Seems 1980 was a prolific year for Mark Shreeve, a year we've already established was the high point of this modern renaissance for art and music that some of us were privileged to have lived through.
It's all finished now of course, with the stragglers having to reinvent the wheel again and again, like landscape painters have had to do for the last 500 years or so; that's the future we have to look towards......the same things but done again,masquerading as something new.
I suppose this rehashing trend started in the seventies, with stuff like 'the Mod Revival' and the resurrection of 'Ska'.
The UK electronic underground of the early eighties was basically a revival of the German Kosmiche music of the early Seventies, repackaged as DIY Electronica, and set in small town provincial England......well no-one else was doing it were they.Very unfashionable in 1980, so if you wanted to hear music like this then you jolly well had to go and 'Do It Yourself', as the Post Punk manifesto would have stated if it had ever existed.
So, here we get a tape of Electronic Space Symphonies recorded in a bedroom in such an exotic location as the dying English seaside resort of Great Yarmouth rather than West Berlin.
It wasn't always like this for Mark however. He did get to work with a member of Tangerine Dream later on, his obvious inspiration. And, less impressive, infact downright criminal, he wrote several hit tunes for page three bimbo Samantha Fox in the mid-eighties!.....I assume those tunes weren't exploratory electronic odysseys like those on 'Phantom'.....would have been fun though to have Sam vocalising to something like this instead of whatever crud she inflicted upon our innocent discotheques?
DOWNLOAD this phantom to your machine HERE!