MIND DE-CODER 53

MIND DE-CODER 53

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“If your mind can open doors – explore”.

                                                               Julian Cope

I’ve been relatively meditative recently (given a particular definition of ‘meditative’), so I start the show with the sound of a Tibetan healing bell and then a collection of recordings recently released by NASA and available from Soundcloud which include, among other things, the chorus of radio transmissions within the earth’s atmosphere, Saturn radio emissions and the sound of light waves curving around the star KIC12268220C which resolves itself a little something by…

PHYLIS KING    FILCOMBE COTTAGE, DORSET

Phyllis is an English poet and partner to Ivor Cutler for some 40 years or so before his death in 2006. Her work appeared on three of his albums. This poem, Filcombe Cottage, Dorset, can be found on his 1976 release JAMMY SMEARS, one of Cutler’s sunnier and more playful albums, with a surreal rural thread running through it.

MARK RONSON     LEAVING LOS FELIZ

One of the stand out tracks on Ronson’s most recent release, UPTOWN SPECIAL, (although not the stand out track, which I think goes to Feel Right, featuring New Orleans based rapper Mystikal, who performs in the best James-Brown-stylee ever, which is one funky-assed mother of a track, and, sadly, almost entirely unsuitable for Mind De-Coder). On this gorgeous slice of summery psychedelia, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker brings a blissed out soft-rock feel to the thang that might possibly give Tame Impala an idea or two for the future.

MOODY BLUES     THE DREAM/HAVE YOU HEARD PT. 1/THE VOYAGE/HAVE YOU HEARD PT.2

For their third album The Moody Blues were pretty much given the keys to the studio and told to come back with something pretty amazing. The result, 1969’s ON THE THRESHOLD, does exactly that, pushing the genre busting psychedelia envelope so far it takes in proto-prog classicism along the way. The final suite of tracks on side 2 of the album (the experimental side) is an exquisite tour de force featuring mellotron, flute and orchestra in a psychedelic flourish that is little short of breathtaking.  

THE ADVISORY CIRCLE     FROM OUT HERE

The Advisory Circle's latest album, FROM OUT HERE, hints at a concept "where bucolic English scenery is being manipulated and maybe even artificially generated by bizarre multi-dimensional computer technology" and, as you can imagine, sounds like the incidental music to a lost episode of Tomorrow’s World recorded during the cold war. The title track crackles with the cadence of a transmission from outer space beaming in from an alternate reality where the Brits, inspired by the real life goings-on of Dan Dare, beat the Americans to the moon.

GIORGIO TUMA     A GHOST ON OUR WAY

A lovely little track, this, taken from the album IN THE MORNING WE’LL MEET, released in 2011 by Italian indie pop smoothie Giorgio Tuma.  It says that Giorgio Tuma set out to make an album to soothe the savage breast, and in doing so he evokes the spirit of Brian Wilson, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, Ennio Morricone and the High Llamas, inhabiting a sort of parallel 60s where elegance never gave way to the counterculture - in short, an album for anyone who had their heads turned by Stereolab at an impressionable age.

SPROATLY SMITH     THE UNQUIET GRAVE

If you like your folk music to have a certain pastoral-psyche quality to it then Sproatly Smith are your band – they bring elements of gothic myth, bucolic folklore and early Pink Floyd to the mix that is as transcendentally lovely as it is strange. They’re the most uniquely agri-psychedelical folky band around and I love their (what we're choosing to call) weird-shire sound with all my heart. This track is from their 2009 release THE YEW AND THE HARE.

IVOR CUTLER     A WOODEN TREE

A simple observation from Ivor Cutler that has the simplicity of a Zen-like kōan. Marvellous.

CRANIUM PIE     MECHANISMS

I've had cause before to note that Cranium Pie seem to beam in their music from the 11th dimension and how their debut release, MECHANISMS PT. 1, released in 2011, shows every indication of being a concept album about a race of lobsters rising up against an evil tyranny of robots. Well, Mechanisms is from that album and a very fine thing it is too – all trippy flutes, prog jams and Brainticket sounds. 2015, however, brings with it the promise of Mechanisms Pt. 2, which I’ve already started saving up my pocket money for. 

THE ACCENT     RED SKY AT NIGHT

The Accent were one of those bands doomed to become little more than a footnote to London’s swinging psychedelic scene. Following a residency at the Upper Cut club they were given the chance to record a single in 1967, Red Sky At Night, that was too heavy to receive any radio play, and that was pretty much it for the band. A pity, really, because Cream and Jimi Hendrix were pushing the same heavy vibe and in another world, The Accent might have been contenders. Sadly, not to be.

THE MOON WIRING CLUB     CORVUS WHIRL

Unsettling goings on from Ian Hodgson’s Moon Wiring Club, whose latest release, LEPORINE PLEASURE GARDENS, allows the near-ancient rites of Victorian / Edwardian music halls and their strange belief in metaphysical worlds to bleed through the present with delightfully befuddling, anachronistic effect.

JULIAN COPE     ME SINGING

Pretty much the sound of Julian Cope unplugging himself from the world, from his second solo album FRIED, released in 1984, when all the Syd Barrett comparisons looked sadly correct. I used to feel like this song all the time. These days I’m all grown up and only feel like this sometimes.

GRUMBLING FUR     ACSCATUDAEA

I fear I may have done Grumbling Fur a disservice recently by damning them with faint praise, when this track, which opens their 2013 release GLYNNAESTRA is quite clearly the work of a band (duo) who know exactly what they’re doing – taking you down the rabbit hole of your mind where the whistle of a kettle and the clatter of pots and pans can take you to some faraway landscape and otherwise away with the fairies. Very fine.

TINTERN ABBEY     VACUUM CLEANER

For a B-side, Vacuum Cleaner has garnered a fairly semi-legendary status amongst your aficionados of this sort of thing, with originals of the single selling for up to four figure sums. Sadly the record didn’t do so well at the time of its release, 1968, with the band, the otherwise promising Tintern Abbey, doomed to play fourth on the bill to Pink Floyd, say, until they went their separate ways shortly thereafter. I think the singer may be Howard Moon.

TEN YEARS AFTER     THE SOUNDS

The 60s were much kinder to Ten Years After, who formed in 1960 as Ivan Jay and the Jaycats, only to find themselves catapulted to star status in America following an appearance at Woodstock (and their inclusion in both the film and on the soundtrack). Before that, of course, they’d also spent time as Blues Trip, and Blues Yard, but it was as Ten Years After they released this blistering psychedelic single in 1968. It didn’t sell at all but success was just round the corner.

THE COMFORTABLE CHAIR     CHILD’S GARDEN

I think we all know where we stand when a feel-good West Coast hippie sunshine pop band call a track A Child’s Garden, and you would be right – but that said, this is still a lovely little piece, and one of the highlights of the band’s only eponymously entitled album which saw release in 1969. The big thing about this band is that they were ‘discovered’ by Jim Morrison and produced by John Densmore and Robbie Krieger; the album itself both gorgeously unpredictable and not a little groovy. Sadly, by 1969 no one really cared for feel-good West Coast hippie sunshine pop and the chair fell apart (as it were). There’s a lot of that on tonight’s show.

PETER WALKER     TEAR

Peter Walker was a guitar virtuoso who so impressed Timothy Leary he was invited to be the musical director at Leary’s legendary Millbrook Estate, the site of numerous be-ings, acid fuelled parties, epiphanies, breakdowns and the usual assortment of emotional dramas. Walker’s second album, “SECOND POEM TO KARMELA” OR GYPSIES ARE IMPORTANT, released in 1969, is, in many ways, the definitive trip album, laced as it is with fabulously oil-wheel-friendly blend of free-flowing, classical-scented pieces like the sublime Tear, yogic experimentalism and sarod blooming ecstatic bliss. Drop some acid to this, get the joss sticks a-going, hang a few paisley throws on the wall and you will be spirited back to those far out days of 1969. Truly a trip unto itself.

BROADCAST     THROUGH THE GATES OF DESTINY

This track, largely experimental and tuneless (it must be said), is taken from that initially tour only release, MOTHER IS THE MILKY WAY, that was uploaded in 2011 following singer Trish Keenan’s untimely death. Hauntological themes and sounds weave their way through it and otherwise make a grown man weep for what they could have accomplished.

MOON WIRING CLUB     37 YEARS FROM THIS POINT

Dizzyingly hallucinogenic and yet lucidly elusive.

THE BEACH BOYS     SURF’S UP

Possibly Brian Wilson’s finest moment; meaning, I suspect, that it’s either too clever by half or as close to perfection as a song can actually be. Rather embarrassingly, I’m not entirely sure what version of the track this is – I found it on the Django Django LATE NIGHT TALES release (very fine indeed, by the way) – and I suspect that they tinkered with it a bit, but otherwise I'm fairly confident that it’s the version that appears on the recent release of SMILE (Sadly, I just don’t have the time these days to play all the different versions of it I own to figure it out). But one doesn’t analyse such poetic beauty, one merely succumbs, willingly, to it. Doesn’t one?

MOON WIRING CLUB     NEON SILHOUETTE REVUE

Unique in application and enchanting in effect.

POPOL VUH     ICH MACHE EINEN SPIEGEL – DREAM PART 4

 ICH MACHE EINEN SPIEGEL – DREAM PART 49 (excerpt)

HAPSASH AND THE COLOURED COAT     OUM

In his marvellous book Future Days, David Stubbs makes the observation that on this track, from their debut album, AFFENSTUNDE, released in 1970, Florian Fricke’s Moog sounds as though it’s channelling the frequencies of the universe – a suitable trip for the exploration of inner consciousness, then. Side one of the album contains a massive, three-part instrumental cross-faded together and called Ich Mache Einen Spiegel (or, if you prefer, I Make A Mirror.) Taking its title from the Florentine Codex, an exhaustive record of Aztec culture set down by a European Franciscan monk in the late 16th century, its initial sequence, Dream Part 4, is a mysterious and floating electronic piece that begins with the simulation of birdsong and immediately plunges, as if through a black hole, into the uncharted reaches of outer space. Fricke owned one of the two newly invented Moogs that existed in Germany at the time – people had never actually heard sounds like this before and the trip was transcendental. I enjoy it so much I play all of it, but I only dip my toe into the pool of Dream Part 49, and whilst it’s playing I include a short track from the album HAPSASH AND THE COLOURED CAT FEATURING HUMAN HOST AND THE HEAVY METAL KIDS (1968) called Oum that I’ve been meaning to play for ages. Both compliment the divine mood of inner exploration perfectly, though I suspect Hapsash and the Coloured Coat were having more fun.

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN     TODAY (THIS ARMY’S FOR PEACE)

I’ve often thought that Belle and Sebastian could make a really good psychedelic track or two if they put their collective minds to it, and whilst this isn’t necessarily one of them, there’s something odd going on in the background that has an undeniably psychedelically informed air about it. This is from their latest release GIRLS IN PEACETIME WANT TO DANCE and hopefully suggests a new direction for the band, now that they seem to have disco under belts.

ROJ     HOME TELESCOPE KIT

Yes it’s filler, but it's quality filler that offers glassy keys and strangely distanced, warbling ferric FX from the 2013 single release THE AMATEUR’S ATTIC, that features two early tape works from the former Broadcast keyboardist. 

TRWBADOR     PICTURES

Trwbador tread a very fine line between Welsh folk music, electro-minimalism and Eastern European hip hop, which translates itself on vinyl as hypnotic beats and acoustic folk pluckings, which combine very nicely on their debut album SEVERAL WOLVES, released last year, into something exploratory and lovely. Last week I compared them to a cross between St. Etienne and Stereolab, whereas Pictures has a touch of Cornelius and Tuung about it, but the album belongs wholly to Trwbador. Gorgeous.

TAKAKO MINEKAWA & DYMAXION     A REPORT ON AN INVESTIGATION

Naive melodies, breathy vocals, and percolating arrangements from Japanese chanteuse Takako Minekawa and a track from her mini-album MAXI ON!, released 2000, on which she collaborates with one of New York’s equally playful Dymaxion. A Report On An Investigation has the air of a haunted melody to it, a kaleidoscopic comedown tinged with mild regret that I’m finding very alluring as I get older.

MORTON FELDMAN     CHRISTIAN WOLFF IN CAMBRIDGE

More filler, yes, but of the quite necessary avant garde(n) variety, this time from that great pioneer of indeterminate music, Morton Feldman. His piece Christian Wolff In Cambridge was recorded in 1963 for chorus a cappella, but I came across it on the album EXTENDED VOICES, released in 1968 by experimental composer Alvin Lucier and The Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, on which the listener is presented with pieces for chorus and for voices altered electronically (I think you have to be a fan of this sort of thing to fully appreciate it). Feldman’s piece, Christian Wolff in Cambridge, is a simple, two-part work, consisting of a succession of chords and single notes sung quietly by the chorus. There is no text. The conductor chooses the duration of each sound on the basis of breath control and harmonic weight – the sort of quality filler you just don’t get on other radio shows.

I had that fade off into the famous speech delivered by Charlie Chaplin from his 1940 satirical comedy 'The Great Dictator' which I was lucky enough to watch the other night and found quite stirring.

THE MONKEES     YOUR AUNTIE GRIZELDA

A track from The Monkees that takes me right back to Saturday mornings safe in front of the telly. Some people don’t get them at all but for me they are one big happy part of growing up and encapsulate the spirit of the 60s, even if it wasn’t quite that part of the 60s that I was growing up in. Auntie Grizelda was the first released Monkees song to feature Peter Tork on lead vocals, although I’ve always assumed it was Micky Dolenz for no other reason than it sounds like him. It appears on their second cash-in album, MORE OF THE MONKEES, from 1967, which as we all know, they didn’t actually play on, but for which we all forgave them what with them being the spirit of the 60s an’ all.

ALVIN LUCIER     NORTH AMERICAN TIME CAPSULE 1967

Finally, an excerpt from Alvin Lucier in which he utilizes a vocoder to encode speech sounds into digital information bits for transmission over narrow band widths via telephone lines or radio channels. There is no written score for this work. The performers are asked to prepare material using any sounds at all that would describe to beings far from our environment either in space or in time the physical, spiritual, social, scientific or any other situation in which we currently find ourselves. The performers’ sounds are fed into the vocoder and are modified during the performance both by the sounds acting as control signals and by the manual alteration of the vocoder components.  It goes on like this for ten minutes or so. I can take about three.

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