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MIND
DE-CODER 60
Music that contains space
for the listener to occupy as thinker, creator and dreamer; music that
envelops, dislocates and bewilders; music which is trance inducing through
repetition but essentially forward facing and unconcerned with historical
accuracy, authenticity, fashion or tradition and music that rewards deep
listening is still the root of the sonic psychedelic experience, and long may
it remain so.
John Doran, Sept 2014,The
Quietus
ALVIN
LUCIER I SITTING IN A ROOM
This
extraordinary track, which is all over the show, was created in 1969 by Alvin
Lucier, a composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore
acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. Much of his work is influenced by
science, exploring the physical properties of sound itself: the resonance of
spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission
of sound through physical media. It sounds mostly unlistenable to, I know, but,
really, it fits the show like a velour glove. On this piece, I AM SITTING IN A
ROOM, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into
a room and re-recorded there many times. Since all rooms have characteristic
resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a
small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they
resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible,
replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The space
acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound. All the recorded
segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and
constitute the work. He’s actually performed this piece numerous times, if
perform is the right word, several of which have been recorded. This particular
version was made on October 29th and 31st, 1980, in his own living room and
consists of thirty-two generations of speech. It lasts 40 minutes and you’ll be
pleased to know I don’t play it all, but it pops up throughout the show
creating something of an ambiance, I’m sure you’ll agree.
KING
GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD LONELY STEEL SHEET FLYER
This
is track four from the Gizzard’s (as I’m choosing to call them in this
instance) marvellous QUARTERS! LP, which has rarely left the household
phonogram since I came across it a few months back. Lonely Steel Sheet Flyer
worms its way irresistibly into your head and hangs around long after its 10
minutes and 10 seconds have taken off into cosmos – this is gorgeous, warped
psychedelia that unspools like a lazy summer afternoon. A bit like I do,
really.
ALEJANDRO
JODOROWSKY, DON CHERRY AND RONAL FRANGIPANE
RAINBOW ROOM
Rainbow
Room is taken from the soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal, audacious
and dazzling psychedelic masterpiece, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, which caused something
of a scandal at the 1973 Cannes Festival. Entirely financed by John and Yoko,
the film is a kaleidoscopic dissertation on the nature of enlightenment that’s
all but impossible to describe, given its emphasis on surreal visuals over
narrative, but which might be usefully summed up as “trippy as nobody’s
business”. The soundtrack itself is less so, but manages to take in psychedelic
rock and esoteric folk music, subtle tone poems to grand-scale orchestral
themes, vintage dance music and a little Tuvan throat singing along the way.
For 40 odd years or so this was the holy grail for collectors of your psychedelic
soundtracks, remaining unreleased following a dispute between Jodorowsky and
the film’s producer Allan Klein (that Allan
Klein who saw off The Beatles). This year, however, saw its release on both CD
and a rather handsome vinyl edition – it should be an absolutely crucial
addition any psychedelic going’s on you have going on.
KATIE
GATELY PIPES
This
stunning piece is constructed entirely of Gately’s own snipped, processed and
layered vocals (and effects), a process so complex that it took six painstaking
months to assemble. Released as a cassette-only release in 2013, Pipes is
seemingly influenced by the spirit of Arthur Russell and Gregorian chant but
remains sonically unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. At times it can be
unbelievably tense both in the varying moods and tones, but Gately’s mixture of
ambient vocal pulsing and complex rhythmic textures are never less than
mind-blowing. Apparently if you slow the track way down you’ll find a pop song
in there somewhere.
THIGHPAULSANDRA THE GOLDEN
COMMUNION
This is the title track from THE GOLDEN COMMUNION, the latest
transgressive release from former Julian Cope collaborator and sonic explorer, Thighpaulsandra
(Tim Lewis to his mum, I hope). In a show not shy of sonic experimentation this
is nevertheless an astonishing piece of music which, over its 24 minutes, takes
the listener on a journey through orchestral and experimental soundscapes that
trip dramatically through balletic chamber music, wayward electronic forces,
synth slipstreams, dense drones and psychedelic soul. It’s a captivating listen
and one which is sustained throughout the whole album which reveals and revels
in the dizzying and often overwhelming psychedelic highs dancing hither and
tither from its grooves.
JULIA HOLTER MY LOVE, MY LOVE
This spellbindingly gorgeous track is taken from the album REMEMBERING
MOUNTAINS: UNHEARD SONGS BY KAREN DALTON, on which Holter is one of many contemporary
female artists (Josephine Foster, Marissa Nadler and Isobell Campbell shine)
given a sample of Dalton’s unrecorded song lyrics (verses, snippets, poems) to
put to music. Dalton herself never recorded her own songs; her two albums,
released
in the late 60s early 70s and now generally lionized as lost folk classics,
contained no original compositions, so chances are she never intended to record
these songs at all – it is left to the artist to find their own way into the
lyrics and channel Dalton’s broken heart through their own melodies. Holter’s
sparse minimalist take on My Love, My Love perfectly captures her own
avant-garde experimentation and gets it exactly right, honouring the spirit of
Dalton’s own captivating aesthetic; full of memory, love and loss the song
turns the pain of loneliness into something almost transcendentally lovely.
MAX RICHTER PATH 5 (DELTA)
And speaking of transcendental loveliness, Max Richter’s Path 5 (Delta)
is almost indescribably sublime. Richter is known as an influential voice in
your post-minimalist circles, commissioning and performing works by minimalist
musicians such as Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, and Steve Reich, but
I’ve always kept an eye on him because of his work with Amorphous Androgynous,
Keli Ali and Vashti Bunyan. His latest release, SLEEP, is an 8 hour therapeutic
project designed to reinforce and reflect, well, natural sleep patterns. In
essence, the listener is required to press play as they ready themselves for
bed, nod off to sleep somewhere between the patient piano chords of track 1 (Dream
1) and the vocal-and-organ ululations of track 4 (Path 3), and re-emerge after
eight hours of music to a gentle crescendo of stretching strings, wordless
harmonies, and long-tone bass near the close of its final track (Dream 0). In
the meantime, Richter’s slow-motion electronics-and-chamber-ensemble hybrid shifts
between and slowly recycles parts of the whole, unfolding like a mix between
Arvő Part and the glacial slow-motion of Sigur Rós, say, that not only reflects
but embodies the process of sleep’s half-remembered patterns. Given that nobody
has the time to listen to the whole piece, Richter has also released an
accompanying album, FROM SLEEP, which lasts a mere hour, from which this dream-like
recording is taken.
HARUMI TWICE TOLD TALES OF THE
POMEGRANATE FOREST
Harumi is one of the great lost psychedelic artists of the 1960s – a
Japanese ex-pat (with a woman’s name, apparently) he managed to convince the
legendary Tom Wilson (of the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Simon and
Garfunkel, Mothers of Invention, Sun Ra, Nico fame – you know the one) to
produce his only album, simply called HARUMI, in 1968. In many ways it’s simply
a product of its times, offering up a respectable mix of blue-eyed soul and
psychedelic pop with all the attendant phasing, occasional baroque orchestration,
Japanese folk stylings, vibraphone and wacked out instrumentation you could
hope for. Sides three and four however take the listener somewhere completely different.
You may never want to listen to it twice, but listened to under the right
conditions, you could lose yourself in the strangely meditative, late-night,
tripped-out stream-of-consciousness minimalism of Twice Told Tales Of The
Pomegranate Forest, and you may need to leave a trail of psychedelic
breadcrumbs in order to find your way back.
No one ever heard from Harumi again. He never made his way back.
THE ORB INTO THE FOURTH
DIMENSION: ESSENES IN STARLIGHT
It’s easy to forget from a distance of, oh, 25 years or so, just how
revelatory The Orb were back in 1989-90. Their debut album, ADVENTURES BEYOND THE ULTRA-WORLD, blew my mind and opened up whole new vistas of music to
explore. Into The Fourth Dimension: Essenes In Starlight is taken from their
second John Peel session, recorded October 13th, 1989, and was
released on vinyl a year later, simply as THE ORB: PEEL SESSIONS, a welcome
relief to those of us who were wearing out their taped-from-the-radio copies
from over-use (in these digital days it all seems so delightfully vintage, I
know). The improvisational genius of the performances is boggling, with Alex
Patterson and Thrash manipulating enormous blobs of tripped out samples,
effects and hallucinatory mood changes to create what was to become ambient
dub, I suppose - don't blame them if subsequent acts were unable to produce
anything quite as good as this, I've never been entirely convinced that The Orb
have either.
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