MIND DE-CODER 29

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MIND DE-CODER 29

"...i might say no,no,no but do it again" 

                                                              For Clare

THE CHRISTIAN ASTRONAUTS      PREPARE TO FIRE

Taken from the album BEYOND THE BLUE, a home-made album by the Shoup family in 1971 - it's my favourite Christian kiddie record ever, featuring all members of the Shoup family and a seven foot cardboard robot called Loosenut. Join them as they travel through space in search of the Lord Jesus and his heavenly resting place. Or not.

(For more information about this album check out this link here. I based a whole radio show around it once upon a time). 

BEYOND THE WIZARD'S SLEEVE      SPACE

The introductory track from the album WEST released in 2008. It gets your head sorted right for what is to follow.

PINK FLOYD      ASTRONOMY DOMINE

Pink Floyd and the opening track to PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN, released in 1967 and to my mind, at least, their greatest album (but, this being Mind De-Coder, I would). This particular recording is taken from the original mono recording that's been unavailable for some years now, but was recently re-released as part of the 3-CD set they released recently to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the album. Psychedelia doesn’t get much better than this.

ASH RA TEMPEL      SUCHE AND LIEBE

The great Ash Ra Tempel, so great in fact, I thought I’d play the whole 19 minutes and 23 seconds of this beautiful track and let its loveliness radiate out from the speakers and fill your whole body with love and light (and then add a short documentary concerning the British army testing acid on its soldiers to comedy effect). Suche & Liebe (‘Seeking and Love’) is taken from the album SCHWINGUNGEN, which I believe translates as ‘vibrations’, released in 1972. The band are normally noted for their mind-bending, soul-enhancing wig outs, but on this track they are on a trip to find God with a great eternal chord sequence that the band themselves believed was the sound of heaven. Hopefully they didn't find Captain Shoup and family waiting for them there.

APRIL STEVENS     DO IT AGAIN (excerpt)

April Stevens sings this unbelievably sexy excerpt of Do It Again on the album TEACH ME, TIGER!, released in 1960, but, if I’ve done my job properly, it sounds like it's coming from another planet.

WHITE NOISE     LOVE WITHOUT SOUND

 White Noise sounded like they were making music from other planets, too. No small wonder - the band was formed by American born David Vorhaus, a classical bass player with a background in both physics and electronic engineering, and consisted of two members of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Delia Derbyshire, who wrote Love Without Sound, was also responsible for the Dr. Who theme, so that kind of puts everything in perspective. This track is taken from their first album, AN ELECTRIC STORM, released in 1969. It's an insane album of strange sounds and noises that apparently took ages to create in the days without synthesisers - one of those seminal albums that went on to inspire The Orb and Julian Cope. It has some pretty noises on it, but also some plainly terrifying ones as well - you'd only want to play side one if you were tripping, say. Love Without Sound is side 1, track 1; can't go wrong with that.

MAGNET      GENTLY JOHNNY

This lovely track was thought lost for years until it happily turned up on a restored version of The Wicker Man and its accompanying soundtrack in 2002. A good thing too, as it's one of the sexiest songs ever recorded,

EXTRADITION     MINUET

A beautiful little piece from criminally overlooked Australian band, Extradition, whose only album, HUSH, released in 1971, transcends all its acid-folk influences – a female singer with a lush unearthly voice, male singers that don’t make you wish they wouldn’t; long hair; beards; songs that romanticize the Ice Age and the phases of the sun and moon, the elements, the seasons, sticks, stones , gongs and chimes - and becomes a thing of wonder in itself.

THE VIRGINEERS     SUN

Mind-bending sugar-coated fun from The Virgineers with this spot-on psychedelic gem from their only album, 1999’s self-titled THE VIRGINEERS.

J.K. &Co     FLY

This magical track from the little known album SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER by the semi-legendary J.K. and Co. was put together by the almost unbelievably precocious 15 year-old Jay Kaye who, in 1968, assembled a band of session musicians, hired a producer and an arranger and got them to record  an album of songs he’d written about the cycle of life and death – a concept album, no less. Amazingly, it’s very good; full of psychedelic flourishes, groovy horns, power pop, acid rock sitar inspired wig-outs and tracks like Fly, which wraps the listener up in warm pulsating feedback waves and what might possibly be a marimba.

PETER WYNGARDE      JENNY KISSED ME

Possibly the weirdest record I own is by Peter Wyngarde, and it's called WHEN SEX LEERS ITS INQUISITIVE HEAD, originally released in 1970 and then withdrawn almost immediately due to the fact that nobody knew what to make of it. Since then it has become an album steeped in myth and mystery (don't you just love albums steeped in myth and mystery?). Peter Wyngarde, of course, played Jason King, part TV sleuth, and part hirsute shag-monster for ITC's Department S show in 1968. For a time, Wyngarde was the world's number one pin-up, so when he was approached to make an album to cash-in on his popularity, the record company was expecting a set of contemporary standards in the manner of Tony Christie singing 'Avenues and Alleyways'. What they got instead was an album of unbridled, rampant male sexuality couched in an aesthetic abandon that set off alarm bells even in those permissive times. No one was prepared for the song Rape, in which he explores the possible virtues of rape in several different languages like it was something you might actually want to try out every now and then, or was unlikely to forget 'Hippie and the Skinhead', in which Wyngarde reads out a letter to 'The Times' by two Home Counties skinhead girls, or the tale of 'Billy the Queer, Pilly Sexy Hippy' delivered as the worlds first rap record over a Nashville honky tonk musical styling. Bizarre doesn't quite cover it. Amidst all this outrageousness, however, you will also find 'Jenny Kissed Me', which always makes me wish that she'd kissed me too. The album is now available on CD after being unavailable for the best part of 30 years. Marvellous.

THE SHORTWAVE SET      SUN MACHINE

Taken from their second and, what appears to have been, their final album REPLICA SUN MACHINE, by South London's junk shop enthusiasts The Shortwave Set. I haven't heard a peep from them since this album was released in 2008, which is a great pity because they made some of the loveliest tunes I ever did here. I do believe that is the sound of the hitherto unknown psychedelic banjo I hear being plucked. Possibly my favourite track on tonight's show.

JULIAN COPE       S.T.A.R.C.A.R.

The mighty Julian Cope in epic form on this psyche-folk freak-out taken from his 1994 eco-warrior manifesto of an album, AUTOGEDDON, in which he rails against car culture and the horrors of urban living. Not everyone's favourite Cope album, but definitely the one on which he has attitude in his latitude and longing in his longitude.

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE      PROCESSION OF CHERRY BLOSSOM SPIRITS

This track is taken from the album SCHOOL OF THE FLOWER, released in 2001, a true head-trip of a record that creates vivid psychedelic folk soundscapes that are both beautiful and ominous. Six Organs Of Admittance is the work of Ben Chesney, and this is his seventh album, released in 2001, and it is rainswept, broken and lovely. Allow yourself to float away.

PG SIX      GO YOUR WAY

Go Your Way was originally recorded by Anne Briggs, who has appeared on a couple of Mind De-Coder's herself. This version is by Pat Gubler, from his first full-length solo release as PG Six, released on the album PARLOR TRICKS AND PORCH FAVORITES, released in 2001. It is an album of sublime simplicity, unashamedly folk, but blended with a lo-fi pop sensibility. He also uses the harp. More people should use the harp.

THE STEVE MILLER BAND     THE BEAUTY OF TIME IS THAT IT IS SNOWING

(PSYCHEDELIC B.B.)

I know – The Steve Miller Band ! – but in 1968 The Steve Miller Band were a west coast psychedelic-blues band who recorded their first album, CHILDREN OF THE FUTURE, in England. The Beauty Of Time… just sort of wraps you up in the lo-fi ebb and flow of its hazy organ playing loveliness, don’t you think? No one bought it, of course, and the band retreated to a rather more commercial sound that somehow resulted in The Joker some five years later.

CRAZY ELEPHANT     SPACE BUGGY

If you’ve heard of Crazy Elephant at all, it’s because of their 1968 bubblegum hit Gimme Gimme Good Loving and possibly There Ain’t No Umbopo. Space Buggy is the B-side to the rather less well known There’s a Better Day A-Comin’, released in 1969, which failed to chart. The band was essentially a studio concoction, created by the record label Super K Productions to cash in on the craze for bubblegum music, though strangely enough they were supposedly promoted as allegedly being a group of Welsh coal miners.

THE END     JACOB’S BLADDER

The End were sadly ignored by the late-60’s despite touring with The Rolling Stones and being managed by Bill Wyman. Their only album INTROSPECTION, released in 1969, missed the giddy heights of psychedelia by some 18 months by which time acid soaked whimsy had been replaced by power trio’s and the first stirrings of prog. This particular bit of filler was supplied by George Kenset, Wyman’s gardener who had also worked with his father on building sites for years. George was encouraged to visit the studio because he was a wealth of amazing and hilarious stories which were recorded for inclusion on the album. There’s not enough of this sort of thing going on these days.

THE STONE ROSES     WATERFALL/DON’T STOP

I couldn’t resist it. Their debut album meant so much to me at the time that I thought all my Christmases had come at once when I first played it, so I’m including this for anyone who may have more or less felt the same way, Clare.

MOON WIRING CLUB     A GUIDED TOUR

Ian Hodgson with another spooky Hauntological offering from 2009’s STRIPED PAINT FOR THE LAST POST.

THE PILLBUGS     NORTH OF REALITY

I’m surprised that I don’t play more of The Pillbugs – their goofy beach buggy take on psychedelia puts me in mind of The Banana Splits and The Monkees and is otherwise right up my street. North Of Reality is from the band’s final and posthumous album EVERYBODY WANTS A WAY OUT, released 2008, following the death of band founder and bassist Mark Kelley.

BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP     ALL MUST WAKE

Warped going’s on from this collaboration between The Focus Group and Broadcast released as the album BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP INVESTIGATE WITCH CULTS OF THE RADIO AGE, released in 2009. It’s an album rooted in jazz, 1960’s BBC interludes, Czech horror films and pulpy science-fiction literature that combines to create little pockets of non-sense – fans of the show will know I go crazy for this sort of stuff.

DAVID BOWIE      LADY GRINNING SOUL

Hardly psychedelic at all yet Lady Grinning Soul from Bowie’s 1972 ALADDIN SANE always takes me somewhere I like to go. It has a faux-James Bond flamenco feel to it that’s just so late night and sexy, and reminds me of someone who I haven't seen for too long. It's one of those sorts of songs.

I thank you.

MIND DE-CODER 28

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MIND DE-CODER 28

The sound of yourself listening…

EDEN AHBEZ      FULL MOON

Eden Ahbez was a hippy some 20 years before the term was invented. Living a bucolic life from at least the 1940s, he traveled in sandals and wore shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He camped out below the first 'L' in the Hollywood Sign above Los Angeles, studied Oriental mysticism, and claimed to live on three dollars a week (which wasn't a lot of money even in those days), sleeping outdoors with his family, and eating vegetables, fruits, and nuts. He wrote Nature Boy for Nat King Cole in 1948, and in 1960 recorded the exotica album EDEN'S ISLAND from which this track is taken. I think he would have liked Waiheke - he liked to dream the dream that the dreamers dream, did ol' Eden.

THE G.T.O'S     THE ORIGINAL G.T.O'S

Miss Lucy and Miss Johna, two of the original G.T.O's - Girls Together Outrageously (or Occassionally; or Only; or Openly; or, well, you get the picture) - the original groupie group, as documented by Miss Pamela Des Barres in her 'candid' biography "I'm With The Band". The G.T.O's  recorded one album, PERMANENT DAMAGE, released in 1969  which was produced by Frank Zappa and consists of some primitive but fairly engaging song writing (none of the girls actually being able to sing) and recorded studio conversations that the girls were apparently unaware of until the record came out. It's a glorious mess of an album that captures a very specific time and place (the Laurel Canyon scene, late 60's) in all its freaky glory and works because everyone involved sounds like they were having a really good time, and in the case of this track at least, a really good time. One of my favourite albums.

KING BISCUIT TIME      I LOVE YOU

King Biscuit Time was Beta Band vocalist Steve Mason's side project until the Beta Band split up and it became his full-time project. This track is taken from the NO STYLE EP, released in 2000. over the years he's gone on to produce a dark electronic disco album under the banner BLACK AFFAIR, but his most recent release, MONKEY MIND'S IN THE DEVIL'S TIME, a big favourite of mine, was under his own name and after a few years in the wilderness seems to be what critics like to call a return to form, by which they mean he's now producing music that is approaching the brilliance of those first three semi-mythical Beta Band EP's. That being said, I Love You has a lovely ambient-folk texture to it that's up there with the best songs he's ever done.

THE G.T.O'S     THE GHOST CHAINED TO THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE (SHOCK TREATMENT)

Another track from PERMANENT DAMAGE - contains the line "I see all the people I want to see, I be all the people I want to be..." which I always thought was pretty wonderful. The song turns into a fully-fledged west coast psychedelic freak-out and features The Jeff Beck Group (with Rod Stewart on vocals) who briefly joined The G.T.O's in 1969. For a hysterical insight into the freak scene at the time I can't recommend Pamela Des Barnes "I'm With The Band" enough - it made me wish that I was sexy young rock singer with a roving eye and a log cabin somewhere up in Laurel Canyon in the late 1960's, and I can tell you, that doesn't happen very often.

THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF THE ALL       WINK OF THE THIRD EYE/

IT HAS NO EYES BUT SIGHT

Released in 1997, this is Andrew Gold of 10cc, scratching a particular itch, who made a faux-lost 1967-era psychedelic album anchored by Beach Boys harmonies, Beatle-esque experimentation and a big nod and a wink towards The Zombies, The Byrds, The Doors and just about anyone else who was around then, on a spot-the-influence tribute album called GREETINGS FROM PLANET LOVE. Like The Virgineers and The Dukes Of Stratosphear, he gets vocals and instrumentation just right and everything about it is trippy as hell. Ironically it became one of the great lost psychedelic albums in its own right on account of nobody buying it. Irony can be so ironic sometimes.

THANE RUSSALL AND THREE      SECURITY

A mighty fine record this - a blistering cover of Otis Redding's Security by long forgotten psych/pop act Thane Russal and Three. First time I played this show out I mistakenly claimed it was released in 1967 only to receive a lovely e-mail from the band's guitarist, Martin Fisher (who'd clearly been Googling himself) informing me that this single was actually released in 1966. Apparently he joined the band in May of 1966 and the single had already been released by then. It was a huge hit all over Australia for some reason, but sunk without a trace in England. The identity of Thane Russell was a matter of some speculation (in Australia, anyway) where it was rumoured it may have been Mick Jagger. It wasn't. It was in fact Australian-born singer Doug Gibbons (for all you trivia fans out there), although Gibbons was an associate of the Rolling Stones in some vague, ill-defined way now lost to the faerie mists of time. The other mad bit of trivia associated with this song was that it was produced by Paul Gadd, also known as Paul Raven, but most (in)famously known as Gary Glitter.

FLEUR DE LYS      CIRCLES

Speaking of blistering cover versions - this track knocks the socks off the original version by The Who. Recorded in 1966, this track is at least 12 months ahead the psychedelic explosion that was to follow - the guitar solo, always one of my favourite guitar solos ever, probably gave producer Jimmy Page something to think about. Nobody bought it, of course.

MAGNETIC FIELDS      EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC LOVE

Taken from the triple album 69 LOVE SONGS, which is a triple album featuring 69 love songs, released by the Magnetic Fields in 1999. As frontman Stephen Merritt says 69 LOVE SONGS isn't remotely an album about love - it's an album about love songs, which is completely different. This particular track can be found half-way through disc three.

TUNNG      OUT OF THE WINDOW WITH THE WINDOW

Psychedelic folkatronica is a dreadful label so let's not use it. Tunng create scratchy pastoral electronica in a quintessentially English folk manner to create albums that are brittle and bright. This track is taken from their 2005 release MOTHER'S DAUGHTERS, AND OTHER SONGS. It is a strikingly original album that reminds me of someone trying to busk along to Bert Jansch on a broken stylophone. More or less. (Perhaps less).

NICK DRAKE      CELLO SONG

This is my favourite track from my favourite Nick Drake album. I may have said this before about a different track from a different Nick Drake album, but I mean it this time. I once heard this track under 'favourable' circumstances and it just dragged me into the urgency of its warm intimacy. Turns out I quite like urgent warm intimacy, so that was alright, then. You can find it on FIVE LEAVES LEFT, released in 1969.

SANDY DENNY      MILK AND HONEY

This is probably my favourite track on tonight's show. Recorded in 1967, this is Sandy's version of ex-boyfriend's Jackson C. Frank's song which eventually ended up on THE COMPLETE SANDY DENNY.  If you listen to this song at about two o'clock in the morning, alone, with a bottle of red wine on the go, and perhaps just a single candle flame to light your way, this song will take you the camp fire of your soul where you will hear songs of love, loss and, just maybe if you're really lucky, redemption. And it's a good place; it really is. You can also find this song on The Original Sandy Denny, released in 1999.

LINDA PERHACS      PARALLELOGRAMS

I just had to look up the definition of outré, to make sure I had the right word. PARALLELOGRAMS an album of outré gorgeousness and elegance, that sounds like nothing I've heard before, but with songs that never lose their sense of fragile magic and melodic beauty. Released in 1970 and ignored by everybody, it was rediscovered in the late 90's and became a big influence on the re-emerging acid-folk scene. Marvellous album, and recently re-released last year with 8 bonus tracks.

GORKY'S ZYGOTIC MYNCI      HALLWAY

Taken from the album SPANISH DANCE TROUPE, released in 1999, an LP that holds moments of rare precious acoustic beauty (as well as tracks like Poodle Rockin', it must be said). This is the opening track from the album and reminds me in part of that Amon Düül vibe from Para Dieswärts. A good album to spend some time with if you ever find yourself alone in a field of magic mushrooms.

KAHIMI KARIE      SLEEP

Syrupy-sweet weirdness from avant-garde pop princess Kahimi Karie and a delirium-inducing track taken from her album TRAPEZISTE, released in 2003.

THE CRANIAL FISHERS     DEADLINE

It's hard to describe what The Cranial Fishers do. They’re just one person for a start – Craig Chambers from Ohio -  a sound collage artist who creates abstract soundscapes, rhythmically driven industrial sounds, throws in a bit of jazz maybe, or a piece of dialogue borrowed from a movie with a cheesy sounding keyboard or lush orchestration, depending on his mood. It often sounds like this, and you can find more of it from the Cranial Fisher audio page here.

XTC      MEETING PLACE

My favourite track from 1986's album SKYLARKING - the band's Andy Partridge describes the album as "a summers day baked into one cake".

SPIRITUALIZED MISSISSIPPI SPACE PROGRAM     ALWAYS FORGETTING WITH YOU

(THE BRIDGE SONG)

This is from the compilation album SPACE PROJECT, released to mark Record Store Day, 2014, featuring music that incorporates sounds recorded in space by both Voyagers 1 and 2. Every track on the album is apparently inspired by a planet or moon in the solar system - Always Forgetting With You (The Bridge Song) is supposedly dedicated to the planet Neptune, but really, it’s dedicated to numbed love.  

THE WHITE KITES     TURTLE’S BACK

Far out sounds from Poland’s White Kites, on their debut album MISSING, released 2013, channelling the spirit of London 1967 into a prog vibe that appears to be the missing link between the lysergic psych-pop of Tomorrow, The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society and Van der Graaf Generator. In a good way.

THE FOCUS GROUP     HEY, LET LOOSE YOUR LOVE

Julian House's Focus Group is a condensed memory of 1970’s British daytime and after-hours television pieced together with musty samples from children’s exercise records, vintage drama, clunky British jazz and library records. HEY, LET LOOSE YOUR LOVE is taken from the album of the same name, released 2005 on the ubiquitous Ghost Box label, and is pretty much an archaeology of emotion, an exploration of the power of not only childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. Haunting, of course.

PYE AUDIO CORNER     FOLK FESTIVAL

The sound of Pye Audio Corner is brought to you by the mysterious ‘Head Technician’, another radiophonically enchanted member of the Hauntological collective whose ambient washes and sinewave soundscapes bring to mind the flickering mid-60's Doctor Who, but at other times you’re catapulted into a collection of long lost club records, engineered solely for the woozy drive home at 4am. Folk Festival is taken from the album BLACK MILL TAPES VOL. 1, released 2010, which features the tag-line ‘magnetically aligning ferrous particles since 1970’.

PAMELA WYN SHANNON     MOSS MANTRA

Pamela Wyn Shannon is one of those American musicians who was born in the wrong country, and possibly the wrong decade. Originally from Massachusetts she now lives in Wales where her love of Celtic mysticism and pastoral acid-folk is given full expression in her unique compositions. Moss Mantra can be found on the fairly wonderful compilation WEIRDLORE – NOTES FROM THE FOLK UNDERGROUND which came out in 2012, but her album COURTING AUTUMN, released in 2007, is not without its own pleasures, being a collection of melancholic songs that have an elliptical quality which create their own time-frame, rules, and kingdoms, and remind me of the songs of Vashti Bunyan, Nick Drake, Pentangle and Bridget St. John, so as you can imagine I’m quite a fan.

IAN SKELLY     CATERPILLAR

After more than a decade drumming for Liverpool psychedelists The Coral, in 2009 multi-instrumentalist Ian Skelly was struck down by a fever that led to him experiencing dreams and hallucinations. It inspired this solo debut, in which he filters guitars, flutes, mellotrons and sharp pop/folk songwriting through a psychedelic haze. Recorded on a vintage tape machine in The Coral's rehearsal space, much of his album, CUT FROM A STAR, released 2012, sounds as if it could actually have been blasted straight from the late 60’s. Nothing wrong with that, of course – check out Caterpillar, ostensibly a song about a small crawling insect (no doubt smoking a hookah), it gradually submerges beneath extraneous found-sounds to enjoy a butterfly-like metamorphosis into a song of gentle but kaleidoscopic beauty. Lovely.

DAUGHTERS OF ALBION     1968/JOHN FLIP LOCK-UP MEDLEY

Inspired by Sgt. Pepper’s, Daughters Of Albion, named after William Blake’s Visions Of The Daughter’s of Albion, only managed the one self-titled album, which they released in 1968. What an undiscovered gem it is, though; 1968/John Flip Lock-Up in particular shows you where their heads were at – a seven minute visionary collage that concludes the album in a kind of proto-prog, psychedelic folk-prog work-out that at some point sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks dropping acid at Woodstock backing Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lennon and the Pope, all at the same time. Brilliant. No one bought it, of course.

LE STELLE DI MARIO SCHIFANO      SUSAN SONG  

  

Susan Song is the loveliest track on an album of European avant-garde freak-outs and psych-pop inspired by Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring, of course, The Velvet Underground. I came across it while reading Julian Cope’s mighty Copendium, a beautifully produced leather-bound tome that collects together his albums of the month feature from his Head Heritage web-site (www.headheritage.co.uk) and thought: ‘I must own this album!’, which, I think, is rather the point of the book and, indeed, the web-site.

 In the mid-60’s Mario Schifano, as the name suggests, was an Italian artist and sculptor hanging in London with his girlfriend Anita Pallenburg and the key hip figures of the swinging London scene, who realized that no matter how cool he was (and he was – his exhibitions of Pop-Art had been wild successes since 1959) he could not hope to compete in terms of coolness with the rock royalty of the day. Understanding the level of intrigue which Andy Warhol had created with his multi-media packages in New York, Schifano set out to emulate this success, but feeling that such a thing could be easily lost in the Swinging London of late 1966, Mario Schifano chose to set up his project back home in Rome. The result was Le Stelle Di Mario Schifano (The Stars Of Mario Schifano) whose one album, DEDICATO A…, released in 1967, featured a 17 minute cosmic jam as the opening track, taking up all of side one, and a second side of extremely catchy little numbers of which, Susan Song, featuring exquisite rippling piano hooks and Ruby Tuesday-ish strings, is by far the loveliest. I will no doubt play the 17 minute cosmic jam another day. 

MOON WIRING CLUB     THOUGHTS OF A MODERN GHOST

Another Hauntological offering from the second album from Ian Hodgson’s Moon Wiring Club, SHOES OFF AND CHAIRS AWAY, released in 2008.  Working tirelessly with his copy of Music for the Playstation 2 (seriously, what’s more Hauntological than that?) Hodgson uses the history of forgotten British television to source his banks of samples, and the results pretty much speak for themselves (so I won’t bother).

AMON DÜÜL II      SANDOZ IN THE RAIN

As distinct from Amon Düül I, which was more of an ill-fated politico/musical commune, Amon Düül II is what was left once all the political activists and psychedelic artists cleared off and left the musicians to tidy up after them. Sandoz In The Rain is taken from the album YETI, released in 1970 and featuring the legendary krautrock image of Shrat the bongo-player, weilding a huge scythe across a field of bright yellow ground fog. On this particular track, a nine minute Kosmische folk improvisation that Julian Cope calls an 'unearthly impression of mythical times', Amon Düül I and Amon Düül II re-unite to beautiful pastoral effect.

I Thank you.