MIND DE-CODER 36

       To listen to the show scroll to the bottom of the page

‘Trust in the you of now…Don’t be frightened to display your talents…use an old idea…just carry on.’
                                                              Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies

JON BROOKS     LOCATION

Location is the opening track from hauntological artist Jon Brooks new album SHAPWICK, released 2013, in which he creates a musical landscape based upon the imaginary impression of the area around the small Somerset village of Sedgemoor. It’s a disorientating introductory piece, in which Brooks (otherwise known for his work as the Advisory Circle) picks up the roar of a motorway and compresses it to a screaming hiss before allowing the album to unfold into a series of elegant melodies shrouded in unnerving mystique.

So that will be Mind De-Coder 36 underway, then.

TAME IMPALA     MIND MISCHIEF

I absolutely love this track – it’s the sound of exquisite longing and unrequited love, psychedelic style; or I might just have been persuaded of this by the video. Taken from their 2012 release, LONERISM, Tame Impala are reaching for the giddy heights. Check out the video here  

BOREDOMS     CIRCLE

I first came across the cosmic Japanese rock group Boredoms whilst reading Julian Cope’s mighty tome, Copendium – An Expedition into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Underworld, in which he wrote that the first time he heard their album VISION, CREATION, NEWSUN (released 1999) it was like ‘a deluge overload euphoria had descended from the highest heavens and whipped me screaming, whirling, teenaged and drooling into my first acid trip/first hard on/first astral projection into a region of unfathomable and untameable NEWNESS. . .I felt like the mystery of all music had been boiled up over one Hindu kalpa (8,640,000,000 years of human reckoning) and had then been distilled through this Boredoms album’. As you might imagine that had me clicking on Amazon so quickly my fingers left lysergic blurs across the keypad – I had to own this album. 

BONGWATER     NICK CAVE DOLLS

 Lurid, outrageous, mind-bendingly psychedelic – Bongwater’s third album, 1990’s THE POWER OF PUSSY, is both a brilliant feminist manifesto and dissection of just how fucked-up America has become. Nick Cave dolls? I want one too.

THE FOCUS GROUP     HOPE HODGSONE

Hope Hodgsone is taken from THE ELEKTRIK KAROUSEL, (2013), a wind-up box of pastoral tapestry gone wrong from Julian House’s Focus Group, released on the ever wonderful Ghost Box record label, home of all things hauntological. It’s the usual blend of the quaint and melancholy with the trippy and the slightly sinister with added psychedelic overtones, processed instrumentation, public information films and refracted folk. This stuff is just never getting old for me.

SOFT HEARTED SCIENTISTS     MONSTERS OF THE ID

The release of a new album by The Soft Hearted Scientists always brings with it the thrill of anticipation around these here parts; but in truth, the last 3 albums have failed to reach the giddy pastoral heights of playful psychedelia set down on their debut album release, UNCANNY TALES FROM THE EVERYDAY UNDERGROWTH. Maybe, like the Beta Band before them, they just promised too much with their early releases. So with all that in mind, you’ll be pleased to learn that the new album by Cardiff’s Soft Hearted Scientists, FALSE LIGHTS (2013), is the bee’s knee’s – an unashamedly fanciful, observant and playful album of psychedelic loveliness, slightly darker in tone than much of their previous work and nearly, oh so nearly as good as Uncanny Tales… 

TEMPLES     SHELTER SONG

New, highly regarded, psychedelic movers Temples have, at the time of writing, only released one single so far, 2012’s gorgeously shimmering Shelter Song, on which they get their take on the Beatles/Monkees/Byrds thing just right. Singer James Bagshaw sounds sweetly intoxicated, but has anyone else noticed he’s the spitting image of Luther, the unhinged leader of The Rogues in Walter Hills' The warriors?

ANTON BARBEAU     MUSHROOM BOX, 1975

Something of a lost psychedelic classic, Anton Barbeau’s IN THE GARDEN OF THE APPLE SUN, released 2006, contains homage to Syd Barrett and The Kinks in his loving recreation of a late-60’s vibe. As you can guess from Mushroom Box,1975, the album delivers pop hook after pop on this, his twelfth album (!), mixed with a pleasingly anglophile (he’s American) eccentricity and a certain tripped out sense of psychedelic whimsy. (I’d never heard of him either).

MOON WIRING CLUB     TRACK 4

A little filler from the Moon Wiring Club’s 2011 release CLUTCH IT LIKE A GONK (GONK EDITION) on which Ian Hodgson offers up 20 or so untitled little vignettes of a hauntological nature.

PERRY LEOPOLD     THE WINDMILL

This lovely track is taken from Perry Leopold’s second album, CHRISTIAN LUCIFER, released 1973 and as fine a slice of acid folk as you could ever hope to hear. Leopold is often credited as inventing the genre we now know as acid folk - in the States, at least (I have my own opinions) – but none can deny that this an astonishing mix of rococo-styled grace and wispy beauty, invoking everything from medieval madrigals to Bach and Vivaldi to Middle Eastern influences and to west-coast psychedelia and, as you might expect, it’s gorgeous.

LAUGHING SOUP DISH     ACIDLAND

LSD, see? Do you get it? Laughing Soup Dish were a lo-fi psychedelic garage band from the 80’s who recorded two albums of the neo-psychedelic variety in authentic 60’s stylee featuring ridiculous psychedelic lead guitar, an assault of over-dubbed effects and self-consciously trippy lyrics. I played Acidland, from their debut release, WE ARE THE DISH, (1987), to my daughter Daisy the other day, and she asked whether they were deliberately singing like that.

“Yes”, I replied.

JULIAN COPE     RAVE-O-LUTION

A special treat, this; a new recording from Julian Cope timed to coincide with the release of his new album, PSYCHEDELIC REVOLUTION (2013) from which I expect you’ll be hearing a track or two shortly enough. 

Rave-o-lution is a 45 minute mix of instrumental themes from PSYCHEDELIC REVOLUTION and punishing grooves from as-yet-unreleased instrumentals fashioned into ‘cross-faded endurothons of Funkadelic freakouts, commune chants and lavish, monolithic Detroit grooves’ presented as a Non-Stop Ecstatic Protest E.P. It is, by a long shot, the best thing he’s done for ages that puts me in mind of his Interpreter-era remixes – always a good place for me. 

I’m playing the whole 45 minutes because this is the Archdrude at his very finest and I’m too in thrall of the whole package to edit any out. It’s available as a download from Cope’s website here 

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