MIND DE-CODER 54

  MIND DE-CODER 54

     To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page

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.

Facebook