Zodiac

by Richie Unterberger
A group of session musicians teamed up as Zodiac to perform the astral-camp psychedelia of Mort Gorson (music) and Jacques Wilson (words) on their 1967 album, Cosmic Sounds. The result was something like a cross-bred monster of Sunset Strip psychedelic rock and the kind of incidental music that you heard on the original Star Trek when aliens appeared on the screen. Each of the 12 tracks is named after a sign of the horoscope (thus the title Cosmic Sounds, get it?) Narrator Cyrus Faryar aims for a balance between Timothy Leary and Rod McKuen as he intones recklessly spacy evocations of each phase of the cycle. It must be said that the backing tracks (there is no "singing" on the record) are rather imaginative, particularly the electronic instruments of Paul Beaver. It's hard to tell if this naive exercise in psychedelia was sincerely naive or a not-so-cosmic joke. But for what it's worth, in 1996 it was cited by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues as one of the inspirations for Days of Future Passed.