“Dinosaurs”

"Dinosaurs" is a gorgeous and other-worldly collaboration between Sky Saxon and psychedelic trance duo The Lemurians. Sky released this melodic track, with its tribal drumming and shared vocals, on his 2001 mail-order CD-r Golden Vaults Volume 1: Timeless. It was evidently recorded not too long before that. Although the CD is now next to impossible to find, "Dinosaurs" is excellent and weird and it makes the disc worth seeking out.

"Dinosaurs" is in fact a remake of a track called "Atlantians". It first appeared on the 1977 8-track tape-only Golden Sunrise album. That release featured several members of Father Yod’s “Source Family” group, including Sky Saxon, but Sky did not contribute to "Atlantians". (It was sung by another member of the loose-knit group.)

Strangely, one verse of "Atlantians" (and this "Dinosaurs") mentioned Lemurians:

We are Lemurians, reincarnated
Up to our old tricks again
Roaming this Earth just to soak up their worth
And go back to her again

Did this song actually inspire the name of The Lemurians music project? Hmm. Maybe. Anyway, where "Atlantians" was a slow psychedelic rock groove with a compelling melody, "Dinosaurs" is a complete rethinking of the tune. This isn’t the murky, druggy 1970s anymore. It’s the high-tech, druggy new millennium!

Musically, "Dinosaurs" is full of hypnotic synthetic percussion, bubbling incessantly under careening synthesizer arcs that spin around and within your head as you listen. It would have a tense atmosphere if not for the fact that it is so free, so disconnected from the corporeal world. How can you feel any anxiety if your soaring this high?

But the appealing, yearning melody is intact. And something that sets "Dinosaurs" apart from Sky Saxon’s usual music is that relatively conventional vocal melody. Sky could belt out tunes, no doubt; but he rarely went for something this lovely and complex. Because he sings in a sort of mini-chorus with The Lemurians, he sounds a lot more disciplined than he often did. He had to hit his marks so the vocal tracks would match up. And, his voice is warm; he’s not lost in a haze as he often was, he’s just relaxed and, for once, in on the joke.

The lyrics of "Dinosaurs" suit the music well, just as they did the original version. “We are the Atlantians,” they coo. “Up to our old tricks again.” There’s a playfulness, a winking smirk behind the methodical snap of the performance. By the end, Sky is invoking his beloved “Ya Ho Wha” as the other singers obediently follow suit.

Who Were Trance Duo The Lemurians?

The Lemurians was a “psytrance” project by two guys called Jan Osh Riemann (“JanOsh”) and Andy “Shiva” Kuchenbauer. They began in 1999 but it is unclear how the German pair crossed paths with Sky Saxon or how "Dinosaurs" came to be recorded. JanOsh left the psychedelic trance game in 2004 but returned ten years later with new projects.

The Lemurians, Mt. Shasta, and Sky Saxon: Heavy, Man!

“The Lemurians”, by the way, is an almost cosmically apt name for a Sky Sunlight Saxon collaboration. The name refers to the mythical lost continent of “Lemuria”, supposedly a land populated millions years ago by an ancient race of primates first posited in the mid-1800s. The emergence of plate tectonic theory ended rational discussion of Lemuria, but it has lived on in New Age philosophy and Tamil mythology.

One branch of thought teaches that the descendants of the Lemurians now live in underground complexes in Mt. Shasta in California. Mt. Shasta was a beloved getaway for one Sky Saxon, who recorded a lovely album there called A Spring Honeymoon With God & Family in 2004.

So in an odd way, Mt. Shasta does indeed seem to have had a supernatural pull on Sky and his quirky musical energies.

Anything Else Like “Dinosaurs”?

The track "Dinosaurs" was presumably recorded either in 1999 or 2000, or possibly sometime in 2001. The Golden Vaults Volume 1: Timeless CD-r was made available in 2001 so it must have been before that. I don’t know if The Lemurians ever recorded anything else with Sky Saxon, but if so it should be released. If it’s anything like as "Dinosaurs", the world needs to bask in its warm, ambient sensuality.

See more