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‘There is no chance co-incidence or accident in a world ruled by divine order.’
George Clinton
HAWKWIND SILVER MACHINE
Blindingly obvious, I know, but what a way to start the show, eh? Give them something they can sing along to, that’s my motto. Can’t really go wrong with this – superior space-rock from 1972, recorded live at a Greasy Truckers benefit gig, the vocals were over-dubbed by Lemmy in the studio and a true classic was made. Marvelous.
THE FOOL FLY
A terrific little track this – winsome, fey, true-children-of-the-sixties psychedelic whimsy from The Fool who, of course, were major players in late-60’s swinging London, although not especially known for their one and only album, THE FOOL, released in 1968 when London, especially, swung like what a pendulum did (just check out the cover). The Fool effectively dressed London that year – a Dutch design collective, they designed much of the merchandise for The Beatles’ Apple boutique, and even painted the huge psychedelic mural outside the shop that the council painted over a few weeks later; dressed Cream and decorated their instruments too; designed the cover for The Incredible String Band’s THE 500 SPIRITS OR THE LAYERS OF THE ONION; stage costumes for Procul Harem; the clothes worn by The Beatle’s for the All You Need Is Love telly transmission; and, amongst other things, designed the album cover for The Hollies 1967 album EVOLUTION on which the band embraced the switched on world of psychedelia, which is probably how they got Graham Nash in to produce the album which, oddly enough, is not half as good as their paintings or their design aesthetic would have you suppose.
BEADY EYE SOUL LOVE
No particular fan of Beady Eye, me, but the new album BE has exactly three tracks on it that I will be playing on the show at some point over the coming weeks, this, Soul Love, being one of them.
JAHRTAL IM JAHRTAL
This lovely track is taken from the rather unpromisingly titled IM JAHTRAL - REPRISEN UND INSTRUMENTALSTURCKE, released by the curiously named Jahrtal in 2010. Jahrtal is the moniker under which Austrian musician, the splendidly named, Ewald Spiss releases his particular take on your pastoral Germanic neo-folk sound, employing acoustic string instruments, drones, church organs, hurdy-gurdies, flutes, bird song and the like into rapturous short pieces that flow into one another in an entirely pleasant manner. Good for the soul and your mental health.
It’s followed by a short piece entitled CRISPIAN READING FROM THE MAHABHARATA, featuring Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker pretty much doing what the title suggests. I’ve yet to include Kula Shaker into Mind De-Coder because, despite a handful of very fine singles from their debut album I’ve never quite took them seriously enough. This piece is taken from the 1996 Hey Dude single and tells you more or less everything you need to know about them.
UNIT 4 + 2 I WILL
If you’ve heard of Unit 4 + 2 at all it will because of their world-wide hit, Concrete and Clay which put them at the top of the charts in 1965. I Will features as the b-side to their rather less popular single 3.30 which, when released in 1969, failed to chart at all. However, this is the track the good doctor used to play down in the cellar of Alice in Wonderland back in the early 80’s and I’ve always had a soft spot for it.
TREES THE GARDEN OF JANE DELAWNEY
You’d be forgiven The Garden Of Jane Delawney was a re-working of a traditional olde English folk song from, oh, the Elizabethan times or thereabouts but was, in fact, written by Tobias Boshell as the title track for the band’s debut album, released in 1970, as part of the flowering acid-folk scene. Boshell seems to have a flair for this sort of thing because half the tracks on the album are re-workings of your traditional English folk song, while the other half are originals – but you’d be hard pressed to know which is which. The album was overlooked at the time and, in fairness, it doesn’t really compare very well to what the likes of Fairport Convention, or Pentangle were doing at the time, despite having a slightly more psychedelic edge, but The Garden Of Jane Delawney is a superb, hauntingly evocative track played on acoustic guitar and harpsichord and sung, beautifully, by vocalist Celia Humphris who imbues the song with the forlorn solemnity of a Jacobean lady, momentarily overwhelmed with feelings of ennui whilst sitting alone in a tiny walled herb garden one spring afternoon.
LIZ CHRISTINE RAIN
Brazilian sound-artist Liz Christine creates diaphanous musical atmospheres on her album SWEET MELLOW CAT, released 2012. The cat in question pops up all over the album, linking the distant thunderstorms, obsolete machinery, cut-up orchestras, white noise, Tropicana loops, Tibetan chimes, movie-dialogue and poetic descriptions on which she creates “a delicate movie for the ear and mind,” (as she explains on the sleeve notes). Her found-sound approach to these musical collages reflect her own love for black and white movies, old jazz divas and, well, cats and has a distinctly hauntological aesthetic which I find hauntingly familiar and, of course, dislocating at the same time.
JULIAN COPE GIRL-CALL
An almost throw away piece that opens Side 3 of Cope’s cheerfully schizophrenic album 20 MOTHERS, released 1995. Unlike every other track, it doesn’t rate a mention in the sleeve notes which comes in the form of a booklet which not only describes each song but includes 11 poems and illuminating quotations from the likes of George Clinton, Yoko Ono and Roberto Blanco. I’ve always thought it was quite the loveliest song on the album though.
FUNKADELIC MAGGOT BRAIN
I played a version of this a few weeks back by Welsh psychedelicists Sendelica who performed an excellent cover for the Fruits de Mer record label, but the original is a stone cold classic that I felt compelled to play by an agency greater than myself. From the band’s third release, 1971’s MAGGOT BRAIN, the title track features a searing guitar solo by Eddie Hazel who, according to legend, was told by George Clinton, high on LSD, to play as if he’d just heard his mother was dead, and then learned that it wasn’t true. The result was a 10 minute solo, recorded in one take, that is generally regarded as a mind-melting and, indeed, emotional apocalypse of sound.
AFRIRAMPO UMI
Umi is taken from the mind-blowing double album WE ARE UCHU NO KO, released 2010 and the final album by Japanese duo Afriampo, two nihonese rock chicks, Oni and Pika, who create the most enormous wigged out noise of truly berserk origins using just guitar and percussion that sometimes originates out of the most surprisingly pretty music imaginable. They have this really great vocal interplay thing going on as well, derived in part from staying with Pygmy tribes in Cameroon in 2004 that makes the whole thing fun, even when they collapse into sustained, free-rock freak-out assaults that sounds like an entire universe convulsing. Stunning.
PAVEMENTSAW GLABELLA-ASTRALA
Cosmic free-form ambiance from Sweden’s Pavementsaw whose 2012 release GLABELLA-ASTRALA offers up, for those of you who can take it, a 40 minute meditational piece, of which you get the full 40 minutes worth, of trance-inducing koschmiche soundscapes that give you something to explore while you consider the implications of the track’s opening statement – namely that at a quantum level all the rules we take for granted on the physical plane are re-written, and that time itself becomes unreal – the music itself seeks to prove the proposition by seemingly travelling forwards and backwards through time, unravelling its secrets, whilst sometimes it doesn’t seem to do very much at all; it simply exists as an otherwordly vibration held in your consciousness. I understand that it might not be for everyone but if you’ve the patience for it, and are as high as a kite, perhaps, then this track will unfold in on itself and reveal hidden pleasures - or you might find it irritating and boring and switch off the radio and have yourselves an early night instead. Who knows how you will respond. Only time will tell – and time, of course, doesn’t exist.
MARJ SNYDER GOD
After a track like that, what else could I end the show with other than a track called God by Marj Snyder who in 1971, at the age of 17, recorded and released the most rarest of things – a truly beautiful Christian-folk album, called A TIME OF PEACE. Everything I’ve read about this album suggests it has the power to quieten even the most cynical of souls, and even though I don’t share her conclusions about the world, there is something unashamedly reverential in her voice that I think speaks to many of us in some form or another. But that might just be me.
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