Valhalla Superdrive and the Cost of Winged Eyes Wide, 80 Minutes of a Style Called SpaceKrunch
An American Producer Blends Funky Played Instruments and Electronica Across 13 Long Tracks
Eighty minutes is a lot to ask of a listener. This album asks for almost all of them. It runs to 13 tracks, one with Carla Duailibe as a guest, and several pass seven minutes. Valhalla Superdrive released Winged Eyes Wide on 17 June 2022. It is the project of Kel Alexander, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. The music mixes funky, played instruments with electronic production.
Valhalla Superdrive’s Winged Eyes Wide is in the playlist below, its opener Trials among the experimental, krautrock and art rock this desk keeps in rotation. The album reached BestRock.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Press play, then read on for what its 80 minutes buy.
Electronic Music Let Played Instruments Back In, and Winged Eyes Wide Arrives in That Wave
So start with the record that made the idea famous. Daft Punk spent four years on Random Access Memories. Sessions ran from 2008 to 2012 in California, New York and Paris, and the album came out in May 2013. Daft Punk hired session musicians to play live parts. Daft Punk also kept the electronics to drum machines, a custom modular synthesizer and old vocoders. The album paid tribute to American music of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It won Album of the Year at the Grammys the following year.
After that, groove-led electronic music with real players in it stopped sounding like a throwback. It became one more way to build a record, and plenty of independent producers took it up. Valhalla Superdrive is one of them, working on a much smaller budget and at a much faster pace.
Where Valhalla Superdrive and Winged Eyes Wide Fit, Five Albums Into a Run of SpaceKrunch
Kel Alexander, a lifelong musician and visual artist, runs the project and produced the album. Winged Eyes Wide was the fifth Valhalla Superdrive album since the start of 2021. Before it came Birth Light, Lotus, Corazón Del Rey and The Crying Queens. He self-released it, and he gives the sound two names of his own, Postronica and SpaceKrunch.
The opener, Trials, sets the template. A funky bass leads, a twangy guitar cuts across it, and synth layers fill in behind. Dovestep builds instead on a stuttering synth beat, with spacey arpeggios and claps on top. Art Blonde is the longest track at more than nine minutes. It came out as a single in April 2022, two months ahead of the album. The tracks average about six minutes each. The album closes on We Go, the track with Duailibe. The music site Obscure Sound reviewed the album in June 2022, a week after its release.
Vangelis and the Blade Runner Score Sit Behind the Synths of Ascension Generator
Still, one track looks further back than 2013. Obscure Sound heard the plucky synths of Ascension Generator as part Blade Runner, part club funk.
Vangelis wrote that score, for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner in 1982. Vangelis built it on an emotive, synthesizer-based sound that borrows from the jazz of old film noir. The official soundtrack was held back for more than a decade, until 1994. By then the music had already shaped electronic music. Ascension Generator runs just over four minutes. Even so, it carries some of that mood into an album otherwise built for movement.
Since 2022 the project has kept the same pace. Two more albums carry a 2024 date, and White Light Mischief followed in May 2026.
Start With Trials and Dovestep From Winged Eyes Wide, Then Give Valhalla Superdrive the Full 80 Minutes
So start with Trials and Dovestep, which show both halves of the method in a quarter of an hour. Then give Art Blonde its full nine minutes. The whole album is a long sit, and that is its cost. What it buys is a producer working through one idea at full length. A funk bass line runs underneath most of it.
BestRock.News’s curator team: “Valhalla Superdrive makes long tracks that keep moving. Winged Eyes Wide earns most of its 80 minutes, and the bass is what carries it.”
Stream Winged Eyes Wide in the player above or on Apple Music, then follow Valhalla Superdrive on Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud and Instagram.
About The Author
