MIND DE-CODER 42

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MIND DE-CODER 42

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

                                                                                                        Terence McKenna

POND     WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MILLION HEAD COLLIDE

The opening track, or ought that be salvo, from HOBO ROCKET, the second album release from Pond this year who are clearly on a roll, featuring a heavy metal assault of guitar riffs, unrestrained drums, sonic wig-outs and psychedelic trickery. Singer Nick Allbrook howls something about ‘the holy of holies’, Buddha, Krishna, God and then we’re off – welcome to mind De-Coder 42

VIDICATRIX     PRIVATE PLACES (SHACKLETON AND MORDANT MUSIC VESRSION) (excerpt)

A marvellous bit of noise I tagged onto the end of Whatever Happened To…, Private Places is taken from the 2009 album PICKING O’ER THE BONES, a roundup of long deleted tracks released on the Mordant Music record label, which is also the name of the production duo responsible for a hauntologically inspired dubstep/techno aesthetic, as well as home to a cast of outsiders including Shackleton and Vindicatrix, about whom, it must be said, I know next to nothing (I only came across Mordant Music because they were invited to collaborate on a Ghost Box Study Series single release with Mind De-Coder favourites The Belbury Poly which I’ve included later on in the show).  On this piece, of which I only provide an excerpt, Shackleton and MM take Vindicatrix’s Private Places and turn it into a barely conscious soundscape of echo chamber dub FX and vocal apparitions and wrap it up in some voodoo rhythms that send it so far out it never entirely comes back again.

NIRVANA     RAINBOW CHASER

Not that Nirvana, who this pair successfully sued over the name, but a duo consisting of a London-based song writing partnership who never really achieved any public recognition but who were much lauded by music industry types and critics alike. Their debut album THE STORY OF SIMON SIMOPATH, released in 1967, was arguably the first narrative-based concept album ever released, pipping The Pretty Things’ SF SORROW and The Who’s TOMMY to the post by a year or two. Rainbow Chaser, which was a minor chart success in 1968 (it reached the coveted number 1 spot in Denmark despite only the scratching the top 40 in England), is taken from their second album, the rather annoyingly titled THE EXISTENCE OF CHANCE IS EVERYTHING AND NOTHING WHILST THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT IS THE LIVING OF LIFE, AND SO SAY ALL OF US, released in 1968 and often abbreviated to ALL OF US for people who can’t be doing with that sort of thing at all.

13^TH FLOOR ELEVATORS     I’VE GOT LEVITATION

I don’t even understand this track. Is it supposed to sound like this? Clearly I mean this in a good way. I’ve Got Levitation is taken from the band’s second album, EASTER EVERYWHERE, released in 1967, and the whole album is a loose, hypnotic trip. The strange patterns of Tommy Hall's electric jug playing are as gloriously bewildering as ever, merging the music of the spheres with an alien attack, and Roky Erickson's vocals make even the most acid-damaged poesy sound passionate, graceful, and wildly alive.

THE LIMIÑANAS     SALVATION

The Limiñanas are something of a revelation – a fuzzy-felt pop folk duo from France who's wonderful, hook laden songs reach out of the stereo and wrap themselves around you. By all accounts, one of the highlights of this years’ Liverpool Psyche Fest, their second album CRYSTAL ANIS, is simple and catchy as hell, humming with effervescent, alluring pop that benefits from superb production that seems to put the emphasis in all the wrong places – like the looping ukulele that opens the album (although, admittedly, that may just be the way I have my amp set up) – which, of course, turns out to be all the right places. Heavenly and triumphant; I’m quite the fan.

THE FOCUS GROUP     THE HEAVY BLESSING

The Focus Group’s ELEKTRIK KAROUSEL has been one of my favourite albums of the year – an awkward collision between unspooled vintage pop and experimental folk moments that finds beauty in the strangest places.

THE OSCILLATION     TELEPATHIC BIRDMAN

A mind-bending track from The Oscillation, whose 2011 release VEILS, combines krautrock rhythms with full-on guitar driven assaults which radiate a trance inducing throb that’s both mesmerising and melodic. Pretty much does what the name suggests.

WHITE MANNA     DON’T GUN US DOWN

Blistering space-rock from California’s White Manna, whose self-named debut album, released 2012, pretty much amounts to 40-odd minutes of relentless, sustained psychedelia of the white-out variety, although on this track there’s just a touch of the jingle for those of you who need to draw breath occasionally.

TIME ATTENDANT     LAPPING UP AT NIGHT

 A little something from the album DOWN TO THE SILVER SEA, a sort of hauntological trip to the seaside, compiled by the Moon Wiring Club’s Ian Hodgson. Time Attendant is the moniker under which experimental musician and painter Paul Snowden releases his aural doodles which, with the best will in the world, are little more than strange, angular melodies and drawn out synth drones – but very conceptual ones. . .

SARAH ANGLISS     VERTICAL GALLOPERS

. . . as, no doubt, are these. Also taken from DOWN TO THE SILVER SEA (released earlier this year), Angliss at least adds a touch of the seaside to the composition. There’s always a touch of the uncanny about her work – she’s a composer, automatist and sound historian who builds robots to play her tunes – but this track reminds me of haunted piers and ghostly Victorian fairground rides.

CLEAR LIGHT     THINK AGAIN

Named after a particularly potent brand of LSD, Clear Light were a folk rock/psyche rock group from LA whose big thing was that they had two drummers. They released just the one album, SAME, in 1967, before returning to, or perhaps becoming, a footnote in musical history. In fairness, they should have done better than they did – SAME has some pretty far out tracks on it with some spot on psychedelic flourishes, but the album failed to sell and the band split up shortly after.

ULTIMATE SPINACH     EGO TRIP

Ultimate Spinach’s Ian Bruce-Douglas (composer, lead singer, multi-instrumentalist) is, to this day, derided as a fourth rate Jim Morrison, Grace Slick or Country Joe McDonald, whose band was never able to scale the giddy heights reached by The Doors, Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish – even contemporary re-evaluations of his band find them wanting and worse still, derivative, as if the best they were capable of was sounding like a recombination of all those West Coast psychedelic bands he so desperately wanted to compete with (Ultimate Spinach had the added misfortune of hailing from a very un-rock ‘n’ roll Boston). That being said, their self-titled debut album, released 1967, sold 110,000 in its first week and remained in the charts for 36 consecutive weeks and is not without its merits – I’ve always been very fond of album opener Ego Trip, me.

STEREOLAB     SPACE MOMENT

A track that pretty much does what it says on the label, Space Moment is to be found on the mini-album MUSIC FOR THE AMORPHOUS BODY STUDY CENTER, created in collaboration with New York sculptor Charles Long to accompany an exhibition he held in 1995 (although for people unable to get their hands on a copy of the limited edition pressing the whole EP turned up on one of the group’s many retrospective albums ALUMINIUM TUNES: SWITCHED ON, VOL. 3 which, admittedly, is where I first came across it). It really is quite lovely; one of my favourite Stereolab moments, combining their early trademark drone-sound with their emerging easy listening, 60’s pop inclinations.

CRANIUM PIE     MASTER OF MYSTERY

A short bit of filler taken from the band’s second album GEOMETRY OF THISTLES , a selection of highly psychedelic tracks recorded between 2006 and 2009, released 2012, but none the less magical for all that. The journey into mushroom land starts here.

THE END     LOVING SACRED LOVING

A lovely piece of psychedelic whimsy from The End, a band you really ought to have heard more from but whose chances of success were scuppered when the release of their only album INTROSPECTION was held back for some 18 months until 1969, by which time the world had embraced a slightly more robust take on music and psychedelic whimsy had already become dated. A pity, as the album is not without its charms as demonstrated by Loving Sacred Loving which also saw release as the b-side to the album's only single Shades of Orange, released in 1968. These days if you’ve heard of them at all, it’s because of the Bill Wyman connection, who managed the band and had them touring as support for the Stones during their Satanic Majesties Request days. Legend has it that Shades of Orange and Loving Sacred Loving were later confused by bootleg collectors as being Stones tracks that were unused from that album and that The Beatles appeared on them, what with them being so psychedelic and all. Sadly not true, but this track was written by Wyman and includes Nicky Hopkins on harpsichord, trivia fans.

DAVID MUNROW     LE PETITE GENTILHOMME

Something of a searing lute solo, this track can be found on the soundtrack to HENRY VIII AND HIS SIX WIVES, released back in 1972. I first came across Munrow in Rob Young’s masterful book 'Electric Eden' in which he unearths the story of the folk revival in the British Isles. Munrow emerged as a leading light in the early music and Renaissance movement of the 1960’s and 70’s which, by all accounts, he brought to life in performances of unsurpassed brilliance.  I’ve been meaning to play him on the show for ages, but lute solos aren’t as easy to segue in as you’d think.

I follow that with a reading of Pablo Neruda’s IF YOU FORGET ME, read by La Ciccone of all people, but having listened to several recordings of the poem, it turns out hers was the best.

NICK NICELY     THE MOURNING

I was so excited to hear this - a newly recorded version of nicely’s psychedelic classic Hilly Fields (1892), reinterpreted by nicely (one only uses lower case) himself for the semi-legendary Fruits De Mer record label, some 30 years after the original release. In this version, released on 7” vinyl with the original recording on the b-side, nicely turns in an elaborate and indeed delicate acoustic version that is as every bit as tripped out as the original. For those of you who are new comers to Mind De-Coder, Hilly Fields (1892) is arguably the greatest psychedelic record to have come out of the 80’s.

MORDANT MUSIC     INN OHM THE LAKE

You know, I had to play this on the strength of the title alone, but it’s nevertheless a trippy little piece that can be found on the single GHOST BOX STUDY SERIES 3: WELCOME TO GODALMING, released in 2010 by the Ghost Box record label, of course. They share the release with Ghost Box co-founder Jim Jupp’s Belbury Poly with whom they share an interest in similar long-haunted byways of sound. Looping voices full of post-war pedagogical advice, humming drones, children’s songs and reverb drenched sounds abound.

THE NATURAL YOGURT BAND     VOODOO

The Natural Yogurt Band are the day job for Miles Newbold who under his guise as The Sign Of Four had a track played on Mind De-Coder a little while ago which fairly reverberated with sonic going’s on and polyphonic sound textures. He burst onto the scene (inasmuch as it can be said that he actually burst anywhere) in 2008 with the album AWAY WITH MELANCHOLY, from which the fairly irresistible Voodoo is taken, a stirring mix of jazz and funk although, crucially, not jazz-funk but something that uses elements of each to take the listener on a pretty far out journey to some place completely else – cinematic, funky and at times mellow, other times modal, it was quite possibly a pastiche of all these things, a faux-vintage record with the tunes to carry it through the sum of its parts.

ARIEL KALMA    MESSAGE 18/10/77

Ariel Kalma seems to be a little known synth-pioneer who appears to have been doing something a bit world music-y and Body-Shop-CD-rack since the mid-70’s at least, but don’t let that put you off. Message 18/10/77 is from the album OSMOSE, released in 1977 and, as one reviewer has put it, it’s sort of like Vangelis getting lost in the Amazonian rain forest 35 years ago, but don’t let that put you off either – take away the New Age bird calls and insect noise and you're left with something approaching a perfectly serviceable Spacemen 3 drone.

I have it float off into something really quite wonderful – a recording of crickets with their sound slowed down to equivalent of a human lifespan and sounding like a choir of angels praising creation (is this what they sound like to each other, I wonder?), recorded by Jim Wilson who then pasted the actual sound of crickets over the top of it for pleasing effect – it actually goes on like that for an hour or so and remains spell-binding throughout - you can check out the whole track here; and whilst that was playing I added the sound of a piano tuner replacing a string on the family piano, which she let me record whilst she was doing it because I thought it sounded really cool. This is mind De-Coder.

ROBBIE BASHO     THE GRAIL AND THE LOTUS

Transcendental guitar playing from Robbie Basho, a mystical minstrel heavily influenced by Hindustani classical guitar, who, in 1966 released his second album THE GRAIL AND THE LOTUS, a great lost psychedelic album from an artist who kind of transcended the genre.

VASHTI BUNYAN     HERE BEFORE

Wistful loveliness from Vashti Bunyan with a track from her sublime second album LOOKAFTERING, which came some 36 years after her first; her voice is gorgeous, pristine and precious.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND     SISTER RAY

And the show comes full circle with a track that’s not so much a song as an assault. Sister Ray, from their 1968 release WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT,  is the definitive Velvet Underground statement in which everything is turned up to 11and the studio bleeds into the production – Reed’s tale of a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear is by no means a psychedelic piece of music, but the overall effect is so overwhelming, the distortion and frequencies set so high, that the senses are simply broken down and rearranged in a proto- heavy metal haze that disorientates and thrills at the same time, and if that isn’t psychedelic then I don’t know what is.

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