
In a culture that increasingly frames everything as content—where even refusal becomes a stance and understatement becomes branding—Flying Saucer Attack offer something harder to instrumentalize. They weren't hiding, but they weren't signaling either. The music doesn't seem to care if it's found late, early, or not at all. That lack of concern isn't romantic. It's practical. It leaves very little for time to erode.
Interlude: The $16 CD
A Christmas present from Nancy—a Flying Saucer Attack t-shirt, unlicensed, ordered online—became the prompt to revisit albums stored on a NAS drive. During a break, another detour: Klang, a 2004 mini-LP by a post-Elastica trio, another Nancy discovery that she'd been quietly championing on her community radio show. Donna Matthews, bassist Isabel Waidner, drummer Keisuke Hiratsuka. Minimal, closer to The Raincoats than anything the 2000s indie landscape was producing. Then: gone.
Wikipedia offers fragments: "Matthews had a band called Klang in 2004 and is now a pastor in Totnes." A second-hand CD available on Discogs for $16. The only vinyl copy listed at $190. The mp3s exist on a now-defunct share blog, passed between hard drives by people who think someone else might want to hear it.
The label that released it—Blast First Petite—folded years ago. The rights are probably tangled or abandoned. There's no mechanism to pay the artist. The vinyl speculation enriches a reseller. The $16 CD goes to someone cleaning out their collection. The mp3 blog makes no pretense: it just shares the music because the music should be hearable.
This is the material reality for most music that falls outside the narrow band of "profitable enough to maintain." The industry extracts value during the brief window when something might sell, then abandons it the moment projections dip. What's left isn't "available" in any commercial sense—it's scattered across private collections, hard drives, file-sharing networks. The music persists despite the industry, not because of it.
The Space Between
Here's something you don't expect when you go looking for a 2004 mini-LP: an interview transcript. Matthews talking about heroin addiction, recovery, becoming a Christian at Holy Trinity Brompton, moving to a more conservative evangelical arts community, being told her worship experiences were "probably more of an emotional or aesthetic experience, not necessarily a Christian experience per se."
She describes her first experience speaking in tongues as "completely ecstatic... I didn't feel I was creating it. It was happening to me." She describes rehearsals with Klang where she'd sing in tongues and the other band members wouldn't notice because it blended into the improvisation. She describes becoming bored with rehearsing their set, preferring the improvisation because it "felt cathartic, felt healing, I felt elated."
The mini-LP wasn't a career move. It was documentation of a spiritual practice that happened to produce a record.
Later: a PhD at the University of Glasgow investigating "the intersection between charismatic Christian spirituality and avant-garde musical practice with a particular focus on improvisation." She's reading Jacques Maritain, wrestling with pneumatology, trying to build a framework that doesn't force her to choose between artistic integrity and spiritual authenticity. She's made an essay film that plays in galleries and universities and conservative evangelical spaces. She's doing pastoral work in Totnes. She's uploading improvisational music to YouTube—no promotion, no press, just offerings.
And here's where the cultural scripts skip a beat or two.
Alice Coltrane turns toward Vedic practice, builds an ashram, keeps making records. That's legible as mystical, aesthetically sophisticated, cosmopolitan. But charismatic Christianity? Speaking in tongues? That's embarrassing. Too close, too familiar, coded wrong. No aesthetic distance to make it safe.
The double standard is pure ideology. One kind of religious ecstasy gets curated because it photographs well. The other gets dismissed because it reminds people of the religion they're trying to distance themselves from. It's not about the experience—it's about which experience fits the cultural narrative of what "serious" spirituality looks like.
The snark is predictable. Ex-Britpop star finds religion. Casualty of fame, seeking solace. The narrative writes itself.
Except: she's not a casualty. She's someone who survived an extractive system, walked away from it entirely, and built a life that integrates music, theology, pastoral care, and ongoing creative practice on terms that have nothing to do with career, visibility, or market logic. She's practicing what Lewis Hyde calls gift economy: art that circulates because it wants to, not because it's been captured and sold. She's living what Brian Eno describes as surrender: creating conditions where something can move through you rather than being controlled by you.
She kept making music. She just stopped making it for anyone in the way the industry requires.
And she's discerning. In one section of the interview, she describes a worship service where healing was happening and someone was asking for money, receiving large donations. She holds both as true: genuine spiritual experience and exploitation. That's not naivety. That's someone refusing to collapse complex reality into simple categories.
What Persists
So this isn't an argument for relevance. Relevance is a moving target, and chasing it leaves footprints all over the work. Nor is it a warning that you've missed something important. Nothing here needs rescuing.
What remains visible from this particular angle?
Flying Saucer Attack made records that don't ask to be understood, don't perform their own significance, and endure precisely because they never tried to matter. They appear, they persist, they don't ask for an accounting.
Klang made one mini-LP during a moment when the music and the spiritual practice were indistinguishable, then evaporated because the point was never the record. The point was the process.
And Donna Matthews kept going—not away from music, not into a legible second act, but into a life that refuses to be captured by any single framework. Musician, theologian, pastor, improviser, researcher. Not former. Not reformed. Just: ongoing.
The $190 vinyl speculates on scarcity while the person who made it uploads improvisations to YouTube for free. The industry extracted what it could and moved on. What persists exists despite those systems, not because of them. Bootleg t-shirts, Discogs listings, mp3 blogs, YouTube channels, hard drives, occasional revisitations prompted by Christmas presents.
This isn't nostalgia. It's not a call to return. It's just: acknowledgment. Some things endure because they were never optimized for anything else. Some people keep making work because the work needs making, regardless of whether anyone's paying attention. Some trajectories don't resolve into narratives we know how to tell.
Discomfort is appropriate. Intrigue is warranted. And if you find yourself rooting for someone who's attempting something this difficult—building a life outside the systems that almost destroyed her, holding paradox without resolving it, refusing to simplify for anyone's comfort—that's probably the right response.
The music is still there. The questions remain open. Nothing's been settled. Which might be the point.