MIND DE-CODER 54
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Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one
- Einstein
LAY
LLAMAS WE ARE YOU
Repetitious afro-funk and spacey Kraut-psych beats from Italian Shamanic duo Lay Llamas with their debut
single, We Are You, taken from last year’s album release OSTRO, on which they
layer deep space synths and malevolent guitar effects over the creeping tones
and floating atmospheres of 60’s and 70’s Italian library and soundtrack music.
We Are You is all slowed-down disco grooves and sinister vocal whispers - it glides
like a pagan breeze across the soul.
JEFF
BRIDGES SEEING WITH MY EYES CLOSED
The first of
three tracks taken from the incredibly strange but captivatingly beautiful
SLEEPING TAPES, released by Jeff Bridges earlier this year. Over the course of 40 minutes or so Jeff mutters
away affably and, indeed, hypnotically over a series of subjects – sometimes
he’s encouraging us to hum more, sometimes he’s discussing the sound of a
toilet bowl re-filling, sometimes he's reciting poetry, and we even join him for a walking
tour of Temescal Canyon, "going for
a walk like two old friends on a Sunday." It’s a captivating and
surreal recording, a fantastic dreamscape full of ethereal pianos, children’s
laughter, Jeff's gravelly baritone voice, and hang gliding. On his website Jeff (and, after listening to this
album, you too will feel on first name terms with The Dude) writes that: “the world
is filled with too many restless people in need of rest – that's why I filled
my sleeping tapes with intriguing sounds, noises and other things to help you
get a good night's rest.”
GNIDROLOG SNAILS
The Prog Fu
is strong in this one. Gnidrolog were a progressive rock act founded in 1969 by
twin brothers Colin and Stewart Goldring who took their surname and changed it
around a bit, added a letter here and there, to create their incomprehensibly
horrible band name – just imagine if they’d become famous? They’d have
regretted it then. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately I suppose, their debut
album, IN SPITE OF HARRY’S TOENAIL, released in 1972, failed to sell in the
quantities required for that eventuality, despite drawing comparisons with the
rather more successful Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull and Van Der Graaf Generator. As is often the case, their status has grown
over the years with their original vinyl albums reaching huge sums among
collectors.
FAMILY ME MY FRIEND
Family’s
debut album, MUSIC IN A DOLL’S HOUSE, released in 1968, put paid to The
Beatles’ tentative plans to name their forthcoming double album A Doll’s
House after the Henrik Ibsen play, but unlike that schizophrenic,
post-come down, sprawling mess of an album (he writes fondly) MUSIC IN A DOLL’S
HOUSE is a full on psychedelic affair, over-produced to within an inch of its
life by Dave Mason, fresh from writing A Hole In My Shoe for his own band
Traffic. The album utilises backwards mellotrons, violin feedback, trumpets, and
obligatory phasing to create a swirling, densely hallucinatory wall of sound.
The guitars in this track seem to lift themselves out of the speakers at you.
SKY
PICNIC FARTHER IN THIS FAIRY TALE
The debut
release IN 2011 from New York City's Sky Picnic, FARTHER IN THIS FAIRYTALE,
resurrects the lost art of the concept album, telling the tale of a loss of
innocence and an introspective journey through life that immerses the listener
in a mystical and fairy tale-like world of psychedelia. The title track is an
experimental piece full of various delays, feedbacks and effects that’s not
entirely unlike Jefferson Airplane circa AFTER BATHING AT BAXTERS. Pretty good
then, and it includes an 11-minute track called Universal Mind De-Coder that
just has to get an airing on the next show.
ROJ LUDWIG’S CHILDREN
A
hauntologically inspired piece from former Broadcast keyboardist Roj Stevens,
who recorded this track – all watery field recordings meshed into a waltzing
synth melody and reversed loops - some years back before finding release as one
half of the THE AMATEUR’S ATTIC single in 2013.
BEAULIEU
PORCH A NEW LIGHT IS BORN
More
psychedelic goodness from multi-instrumentalist Simon Berry, who, in his guise
as The Beaulieu Porch, produces hand-crafted, giddy kaleidoscopic pop albums
that are very much at home to the spirit of 1968. THE CARMELITE DIVINE (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK),
released earlier this year, is an ever changing palette of sounds and images,
guitars and orchestras twisting and turning through a swirling mass of
harmonies and hook lines influenced by, but not entirely indebted to, Strawberry
Fields. This is a good thing, of course.
CRANIUM
PIE TRACK 2
For their
follow-up to 2011’s MECHANISMS PT. 1, Cranium Pie have confounded expectations
(well, mine, at least) with a sprawling double album of four tracks, each of which
delivers some 20 minutes or so of progtastic grooves. In many ways it’s
actually a sequel to their debut which, if you remember, was set in an
imaginary future where the only form of life appeared to be the crayfish, and
the rest of the world was dominated by machines. The ex-human consciousness
somehow migrated into the crayfish, and they became very spiritual and
enlightened, though violent also, as they were in perpetual war with the
robots. The mysterious blinking eye had given the creatures the task of growing
a human homunculus, and delivering it to the wall safely, in order to reseed a
newer version of the human race (you got that right...?). Part 2 is apparently
set mainly in the time running up to the apocalypse and posits itself at
that exact point where psychedelia meets prog and briefly became something
better than both (before it became all wanky).
The band
itself says of the concept:
“Bravely the last band on Earth clung to survival, transmitting their
messages of hope over the short waves to any listener alive. Entombed in their
subterranean domain, they made recordings using broken equipment salvaged from
the museum of hospital radio.
"For nine hundred
and eight years the tapes lay hidden in the sealed bunker, until they were
eventually discovered by the crustacean resistance. In a selfless act of
potential genocide they transmitted the tapes as a warning, back in time to the
early 21st century, to a time just before...”
It is, as
you can imagine, a trip verily unto itself.
SPROATLY
SMITH WILLOW’S SONG
A bit of a
treat this – Sproatly Smith, my favourite agri-psychedelic folk band, cover my
favourite song of all time (various other songs of a vaguely bucolic nature
notwithstanding), for the Active Listener’s first anniversary release in 2012.
THE ROWAN
AMBER MILL MANDRAKE, HEMLOCK AND RYE
(ERGOTISM VERSION)
The Rowan
Amber Mill are purveyors of your woodland folkadelica, a psychedelic mix of medieval
folk charm and pastoral Victorian romanticism that puts them in the same
field as Sproatly Smith, say. In fact, this track is taken from that same
Active Listener mix and I urge you to check out the blogsite – it’s my first port
of call for all things of a weird-folk nature.
THE ADVISORY
CIRCLE TRIADEX 259
The Advisory
Circle’s new album FROM OUT HERE takes us back to a disembodied version of the
past, not so much re-imagined but stuck somewhere in the 50's just as the future
was becoming imaginable. Relying less on samples than usual, the music sounds
like the sort of thing Dan Dare would listen to on the way home after a hard
day’s work on the moon.
Triadex 259
(named after an old 70’s sequencer-based synthesizer) is a spooky sonic transmission
from a pioneering age with the hauntological dial turned up to 11 on the
radiogram.
NOEL
GALLAGHER THE BALLAD OF THE MIGHTY I
(A BEYOND THE WIZARD'S SLEEVE RE-ANIMATION)
What is
there to say about Noel Gallagher, an artist who has been treading water since
the release of WHAT'S THE STORY, released, let us not forget, some 20 years ago
now? Why do we give him the time of day? Short answer: he does a good line in
remixers. Having turned his back on the polymesmeric Amorphous Androgynous
because he couldn’t be arsed, he’s now knocking on the door of Erol Alkan and
Richard Norris to bring a Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve re-animation to the second
single from the aptly titled, CHASING YESTERDAY, released earlier this year. It’s
a brilliant choice, of course, and they bring a 70’s psych-prog feel to the
track - it's all lysergic strings, hazy effects and a beautifully languid
atmosphere. Marvellous. There’s an equally good Andy Wetherall remix of the
first single In The Heat Of The Moment knocking about, and I understand there
may be a collaboration with Massive Attack coming along too. One day he might
make me feel again the way I did when I first heard DEFINITELY MAYBE.
GIORGIO
TUMA RAYMOND BLEEPS 2/ RAYMOND BLEEPS
I played an
excerpt from a documentary discussing the nature of reality and how, really,
there was nothing to discuss what with reality being an illusion and all, and
whilst that was happening it pleased me to play a couple of trifling pieces
from the album IN THE MORNING WE’LL MEET, released by Italian psych-crooner
Giorgio Tuma. They’re rather inconsequential but none the less lovely for all
that.
PETER
WALKER I AND THOU
Released in
1968, Peter Walker’s album “SECOND POEM TO KARMELA” OR GYPSIES ARE IMPORTANT
was a ground breaking blend of folk, raga, psychedelia, Eastern and Modal
sounds that captures the essence of true west-coast acid folk. Walker was
intimately associated with Timothy Leary and provided the soundtrack to many a
trip at his lysergic Millbrook hideaway. His tunes epitomise late-60s
psychedelic experimentation, with tufts of notes from his nylon-string guitar
or sarod blooming into ecstatic bliss - tune in, turn on and drop one to this.
JEFF
BRIDGES MY KEYS
In which
Jeff creates a beautiful sound picture of a lost love, found.
STERLING
ROSWELL ASTEROID No. B-612
As the title
suggests, this is an otherworldly delight – like a 60’s sci-fi soundtrack,
mixed with Meddle-era Pink Floyd. Sterling Roswell, multi-instrumentalist and
former drummer with the Spacemen 3 released THE CALL OF THE COSMOS, from which
this piece is taken last year.
QUICKSILVER
MESSENGER SERVICE WHO DO YOU LOVE?
Opinion is
pretty divided about this track – for some, it’s the definitive live recording
of the mid-Sixties San Francisco psychedelic-ballroom experience, for others
its guitar wankery epitomises all the worst excesses of American hippie music.
Released in 1969, the Who Do You Love Suite takes up side one of the band’s second
release, HAPPY TRAILS, and was recorded over a couple of live shows and broken
down into separate movements – namely, When You Love, Where You Love, How You
Love and Which Do You Love - in which the band are given the opportunity for a
solo outing of some sort. On the whole it’s best to let your mind wander off
elsewhere and return for the closing coda Who Do You Love Pt. 2 when it all
comes together in one pounding refrain that kind of knocks your socks off.
Never as successful as Jefferson Airplane or The Grateful Dead, this album is
nevertheless equal to anything produced by either band in that era, and remains
a sonic documentation of those times.
JEFF
BRIDGES FEELING GOOD
In which
Jeff Bridges thinks you’re great. Think about that…Jeff Bridges thinks you’re
great.
