MIND DE-CODER HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

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MIND DE-CODER HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

                                                                                    Aleister Crowley

(EPISODES FROM) THE FIELD BAZAAR     THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL

So the story goes that O Campo Bazar was a Portuguese Twilight Zone/Tales of the Unexpected style programme which should have disappeared without a trace along with the rest of the 70s had it not been for the release of (episodios de) O Campo Bazar, a promotional gimmick marketed as `a sampler of instrumental works created especially for the programme’ which has since become a semi-legendary curio, the likes of which the thesaurus defines as:  anything very rare or impossible to obtain is said to be like finding hen's teeth. Released in Portugal in 1973 by performers who to this day remain a mystery, the story continues that such was the cult status and mythos of the group/artist that 2012 saw the release of `The Bane Tree’ – a collection of recordings that enjoyed the feel of being demos and unused tracks from the original TV show. This time, however, the artist(s) responsible had a name that had been translated into English - The Field Bazaar - and the (episodes from) bit, which was a clear indication of its TV series roots, had also been translated and kept. The performers remain unknown.

The name `The Field Bazaar’ - which is what `O Campo Bazar’ is a translation of - probably comes from a short story from the pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The show was so unsuccessful on the small screen and so successfully buried afterwards that it is believed that no footage remains and no one will admit to working on it - although Alfred Molina is said to have appeared in the pilot episode. It is said that the voice of Vincent Price provided each episode’s introduction in such an insultingly bad attempt at Portuguese that his parts were re-recorded in an attempt to save the show.

Recently artwork for a previously unknown (episodes from) The Field Bazaar album, A TALE OF WITCHES, WOODLAND AND HALF-REMEMBERED MELODIES…, unreleased and assumed lost, was discovered in a box of old picture frames at a church jumble sale in Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire. A ¼ inch tape also surfaced in 2012 which is now believed to be tracks from the recording sessions for this lost album. So far a tweaked and updated tune, The Musgrave Ritual, is the only track to have materialised from this lost album. The title again references Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and includes a reading of the ancient ritual from the Sherlock Holmes story of the same name.

At least, that’s the story. After spending more time than I ought to researching (episodes from) The Field Bazaar, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a prank; a hauntological backstory passed off as myth by person or persons unknown in a playful attempt to ensure anonymity and fuel curiosity in equal measure. This makes me love it all the more, of course.

BOARDS OF CANADA     TELEPATH

In some circles Boards of Canada are considered the forefathers of hauntological music. Their earlier albums evoke the sounds and memories of a faded modernism arising from mid-twentieth-century television, science, public education and childhood – albeit a childhood not as lived but as we grown-ups remember it; the memories of which, as the band put it, represent a more terrible reality that blends paradoxically with our childhood dreams. Their most recent release, TOMORROW’S HARVEST, released in 2013, owes more to the soundtracks of John Carpenter, Mark Isham, and Wendy Carlos, all of whom constructed some of their most enduring scores in the late 1970s and early 80s, but Telepath reassuringly resonates with the crackly transmissions and washes of amniotic analogue sound that made those early albums a hauntological reference point.

BUTTHOLE SURFERS     SWEAT LOAF

The Butthole Surfers aren’t so much a band; more the aural equivalent of a nightmarish acid trip – but, crucially I didn’t know that at the time. “Listen to this”, a friend had casually said one dreary afternoon, and left me to it. That evening, relaxing on the sofa in a state of heightened awareness (as it were) I’d slipped into a dream world of blissful delirium following a pleasant experience with the Spacemen 3. I then placed this on the record player and as those first noted drifted from the speakers I got myself all nice and comfy on the sofa in anticipation of further dreamy reverie …”Daddy, what does regret mean?” Oh, this is going to be lovely, I thought, an enraptured smile already playing on the corners of my lips… and then I literally erupted from the sofa as if I’d had an electric cattle prod shoved up the psychic jacksie, running around the room in panic and confusion, convinced I was under attack and simply being unable to understand what was going on, just trying to find the off switch and being unable to find it anywhere, but knowing that only by being able to turn the stereo off would everything be all right again. And that was my first experience with the Butthole Surfers. Sweat Loaf utilises that warped riff from Black Sabbath’s Sweet Leaf but somehow makes it sound less celebratory and altogether more unhinged than anything magicked up by that band even in their most decadent glory days. It opens side 1 of LOCUST ABORTION TECHNICIAN, the Butthole Surfer’s heaviest, darkest and most disturbing album, released 1987 – an album that veers from heavy fucked-up psychedelia to grungy noise rock to progressive guitar and tape effects in one big, gloriously schizophrenic mess. In retrospect, the album cover should have been a bit of a giveaway; and the album's name; and their name, I suppose. Of course, I can laugh about it now. Not for the unwary, that’s all I’m saying.

ENGLISH HERETIC     THE SACRED GEOGRAPHY OF BRITISH CINEMA

EnglishHeretic is a project curated by Andy Sharp whose idiosyncratic musical vision is inspired and coloured by an abiding interest in the arcane and the occult, resulting in albums very much at home to all things paranormal, magic of the ceremonial kind and ever so far out goings on in Ye Olde Rural England. Sharpe’s 2005 release, THE SACRED GEOGRAPHY OF BRITISH CINEMA, is dedicated to the harrowing opening scene of Michael Reeves' 1968 horror movie, WITCHFINDER GENERAL, filmed in the medieval village of Kersey. It’s an unsettling listen, layered with creepy and creaky experimental folk electronics, Mansonesque psychedelia, Electronic Voice Phenomena type collages and field recordings culled from visits to the crematorium ground on which Reeves' ashes were scattered following his death shortly after the completion of the film. The CD is accompanied with a 16-page booklet which reflects on the genesis of the English Heretic project, as well as a survey of film locations, a poetic meditation on the Anglo-American ricochets of Suffolk's esoteric history and suggested walks around the area where it was filmed and sound experiments to be carried out if that be your wont.

ERIC ZANN     OUROBORINDRA

Eric Zann is: a) a character in a short story by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft in which a mute old man plays strange melodies and rhythms of sound of an almost otherworldly nature in an attempt to keep back unknown and unseen creatures from his window, which is said to look out into a black abyss - most likely another dimension if Lovecraft has anything to do with it, and, b) an alias for Jim Jupp, co-founder of the Ghost Box Music label, and the man behind Belbury Poly. Jupp uses Zann’s moniker to record music that’s somewhat darker and more Gothic than other Ghost Box artists, despite containing many key elements of the Ghostbox aesthetic, namely the influence of Hammer Horror soundtracks, ambient music and drones; in Jupp's words, it contains references to "crows, church bells, magic spells and other horror signifiers". OUROBORINDRA was released in 2005 and sees Zann manipulating ancient oscillators, radios and found sounds in an attempt to tune in to voices beyond the veil. An electroacoustic journey through stark, echoing soundscapes, haunted by half heard voices and weird amorphous entities whilst occasionally offering us fleeting glimpses of the light and beauty beyond.

H.P. LOVECRAFT     MOBIUS TRIP

Disoriented hippie euphoria from the band H. P. Lovecraft, whose second album, H.P. LOVECRAFT II, released in 1968, was legendarily the first major label release to have been recorded by musicians who were all under the influence of acid – which is pretty admirable given my inability to even put the kettle on under similar circumstances.

DELIA DERBYSHIRE AND BRIAN HODGSON     THE HOUSE SPEAKS

This is the bit of music that’s playing in the background whilst we’re given the meaning of Halloween to the Celtic calendar. It’s from the soundtrack to the 1973 horror film THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, in which a group of stout-hearted physicists and parapsychologists attempt to spend a week in a purportedly haunted English manor in which previous investigators were killed while doing research. Roddy McDowell is in it, just in case you were tempted to watch it. An album has never been officially released, but the score that does exist seems to have been ripped from a copy of the movie by Derbyshire obsessives, of which there are many, despite the majority of the soundtrack having actually been provided by Hodgson from his Electrophon studio. For the most part the majority of the tracks on this release feature a haunting minimalistic ambient-like atmosphere, with minor amounts of percussion and brass and sounds which are both organic and mechanical in nature. Hodgson's strange sound effects can be heard throughout each cue, and largely sound like spirits calling out from the beyond and letting out torturous moans, although what sounds like muffled sexual moans can be also heard in some places – I think this may have been Derbyshire's contribution to the album; she slipped them onto her debut album, an Electric Storm, too (not that I'm a Delia obsessive in any way).

SPINAL TAP     STONEHENGE

In ancient times...

Hundreds of years before the dawn of history

Lived a strange race of people... the Druids.

No one knows who they were or what they were doing

But their legacy remains

Hewn into the living rock... Of Stonehenge.

Genius. Couldn’t resist it. Just because it’s Halloween, that’s no excuse to get carried away.

SCHIZO FUN ADDICT     THEME FROM SUSPIRIA

This is a 7” vinyl release from the fairly wonderful Fruits De Mer record label who specialize in this sort of thing – an off-kilter version of the Theme From Suspiria, the highly rated Mind De-Coder favourite 1977 Italian horror movie by Dario Argento with a seminal soundtrack by cult band Goblin. I could have gone with the Goblin soundtrack, of course, but thought I’d favour this version by Schizo Fun Addict when I read it had been recorded above a funeral home in New Jersey last year. The tubular bells are replaced with piano and then some sort of harpsichord synthesizer which carries that familiar refrain, then before you know it there are oscillators flying around all over the place, creepy la la la’s instead of whispering witches and then some funky breaks that wouldn’t have disgraced a vintage Deodato LP. There's even one point where it threatens to turn into the Doctor Who theme. Marvellous. If Goblin had been listening to Brian Hodgson rather than Mike Oldfield then their version could have potentially sounded like this.

JASON CREST     BLACK MASS

Jason Crest were psychedelic also-rans as the 1960s came to a close. They’d released 5 singles, none of which particularly sold well at the time despite much radio play, but have since garnered some cult status as they began to appear on various psychedelic compilations. I believe this track - where the blood-curdling vocal, monkish chanting, and occult-tinged lyrics can bring to mind a more psychedelic Black Sabbath (or perhaps an even a more psychedelic Spinal Tap) - was originally slated as an a-side but was relegated to the b-side of their final single A Place In The Sun, released 1969, following their label’s declaration that the song was unfit for public consumption. I read recently that there’s a 10 minute mix of this knocking around somewhere, created by an anonymous studio engineer from the original acetate during some downtime which I will try to get my hands on for next week.

VANILLA FUDGE     SEASON OF THE WITCH

Like Iron Butterfly, the Vanilla Fudge occupied that point where heavy psychedelia was just one step away from nascent heavy metal – I think I read somewhere that Deep Purple were inspired by the Vanilla Fudge sound, but there is a prog-rock element to their sound that equally leads to Uriah Heap. Nathan Hall, of the Soft Hearted Scientists, has said recently he considers this to have been a spectacular wrong turn and wonders how music would have turned out if bands had continued to explore the psychedelic path instead of the heavy metal path. Me too. Despite that, I'm still a fan of this particularly strung out version of Donovan’s Season Of The Witch, which can be found on the band’s third album, RENAISSANCE, released in 1968. It’s a much darker version than the original, brooding and fuzzy, and it reaches something of a grim conclusion – but I still don’t know why you have to pick up every stitch just because it’s the season of the witch. Demonic knitting, anyone?

LOUISE HEUBNER     ORGIES – A TOOL OF WITCHCRAFT

A spoken word recording of spells and charms of seduction and sexual power from Louise Huebner, the Official Witch of Los Angeles, a practicing third-generation witch and author of several books on witchcraft. Coming from roughly the same era that produced occult celebs like Anton LaVey and Sybil Leek, Huebner was media savvy enough to follow her government-issued designation for "Official Witch Of Los Angeles County" with the release of this LP SEDUCTION THROUGH WITCHCRAFT in 1969. It’s a reverb-heavy collection of incantations centred around "charms of seduction and sexual power", delivered in a voice on the point of orgasm, swishy Moog sounds and plenty of stereo manipulation. As they say, if you only buy one pre-Witch House/Spoken Word LP of seductive enchantments this year, make it this one.

THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN     PRELUDE/ NIGHTMARE

Forever defined by Fire, I thought I’d play the opening track from the band’s only album THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN, released in 1968, an album that manages to be just about proto-everything that followed in the next couple of years, and certainly gave Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan a thing or two to think about in terms of deranged shamanic delivery. For all that, it’s a surprisingly melodic affair with a mixture of everything, taking in R & B, jazz, blues, psychedelia and experimental rock which, in this instant, includes narration, poetry, gongs, screams, symphonic passages, wild horns, flutes and wigged out organ solos from fellow cohort Vince Crane, whose Hammond is at the heart of the album. Despite being a classic single in its own right, Fire really makes sense in the context of this album, coming as part of a suite of songs that suggest that Brown was aiming for a dark rock opera about Hell. Sadly that album never saw the light of day, the result of producer/manager Kit Lambert’s desire that the album actually sold. Despite this, it remains a classic of that all too rare proto-prog-rock-symphonic-metal psychedelic scene.

CHRIS MORRIS     UNFLUSTERED PARENTS

Whilst by no means the spookiest track on this evening’s show, Unflustered Parents is certainly the most horrifying. This track is taken from the CD release that accompanied Chris Morris’s brilliantly subversive BLUE JAM, an ambient radio anti-comedy programme, described once as a perverse sound garden, which aired on BBC Radio 1 in the wee hours of the morning from 1997 to 1999, the likes of which you don’t hear too much off of these days. It came with a brilliant soundtrack with music by the likes of Brian Eno, Portished and The Aphex Twin supplying surreal background noise. I think it was recently available on Radio 4 Extra, and it's well worth checking out.

WHITE NOISE     BLACK MASS – AN ELECTRIC STORM IN HELL

Eagle-eared listeners will recognise this from Dracula A.D. 1972, where that scheming Johnny Alucard tricks a gang of switched-on teenagers looking for kicks into holding a black mass in an abandoned church, so I thought I’d include a bit of that here. The track was made by White Noise, the experimental electronic group formed by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop and David Vorhaus, a classical bass player with a background in physics and electronic engineering, and was included on their debut album, AN ELECTRIC STORM, released in 1969. I’m surprised to find myself playing it all, given that I’m sure it would cause even the most experienced and engagingly optimistic Head to have the sort of bad trip normally brought on by dropping some brown acid and coming up in the toilet stalls at Glastonbury festival. To heighten the vibe of rising dread, what with it being Halloween and all, I have the following play over it…

DOLLY DOLLY     THE RAVEN

Dolly Dolly (sometimes known as Dolly) is David Yates, a Berkshire-based spoken-word artist, poet, events curator, radio playwright and something of a British surrealist working in the hauntological tradition.  His work makes use of cut-ups, automatic writing, and dream diaries channelling the skewed atmospherics of such luminaries as David Gascoyne and Roland Penrose should their ghosts have appeared in an abandoned garden shed. This particular piece, however, is simply what it says on the label – Yates reading Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic masterpiece of mournful and never-ending remembrance, THE RAVEN. White Noise’s track runs out about halfway through, so I provide further spooky ambience from…

WOODBINES AND SPIDERS     ROTTEN DRUID

WOODBINES AND SPIDERS is the result of a collaboration between the Moon Wiring Club’s Ian Hodgson and Jon Brooks of The Advisory Circle, released in 2014. The concept seems to be real estate meets ruin porn - with W&S as estate agents specialising in houses with perturbing atmospheres and sitting tenants from other planes. Disembodied voices ring through modulated tones and a host of laudanum lidded moments scratching at your darker consciousness. The background is filled with an eerie tone like old heavy dusty drapes.  As the advertising blurb suggests: “Let the future of your surroundings and the landscape of memory seep together inside one authentic purchase”.

MICK JAGGER     INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER

See, it says that this from the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s 11-minute film, INVOCATION TO MY DEMON BROTHER, released in 1969, for which he got Mick Jagger to provide the musical score, such as it is, on a newly received Moog. But this isn’t the piece of music that accompanies that film, which in any case sounds as Jagger was still struggling to come to terms with the on button. The piece I’m playing I found on an album called VARIOUS ARTISTS – SOLO MUSIC WORKS 1961-2011, which, as the title suggests, features Jagger’s various solo outings over the years. On this album, this track is catalogued as belonging to an unreleased copy of the film’s soundtrack. The film itself was assembled from various out-takes of Anger’s earlier film Scorpio Rising, so perhaps the soundtrack contains bits and bobs of discarded musical pieces. I like this track though, it sounds like he actually managed to get the Moog out of the box and managed to plug it in properly.

And then we slip into the dreadful ending of The Wickerman, in which the redoubtable Sergeant Howie learns the shocking truth about goings on in Summerilse and the island’s residents burst into spirited rendition of that 13^th century classic, Summer Is Icumen In. In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I play another version of it, this time by…

PRUFROCK     SUMMER IS A-COMING IN

Prufrock is a collaboration between multi-instrumentalist Steve Christie and Dolly Dolly. After playing on Dolly Dolly’s debut album Antimacassar the pair decided to work together on the short series of tracks included on this EP. Dolly recorded sounds from his garden bird table, a grandfather clock, a 91 year old lady who recited a poem from memory, but sadly died two weeks after the recording was made, a group of adults with learning difficulties and a walk though Old Town Hastings towards the sea. Steve used an old school Steinway Grand Piano, a Lowrey DSO-1 Heritage Deluxe organ, a 19th Century Pipe organ, a cello, a violin, a recorder, and a bit of computer, and mastered it on an ex-BBC Pebble Mill Studer B67 tape machine, a nice touch I’m sure you’ll agree. It has hauntology writ large all over it.

PROCOL HARUM     REPENT WALPURGIS

As all proper witches know, Halloween is a yearly celebration observed in a number of countries on 31 October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. It initiates the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints ( the hallows in question), martyrs, and all the faithful departed believers. It doesn’t really have anything to do with witches at all; they just got kind of roped into it as a hangover from those days when Christians persecuted wise women, old crones, young maidens, widows and, well, were pretty much suspicious of all women really, and in doing so turned them into a tidy caricature of all that’s supposed to be evil and fearful. Your real witch actually celebrates Walpurgis Night, or Walpurgisnacht, to give it its correct German title, a Sabbath held on the night of 30 April, the eve of May 1^st, when witches meet for a bit of a chat and a knees up. All of which is my way of putting the track Repent Walpurgis, from the band’s 1967 debut release, PROCOL HARUM, in some kind of context. That being said, this track has a touch of Julian Cope's Safesurfer about it, don't you think? It kind of makes up for me not using him anywhere in the show. He knows a thing or two about paganism, what with being an Odinist and all. I had a track lined up and everything. Oh, well, maybe next year.

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