MIND DE-CODER 10

 MIND DE-CODER 10

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"Please God, fuck my mind for good"

                                                       Captain Beefheart

OS MUTANTES     PANIS ET CIRCENSES

Trippy and delightful post-SGT. PEPPER'S pop from that barely glimpsed genre - psychotropicadelia. Os Mutantes debut album, OS MUTANTES, released in 1968, showed that not only did the 60's happen in Brazil too; they seemed to be having more fun than the rest of us. The album presents a playfully exotic explosion of sounds and ideas that manage to combine John Cage, The Beatles and Bossa Nova with baroque psychedelic flourishes to create songs that sound like nothing you've ever heard before. Very beautiful and very strange.

BAKER KNIGHT AND THE KNIGHTMARES     HALLUCINATIONS

1967 single release for a band that had been around since 1956. Baker Knight was actually a proficient songwriter who had the likes of Elvis, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jnr record his songs. Hallucinations comes on like a whacked-out, psych-lite garage-rocker that just doesn't have the menace of, say, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, but works because it's a proper pop song that bubbles along on a river of psychedelic colour. More or less.

THE HUSH     GREY

Not many pop songs started with the lines "One day I'll die...leave things behind - but that's just one thing on my mind" in 1968, which is probably why the record company insisted that this snarling garage punk classic was hidden away on the B-Side to the more cheerful Elephant Rider - not that anyone bought the A-Side either. This song was one of my very first introductions to psychedelic music, being a favourite at Alice In Wonderland, the underground psychedelic nightclub I was lucky enough to discover back in the early 80's. Trivia fans may be interested to know that Sebadoh sampled the riff for their 1999 single Flame, which is where you've probably heard it before.

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE     WHITE RABBIT

The classic, switched on psychedelic masterpiece from 1967's SURREALISTIC PILLOW and singer Grace Slick's finest moment. I actually prefer AFTER BATHING AT BAXTERS, which was released later that same year, but none can deny that this song creates such a rush of sensory distortion that it’s a trip verily unto itself.

THE SNEAKER PIMPS     HOW DO

The Sneaker Pimps are remembered (if they're remembered at all), for their single 6 Underground, from their debut album BECOMING X, released in 1996, from which this track is taken. On it, singer Kelli Ali, shows a nascent interest in acid-folk that was to develop into Mind De-Coder favourite ROCKING HORSE, some 12 years later. How Do is a cover of Willow's Song from The Wicker Man soundtrack – which I’m guessing they learnt through repeatedly watching the film on video, because the original soundtrack wasn’t released until several years later. This is by no means my favourite version, I just wanted to include it because I am a big fan of Kelli Ali. She was apparently invited to ‘leave the band’ after the success of BECOMING X, I don't know what became of them, but ROCKING HORSE is on the stereo all the time round here.

THE BEATLES     CARNIVAL OF LIGHT (excerpt)/

MP3J     TOMORROW KNOWS RAIN

I include about a minutes worth of Carnival Of Light by The Beatles, which is all anyone actually needs of the legendary unreleased recording. In fact, truth be told, I'm not entirely sure this Carnival Of Light on account of the original never having been released I've nothing to compare it to, but even if it's not, I imagine it sounds a lot like this -backwards guitars thrown together by the band as a commission for a mixed-media 'event' in 1967. Still, thought I'd include it, and then have it disappear into something not entirely dissimilar put together by the mash-up producer MP3J, who chooses to focus almost entirely on The Beatles for his mash-ups. I've done this so cleverly, however, that I can no longer tell where one starts and the other finishes, which may or may not have defeated the object of the exercise. Or maybe it did. What I was trying to create was some noise for this next track to emerge from.

THE BEACH BOYS     WONDERFUL

This is my favourite of at least four versions I own of this song - I believe this version is sung by Dennis Wilson (I don't know why I make these statements, I think I must have read that somewhere years ago, but there is a certain element of me making it up as I go along), with Brian on harpsichord, and can be found on one of the various bootlegs that began circulating following the aborted sessions for the original SMILE album in 1966. I read somewhere that Brian Wilson also favours this early version of the track, and appears to be the vocals that finally found their way on the more or less definitive version of SMILE that appeared last year, but whoever’s singing – they have the voice of an angel.

THE BEATLES     LOVELY RITA

My favourite song from SGT. PEPPER'S, strangely enough. It sounds a bit playful and throwaway (compared to A Day In The Life, say), but this is the sound of a band recording at the height of their powers effortlessly producing a lovely little song that is imbued with a casual psychedelic knowingness that is entirely understated and yet lifts the spirits like a walk in the park on a sunny day (whilst tripping).

THE FOCUS GROUP     PAN CALLING

I've actually been sampling quite liberally from The Focus Group’s earlier hauntological noodlings throughout the show and here is Pan Calling, taken from the 2007 album WE ARE ALL PAN'S PEOPLE, which possibly owes as much a debt to 1970's Top of The Pop's dance troupe Pan's People as it does to the novella The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, published in 1890. 

MGMT     SIBERIAN BREAKS

Now that we’re all getting excited about their forthcoming third album, I think it’s time we had a quick reassessment of their much unloved second album CONGRATULATIONS, released 2010. There’s nothing wrong with it except the cover! What were they thinking of?  Other than that, it’s best to  focus on the fact that it's filled with sublime psychedelic tracks instead. In fact, if you take away the ear-candy from their first album, ORACULAR SPECTACULAR, you're left with an album of really weird noises that were beaten into tunes; so CONGRATULATIONS really oughtn't have been the surprise that everyone decided that it was. CONGRATULATIONS was produced by Sonic Boom, ex of the Spacemen 3, so it (literally) wears its psych-art credentials on its (inner) sleeve (the outer sleeve, as discussed, being somewhat alienating bollocks). Most of the album is very pretty, and even has its moments of flighty folk-pop mysticism, like demonstrated on this track, the 11-minute Siberian Breaks. I'm a fan, me. 

UJANG SURYANA     SORBAN PALID

 I first came across this curious piece of music on the accompanying CD to David Toop's extraordinary book OCEANS OF SOUND, his ground- breaking history of ambient sound and musical evolution, published in 1996. Ujang Suryana is a blind degung composer from West Java who plays these simple but affecting tunes using a gamelan (an ensemble of tuned gongs, metallophones and drums) and suling (an end-blown bamboo flute). Based on these few instruments, Gamelan degung is apparently hugely popular in your Indonesian parts, with its unique combination of skilled playfulness and simplicity, and all. I understand that Ujang was considered something of a legendary figure in this field and was responsible for over 60 albums before his death in 2005. I find the music hypnotic and enchanting, me.

FUNKADELIC     MOMMY WHAT'S A FUNKADELIC?

Some seriously acid-laden funky shit from George Clinton's "Funkadelic-Parliament thang”. This is the opening track from their debut album, FUNKADELIC, released in 1970, and pretty much lays out their agenda - namely that Funkadelic are alien in origin, but not dangerous. The album suffers from poor production values but offers up an explosion of creativity and deep funk lysergic grooves in contrast to Parliament's upbeat funky dance music, despite being the same band. With Funkadelic you had a band that asked for the loan of your funky mind so that they could play with it for a while - not unlike Mind De-Coder, really.

SPACEMEN 3     THINGS'LL NEVER BE THE SAME

Narcotically minimalist drones from Spacemen 3's second album THE PERFECT PRESCRIPTION, released in 1987, although in this case I'm using the version of the track found on FORGED PRESCRIPTIONS, its 2003 re-release in which all the original multi-tracking, that couldn't be reproduced on stage, was put back. THE PERFECT PRESCRIPTION was intended to mirror the highs and lows of a drugs trip, and in their case, I think we're talking heroin here - I mean, let's face it, it hardly sounds like they've just dropped an 'e'. It starts with Take Me To The Other Side, reaches a blissed out peak with Ecstasy Symphony and Feel So Good, then crashes into the come down with Things'll Never Be The Same, a track built around a monstrously heavy guitar line that in this, the FORGED PRESCRIPTION'S version of the track, goes backwards, forwards, sideways and is very nearly transcendental, offering the mind a fairly unhinged place to roam. 

SPIRITUALISED     LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE

After the Spacemen 3 imploded, Jason Pierce found relief, if that's the right word, in Spiritualized who, in 1997, released the epic LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE, an album of balance and extremes, restraint and excess, addiction and isolation, love and loss (yep, I think that just about covers it). Ladies and Gentlemen... if it is about anything, is about healing the heart and soul. The opening title track that I've used here, a serene and otherworldly vision of numbed loneliness and blissful yearning, is taken from the 2009 re-issue of the album which restores the original version of the song on which Pierce and The London Community Choir sing the refrain from Elvis's Can't Help Falling In Love With You, the Presley estate having lifted a ban that prevented its inclusion first time round; which makes a track that I wasn't even aware was missing anything, now perfect. This is one of the three songs I'd want played at my funeral - you'll have to check Show 8 to find out what the other two are, should you be in anyway interested.

ERIC BURDON AND THE ANIMALS     ALL IS ONE

This is the final track on the band’s loopy 1968 album, the brilliantly tripped out, THE TWAIN SHALL MEET, by which time the band had embraced psychedelia and were busy espousing some of its more esoteric messages, employing the use of the little known psychedelic bag-pipes, as well as the slightly more familiar and reassuring sitar, oboes, horns and whistles. This is the album that also contains the fairly tripped out and slightly better known Sky Pilot, which I must play another day.  

As the bagpipes fade, they get lost in a few various bits and pieces that are worth a mention - I use an excerpt from a track called Within from a soulful celestial ambient mash-up album called THE ORTICA by Alan Black, an album I've used quite liberally throughout the Mind De-Coder series when I've needed a particular background ambiance or a gap that needed filling; you can download it for free from here.  He has a back catalogue of gorgeous ambient sounds that I recommend you check out while you’re there.

I also use a part of Meadow Meal, by Faust, from their debut album released in 1971. 

CAN     DEAD PIGEON SUITE

For those of you who are fans of Can’s EGE BAMYASI, this track should come as an intriguing surprise – Dead Pigeon Suite is a beautiful 11-minute medley edited from the spare music that yielded Vitamin C, and comes from the recently released LOST TAPES (2012). The original, featured a simple organ solo which, on this version, is played by harmonised flutes, and I’m a sucker for flutes, me. It also features a wicked percussion break. Fascinating. 

THE WITCH AND THE ROBOT     SEX MUSIC (BEEF ON WAX)

A rather unpromisingly titled track from the Lake District’s The Witch And The Robot, Sex Music (Beef On Wax) is taken from the band’s debut album, ON SAFARI, released in 2009. It’s a relentless mix of broad scope, spanning pseudo-traditional ballads, spoken-word surrealism and folk-rock freak-outs, folky guitars, flamboyant percussion and hypnotic chants that propel the listener into the band’s psychedelic mind-scape.

JULIAN COPE     THE BATTLE FOR THE TREES

The Arch-Drude himself, Julian Cope, here at his Arch-Drudiest with my favourite track from my favourite Cope album, 1996's INTERPRETER, and the epic The Battle For The Trees, dedicated to the protesters at the Newbury by-pass. The album came with an all-purpose mythological mind map of the sacred Marlborough Downs  - I like to think that within Mind De-Coder you'll find the tools to create mind maps of your own, so that you can face your world with compassion, knowledge and readiness. But just in case, and to make the point clear...

... I chose to play out with John R Butler and Hand Of The Almighty (otherwise known as God Will Fuck You Up), or the first verse at least, from the album SURPRISE!, released in 2006, which may possibly be knowing satire, or it may not, I really can't tell what with the way things are going these days (I kind of hope it's not, actually), but either way...

That was Mind De-Coder 10, I thank you.

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