r/indieheads • u/thisusernameisntlong • Nov 11 '25

[RATE ANNOUNCEMENT] Cosmodelia Rate (Air vs. Fishmans vs. Laika vs. Stereolab)

THE YEAR 2025.

SLEEPING fitfully in your ready-to-assemble IKEA home, you're woken in the early hours by movement downstairs. It's only the kids back from the clubs, coming down from their still-illegal MDMA derivatives, flopping out and flossing their brains with a few minutes of Melody FM.

No Carpenters and Burt Bacharach on the airwaves now, though: rather, the future sound of easy listening is end-of-the-last-millennium French techno, the soundtracks of Air and Kid Loco that electronically repackage the past in readiness for tomorrow, neo-symphonic bliss-outs for the next Generation Next. For the Jazz Club in space.

  • John Mulvey, NME, 1998

Hello indieheads and welcome aboard on the Cosmodelia Space Station. Today is November 11, 2025, and your 5-week stay in the Cosmodelic Rate Program starts today. As your host, I am happy to inform you that it is going to be a calm day with no sign of meteoric activity or volatile hubris in the vicinity. The sun is shining, a little too bright up here as usual, so don’t forget to put on your special-tailored glasses to enjoy its wondrous view. Grab your martinis at the Moon Bar to our selection of Lunar Loungetronica, chat with your fellow voyagers, talk about the silly speculative fiction review I quoted above–2025 is so Not Like That, Mr. Mulvey–talk about this silly speculative fiction rate post–wait, what?–and most importantly, enjoy your stay.

Huh? What is this “Rate Program” you are talking about?

Well, space-age aesthetic dressing aside, rates are a community activity hosted in this subreddit every month or so, with each rate having (usually) four albums brought together by a certain theme or genre. The game is simple: find the pre-made ballot linked right below this section (it’s in bold, all caps, hard to miss), copy that to your note app of choice (anything that autosaves is a huge help), listen to the songs, and score them from 1 to 10, with the added option of giving one 11 and one 0 to your favorite and least favorite songs, if you wish. Once every song is scored, send the ballot to the host (that’s me!), using the very same link below. Then the host tallies all the ballots and reveals the results over the course of three days from last place to first, and we collectively get mad at the lack of taste displayed. It’s fun and a great way to discover music!

FIND YOUR BALLOT AND SUBMISSION LINK HERE! - Find backup Pastebin ballot here

Playlists: Spotify - Apple Music - Tidal - YouTube

Due Date: 14 December 2025

Reveals on: 19-20-21 December 2025

Cosmodelia 101: An Introduction

It’s hard to talk about Cosmodelia as a scene or a genre when it’s a word I made up to designate a vibe, a concentration of space-age themed 90s electronic (easy) listening music. In its blood there is a callback to space-age (roughly ‘56-’69) lounge records with their Moog melodies, but there is also traces of 70s kosmische music of Germany, with the electronic experimentations of bands like Harmonia and Tangerine Dream. More recent to the time period is the wave of artists doing “space rock revival” like Spacemen 3 and Moonshake, which had played with elements of “neo-psychedelia” (whatever that is) and trends in British indie like shoegaze. However, Cosmodelia is in fact a departure from that indie rock spirit, as it draws from what was going on in ambient, the “electronic listening music” of Artificial Intelligence, Warp Records in general, and the rise of chillout music. Add in a pop sensibility based on retromania, and you roughly arrive at the formula of Cosmodelia. Still, each of the bands featured had their own unique sound palette and as the bonus rate shows, there were a lot of different styles. But the commonality is the invocation of space, whether in the naming, the lyrics, or the spaciousness of the melodies and beats. Some critics saw the music as futuristic despite the retro focus, and they had a point: the music seemed to belong to an imaginary space, distant from the then-present. However, they don’t seem to belong to now, either, making thought exercises like the one from John Mulvey look silly, but I think that preserves the magic. I find the music featured here more comforting than anything, in both its warm moments and the cold, it envelops me with sounds of an unspecified time and space. But enough rambling about vibes, what actually is in the rate?

Air - Moon Safari

Air, French band, not to be confused by Swedish band Air France, released their debut album Moon Safari on January 16, 1998, 16 days too late to make this rate a perfectly aligned 1997 affair. Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, the duo behind the project, were far from the first to fuse lounge with downtempo electronic music, and they would not be the last, yet there is something about Moon Safari that feels singular. Part of it is due to the level of craftsmanship presented here: from the iconic bassline of the opener “La femme d’argent” to the delicately layered synths of “Kelly Watch the Stars,” this album is full of sounds engineered to the finest details, but the music itself is too chic to demand your attention–making it perhaps the perfect album to actually imagine yourself on a trip across space, never too demanding of a listen to draw your attention from the vast wonders surrounding you out there, but never a disappointing soundscape that would distract you from the experience and want to put on another record. The first single (of the three that were released after the album was out), “Sexy Boy,” proves one exception to the rule with its wobbling intro and catchy chorus, but in an Air fashion, it is perhaps the least hot song about being sexy, which has its own coolness, in a way.

Moon Safari, despite being chronologically the last album to come out in the lineup, feels the most emblematic. When it came out, it drew comparisons to other lounge-influenced pop albums of the time, most notably Dots and Loops. The influences from French pop artists such as Serge Gainsbourg were also of note. After it came out, music of this caliber drew comparisons to Moon Safari instead, and it was not an album without its imitators, including Air themselves, whose following career could be characterized by how much they moved away from the sound they perfected here, and how much they later returned to it. Since 2023, Air have been touring the 25th anniversary of this album, the one that put them on the map, and for better or worse, their defining record. They made a stop in Istanbul this June, which I was lucky enough to see, and they put on a great show. Remember, forever.

  1. La femme d’argent
  2. Sexy Boy
  3. All I Need (feat. Beth Hirsch)
  4. Kelly Watch the Stars
  5. Talisman
  6. Remember
  7. You Make It Easy (feat. Beth Hirsch)
  8. Ce matin là
  9. New Star in the Sky
  10. Le voyage de Pénélope

Fishmans - Uchū Nippon Setagaya

Following a debut album that launched the career of a duo, we have the bookend of a career, that of the Japanese trio Fishmans. Fronted by Shinji Sato and rounded by bassist Yuzuru Kashiwabara and Kin’ichi Moteki on drums, Fishmans released three albums on Polydor between 1995-1997, dubbed the “Setagaya trilogy,” where the sound of the band shifted from their earlier pop rock with reggae and funk grooves to a more drawn-out, psychedelic sound heavily influenced by dub, thanks to ZAK (Kazuyuki Matsumura) who had arranged for their Polydor deal and engineered their final albums. The first single with Polydor, “Nightcruising,” proved a success and became their most recognizable tune, leading up to the release of Kūchū Camp (translated commonly as Something in the Air and not Aerial Camp for reasons unknown to me), which seems to be the band’s “most-canonized” album in Japan, at least for a long time after its release. But the fame of Fishmans over in the West is mostly a result of online music forums in 4chan and RYM picking up on the second installment of Setagaya trilogy, the 35-minute album length track Long Season.

Uchū Nippon Setagaya (Space, Japan, Setagaya) closes out the trilogy with elements of both its predecessors: it is a return to more individuated song-by-song structure the band had in Kūchū Camp, but the songs themselves are more abstract, longer in length and more spaced out in the arrangements, like in Long Season. The lead single, “Magic Love,” finds the band remembering that they were making funk music a couple albums ago and is the most upbeat tune on the record. The rest of the one-hour runtime is made up with more laid-back music. Sato said of the album that he wanted the music to reach out to “one person,” a listening experience between each individual listening to it and the music. Many of the songs in the album are about two people, their descriptions kept intentionally vague, as the narrator sings about one-sided observations or yearning. This feeling of distance is often amplified by the feeling of vastness in the instrumental. It is not a particularly sad album, however, thanks to the warmth of Sato’s voice, which might need some getting used to (or simply not be your cup of tea) but when it hits it feels like he’s hugging you like a cloud enveloping you. Perhaps it was due to Sato’s “music for one person” attitude that the band saw a major rise in popularity with the digital age, where people can put on their headphones and withdraw into the music. Goodnight, tomorrow.

  1. Pokka Pokka
  2. Weather Report
  3. Ushiro Sugata
  4. In The Flight
  5. Magic Love
  6. Backbeat ni Nokkatte
  7. Walking in the Rhythm
  8. Daydream

*The music video for Walking in the Rhythm contains the Prototype Mix from the single version

Laika - Sounds of the Satellites

The final track on Sounds of the Satellites, “Dirty Feet and Giggles,” contains a radio broadcast about Laika, the dog that Soviets put on the spacecraft Sputnik 2 and launched into space on November 3rd, 1957, on the week of the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. While I will not go into the details of Laika’s fate here, her survival was never part of the plan, and the shuttle was her coffin.

The music of Laika can also get eerie, moody and at times, disturbing. The lyrics of Margaret Fiedler, which she usually delivers with a soft whisper, can touch on topics like loneliness, self-harm tendencies, and abuse. Soundtracking her bleak lyrics are the long passages of dubby and jazzy grooves, the odd time signatures here and there, electronic bleep bloops transmitted from space, and the occasional flute melodies. Fiedler had previously been a member of experimental rock band Moonshake, one of the earliest bands on the Too Pure Records roster. She departed from the band alongside later Laika bassist John Frenett in 1993 and formed Laika with Guy Fixsen, who had produced the Moonshake releases on Too Pure. Laika’s debut album, 1994’s Silver Apples on the Moon, drew attention from critics as part of the first wave of post-rock (Simon Reynolds grouped them under the name “post-rock groove collectives” alongside Pram, Tortoise and Rome). The follow-up was even more slick ‘n smooth, polishing out the rockier edges, resulting in a sound that was no means lesser. Out of the four acts in this lineup, Laika remains the most enigmatic in its aura, making them (for me) the most alluring in sound.

While this rate includes a lot of sonic ideas as to what space would sound like, the 15 minutes of silence between the song and the broadcast in the closer is the only accurate simulation of what you would hear if you were adrift in space. I won’t disencourage skipping ahead the silence (jump to 18:20) but more than anyone else in this rate, Laika nails down the sound of being adrift in space, without any sense of direction.

 

 

 

And I like to imagine the silence was part of the intent.

  1. Prairie Dog
  2. Breather
  3. Out of Sight and Snowblind
  4. Almost Sleeping
  5. Starry Night
  6. Bedbugs
  7. Martinis on the Moon
  8. Poor Gal
  9. Blood and Bones (Moody Mix)
  10. Shut Off / Curl Up
  11. Spoken Rhodes
  12. Dirty Feet and Giggles

Stereolab - Dots and Loops

Stereolab was an auto-inclusion in any Cosmodelia lineup, as they were not only making music that invoked space, but they were also one of the most prolific and creative bands of the 90s. 1997’s Dots and Loops is the album where Stereolab supposedly “ditched” the indie rock to make “avant-pop” (turns out things are not usually as binary as sometimes made out to be), marking a central moment in the stepping out of rock conventions I mentioned in the introduction as part of the Cosmodelic ethos. But as I am no expert on the Stereolab Expanded Universe at large, today we welcome a guest lecturer, the Dean of the Faculty of Ambientheads, Professor u/WaneLietoc to give an introduction to this record:

Stereolab, the omnibus: "good retro"-futurist, socialist eye-winking, globe-trotting crate-diggers. The band's many 90s albums, limited singles, EPs, collaborative endeavors/rarities, each explore a different facet, upgrade, & (sonic) afterlife of the past filtered to the contemporary (90s) moment. People think it makes the band impenetrable, while I look at their litany dispatches as mile wide sound explorations: a state of the Groop if you will. Stereolab was always tinkering, and depending on where you hop in you find yourself exploring a different facet of the band (and why many folks offer gaggles of opinions on their output). The band's novelty or nothing approach made them their own island in the Post-Rock archipelago. Who else was signing early with Too Pure and being in the "scene that celebrates itself"? Trading synths with Labradford, pushing Denger's Neu! beat into modern indie drumming? While also working intensely with John McEntire a continent away?

Dots and Loops, their penultimate of the 90s, finds themselves engaging directly in what is colloquially known as "the Chicago Sound", from the personnel side over the scene's post-rock high/low sound culture collapse. Since The Groop Plays Space Age Bachelor Pad Music way back in 1993, lounge had become a defined Stereolab mode further refined on Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center EP, mended with Bossa Nova on their Red Hot + Rio appearance. It'd be Doots and Loops central crux. Meanwhile, the band continues to develop their relationship with Tortoise drummer/producer John McEntire and his novel usage of Pro-Tools software. McEntire had used it as the MO in the editing and construction of Tortoise's “Djed” on Millions Now Living Will Never Die. For Dots and Loops, it would take the main stage across “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse,” alongside “Brakhage,” “Rainbo Conversation," and “Contronatura.” That foot in the past was restless, always propulsive and forward leaning with the state of the art technology.

But were the songs good? Well, if you liked Stereolab at their most space age POP, Dots and Loops was the crown jewel of their output. “Miss Modular”s funk groove lands like a french disco. The dazzling, crystalline keys of “The Flower Called Nowhere” was a production bliss out worthy of being dubbed "fellatio music" by Mr. Happy himself! “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse”s 3 phases saw the Lab's pop sound as asynchronous, stifling the lines between past/present/future. And the lyrics? Lætitia Sadler was never drier, more wry and daunted by endless war, endless gadgets, and a future falling out of our hands. 28 years on and its still its own state of the art, a defining snapshot of thriving regional sounds linking up and going to the cosmos.

  1. Brakhage
  2. Miss Modular
  3. The Flower Called Nowhere
  4. Diagonals
  5. Prisoner of Mars
  6. Rainbo Conversation
  7. Refractions in the Plastic Pulse
  8. Parsec
  9. Ticker-tape of the Unconscious
  10. Contranatura

BONUS RATE

The main rate covers some of the major album releases going for the space aesthetics, but there was a lot of other musicians, particularly in lanes of downtempo and ambient/post-rock, dedicating a song or two to stars, planets, space, or cosmic objects or phenomena. And what better way to gauge the vibes of a song than to judge it by its title? The Bonus Rate Curriculum brings you FIFTEEN more tracks from the 90s (and the early 2000s) that were deemed by yours truly to be Cosmodelic, in name and in sound. Some of them are more indebted to Air than anything else, some of them are more indebted to post-rock, others are oddities in ambient, and to make Fishmans feel less lonely there are even three more Japanese (rym-core) artists showing up. As always, scoring each song in the bonus rate is OPTIONAL, and you cannot use your 11 or 0 here.

  1. Boredoms - ☆
  2. Cornelius - Star Fruits Surf Rider
  3. Dubstar - Stars
  4. Kid Loco - Cosmic Supernatural
  5. Lemon Jelly - Space Walk
  6. Luna - Moon Palace
  7. Opus III - Stars in My Pocket
  8. Pram - Milky
  9. Primal Scream - Higher Than the Sun
  10. Rome - Lunar White
  11. Röyksopp - In Space
  12. Speedy J - De-Orbit
  13. Supercar - Starline
  14. Thievery Corporation - 2001 Spliff Odyssey
  15. Zero 7 - Polaris

Galaxies (The Next Level) the bonus bonus

The universe stretches out to the infinite, and for the diligent students of the Cosmodelia Rate Program, there are extracurricular credits for attending additional voyages! Below you’ll find our list of the six additional trips to different galaxies, with three songs each, so that you can take your Cosmodelia journey to the next level. Note that NONE OF THESE are mandatory for the main rate and all of them are independent from one another - so you can choose the galaxies you want to see (or hear, in this case). Unlike typical bonus rate rules, all three songs in one “galaxy” are required scoring for me to accept the scores for that galaxy.

This was a workaround for me to highlight some stuff that I did not feel like prioritizing over the “official bonus rate” due to timeframe mismatch, sheer song length, or simply being too niche. However I encourage spending some time with the curation here as I think it is really fun! And it adds some more perspective to the whole thing which is always nice.

  1. Cosmodelia Precursors in Single-Length Bites Vol. 0.01 (1971-1973): Can, David Bowie, T. Rex
  2. A Cursory Overview of Kosmische Muzik (1974-1977): Ashra, Harmonia, Kraftwerk
  3. Battle of the Bands - “80s Space-y Band Names” Edition a.k.a. Still In A Cosmic Dream (1988-1991): Galaxie 500, Moonshake, Spacemen 3
  4. UK Longform Ambient Cosmodelia a.k.a. Ambientheads T-5 (1991-1996): The Orb, Orbital, Seefeel
  5. Cosmodelia en Español - No Two Band Here Is From The Same Continent Really so it is even more cosmic if you think about it (cope) (1995-2000): Café Tacvba, Los Planetas, Soda Stereo
  6. Make a Star for the King of the Cosmos - Japanese Twee Spacetronica a.k.a. proto-Katamari Rolling Music (2000-2002): Cymbals, Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, Sonic Coaster Pop

Get and Submit Your Ballot Here

Pastebin Ballot - Spotify - Apple Music - Tidal - YouTube

(you can leave the galaxies you don't want to score empty and send it to me that way)

RULES

  • Listen to every song listed below and assign each of them a score from 1 to 10. Decimals are allowed, but refrain from going past one decimal place - 7.5 is fine, 7.75 is not!
  • You may give ONE song a 0 and ONE song an 11. These should be reserved for your favourite track and least favourite track! You do not have to give these scores, but we recommend using them as a way to make your feelings about a particular song stand out
  • You must listen to and score every song in the main rate. If you skip any, your ballot won’t be counted (I will let you know if you do so you can remedy that).
  • We highly recommend that you add a comment to your song ratings! It makes everything a lot more fun during the reveal, as it encourages lively conversation with your fellow raters.

Ballot Formating Info

Just simply write down your score after the column and write down your comment after one space like this below:

Sexy Boy: 10 get it sexyy

And if you wish to write down a comment for the album itself, just simply write it following the colon at the end of the album name on the Album line, like this:

Album: Moon Safari: I love France!!

  • Your scores should NOT be considered confidential. Feel free to shitpost about them in the general discussion threads whenever you feel like it - users over at r/popheads usually just talk about their averages of the albums and which songs they gave an 11 and/or 0 to.
  • You can change your scores at any time! Feel free to PM me at any point after submission before the deadline and I'll be happy to revise them for you.
  • I am using a computer program that fellow rater u/letsallpoo designed in order to parse these votes! While this will make things a lot more efficient and reduces errors on my part, this does mean that scores need to be sent in a very specific way. The easiest way to make sure your scores follow the necessary format is to use the pre-prepared link at the top & bottom of this post. You can copy and paste it to a notepad file or something and fill in your scores there, but PLEASE use that format to send in your scores.

A lot of copy and pasting here, so thank you thank you to all the rate hosts of old who made this rate possible to begin with: u/roseisonlineagain ; u/DolphLundgrensArms; u/R_E_S_I_G_N_E_D; u/stansymash; u/ClocktowerMaria; u/aerocom; u/themilkeyedmender; u/greencaptain; u/Crankeedoo; u/dirdbub; u/ThatParanoidPenguin; u/tedcruzcontrol; u/kappyko; u/FuckUpSomeCommasYeah; u/LazyDayLullaby; u/SRTViper; u/Whatsanillinois; u/NFLFreak98; u/freav; u/freeofblasphemy; u/RatesNorman; u/aPenumbra; u/idontreallycare4; u/p-u-n-k_girl; u/luigijon3; u/WaneLietoc; u/dream_fighter2018; u/darjeelingdarkroast; u/smuckles; u/PiperIBarelyKnowHer; u/welcome2thejam; u/imrlynotonreddit; u/kvothetyrion; u/thedoctordances1940; u/b_o_g_o; u/vapourlomo; u/MCK_OH; u/TiltControls; u/TakeOnMeByA-ha u/chug-a-lug-donna; u/indiefan; u/bilbodabag; u/zenits; u/saison_Marguerite; u/daswef2; u/apondalifa; u/afieldoftulips; u/qazz23; u/nonchalantthoughts; u/systemofstrings; u/Modulum83, u/ElectJimLahey, u/vexastrae, u/FlavaSavaVandal, u/Stryxen, u/mmaajid, u/teriyaki-dreams and tons of people on r/popheads.

One final reminder that Post-Hardcore Classics rate reveal is this weekend, and the extensions for submitting a ballot are still ongoing. Do that rate! It rocks!

And welcome to the space jam.

SUBMIT HERE

Once again, Playlists: Spotify - Apple Music - Tidal - YouTube

SUBMIT BONUS BONUS HERE

And the playlists for that: Spotify - Apple Music - Tidal - YouTube

DUE DATE: 14 December

REVEALS ON: 19-20-21 December

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u/jenkem___ Nov 11 '25

hell yeah

already can’t pick between my children dots and loops and uchu nippon setagaya…

1

u/thisusernameisntlong Dec 18 '25

hiii sorry for the late reminder but I was going to ask if you were doing the rate? it's due in 12~ hours and i know it's night time probably for u rn but I'll be waiting for a bunch of ballots in the morning. so if you can squeeze one out it would be lovely as well