Brian Bennett • Voyage
DJM Records DJF 20532
33-RPM LP
In 1979 I fell in love with the music on one of my dad’s cassette tapes. The tape was unmarked, but was bright yellow. A sticker on the tape’s case contained what seemed to be a track listing, and we referred to the tape as “Voyage”. My dad claimed he got the tape from one of the people who worked for the (now defunct) record company. Years of searching (remember, this is pre-Google!) turned up nothing.
Then, in 1993, I was camping in the Canadian Rockies with a couple of friends. We were watching an old video about glaciers at the Columbia Icefield when suddenly I heard the opening chord of Voyage’s first track. I wrote to the producers asking what the track was, but that information was lost in the mists of time. A few years later, I heard part of another track on a new video about BC’s coastline. Again, I wrote to the producers, but still no luck.
Fast forward to 1998, as I’m preparing to move to Canada. Internet searches for “Voyage” and “Force” had too many hits to be of any use, so grasping at straws I tried using the track listing as the search terms. I finally hit pay dirt: a Brian Bennett fan had created a discography web page, and right there was the complete album details! The record was indeed called Voyage, and it had been re-released on CD relatively recently. I ordered a couple of copies (one each for my dad and I), and asked the discography author if he had the record on vinyl. He didn’t, but knew someone who did and put me in touch with him. I contacted the vinyl owner, and after I shared with him the story of my long search, he was happy to sell me his vinyl copy of Voyage. After nearly 20 years of searching, I finally had a copy! (Even better, it was the original gatefold sleeve release. Later versions have a single sleeve.)
Voyage consists of six instrumental tracks, each of which makes heavy use of synthesizers, in addition to bass guitar and drums. The sound quality is passable—but definitely not “audiophile”! But that doesn’t matter, because the music is wonderful (ignore the misguided subtitle suggesting “a journey into discoid funk”). If synthesized music is your thing, check this one out—if you can find it!
Incidentally, the tracks I heard in the videos were the title track and Ocean Glide respectively.