MIND DE-CODER 71
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“Have your own little revolution NOW!”
Keith West/Tomorrow
THE JIMI HENDRIX
EXPERIENCE EXP
AXIS: BOLD AS LOVE was
Hendrix’s second release of 1967 following his ground-breaking debut earlier
that year. It shows a band stretching in all areas, not just musically but in
terms of song-craft as well. It’s a fantastic listen, full of proper songs and
therefore not quite as mind-bending as ARE YOU EXPERIENCED. It does however
feature the highly avant garde EXP as
its opening salvo showing the playful sense of experimentalism that defined the
first album was merely bubbling under the surface for this one. Wouldn’t it be
great if bands these days could knock out a couple of radically innovative
albums a year (or any sort of album, really, let’s face it) instead of making
us wait three or four years between releases? Of course, that’s when being in a
band meant something.
THE LUCK OF EDEN
HALL SLOW
For their most recent
release, Chicago’s The Luck Of Eden Hall have produced a glorious technicolour
journey through time that plays around with all of our perceptions of what that
could actually mean on a psychedelic record. On THE ACCELERATION OF TIME,
released in 2016, time is speeded up and slowed down; dreamscapes unfold and
are put back together again; sound is distorted, stretched, and collapsed,
ceaselessly shifting and yet, and this is the important thing, never at a cost
to the tunes, which are fabulous and dizzying and, in the case of Slow, the album’s opening track, feature
the mellotron, which is always a fine thing.
PINK FLOYD MATILDA MOTHER
Sometimes it
physically pains me that I never got to visit UFO and see house bands Pink Floyd, Tomorrow and The Soft Machine
play whilst tripping my balls off on a sugar cube of Sandoz’s finest. Really,
it just stops me dead in my tracks sometime that I will never have got to see
Tomorrow play live at UFO and just
like that my day is ruined. I console myself that I got to see Doctor and The
Medics play countless times at Alice In
Wonderland in the 80s, but that’s all it is, a consolation. So, to console
myself once more I put together the next three tracks just to remind myself of
exactly how good it would have been.
This version of Matilda Mother seems to be an earlier
recording of the track that graces 1967’s PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN, featuring
lyrics Barrett more or less lifted from Belloc's ‘Cautionary Tales’, much to
the evident displeasure of Hilaire Belloc’s estate, who promptly denied him
permission to use them, resulting in a re-write and the version we are more
familiar with. This version appears on their recent box set PINK FLOYD: THE
EARLY YEARS 1965-1972 but I understand you can also find it on the considerably
less expensive compilation, AN INTRODUCTION TO SYD BARRETT in 2010.
TOMORROW THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF TIMOTHY CHASE
My regard for Tomorrow
is unbound – they were the band I most regret never having had the opportunity
to see play (what with me being two at the time and all) and, if you could have
stuck them on a bill with Jimi Hendrix, I would have considered that a good
night out. (This actually happened.)
The Incredible Story Of Timothy Chase is from their only album proper, TOMORROW,
released 1968. Despite being regulars at UFO (for UFOria, you understand) fame
eluded them, partly because their album, recorded in the spring of 1967 was
held back until February of the next year, during which time London’s brief
love affair with psychedelia was beginning to wane, and partly because singer
Keith West so busy promoting the hit single Excerpt
From A Teen Opera, for which he provided the vocal, that he no longer had
time for the band which, in the wake of his solo success, the record company
was now calling ‘Keith West and Tomorrow’, much to the chagrin of the rest of
the band. The album is as fine an artefact of psychedelic London as you could
ever hope to hear featuring two of my favourite tracks from the 60s, but it’s
not a great album, not in the way that PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN is a great album,
if you see what I mean, but I feel they could
have made an album that good if the psychedelic dice of destiny had just rolled
another way.
SOFT MACHINE WE
DID IT AGAIN
This is the track
where Soft Machine also casually invent krautrock alongside the progressive
jazz-rock they’re more noted for. Taken from their debut album THE SOFT
MACHINE, also released in 1968, I understand they could stretch this track out
for 15 minutes or more when playing live. Can you imagine? Far out.
THE MOVE FLOWERS IN THE RAIN
By contrast, The Move
only ever played at UFO once, and by some accounts it didn’t go down too well
with the audience of regulars. Never truly a psychedelic band, The Move were
more likely to be under the influence of a pint or two of Newcastle Brown Ale
than they were LSD, but that didn’t stop them flirting with the imagery of
psychedelia and producing a number two hit with
Flowers In The Rain in 1967. They had a pyrotechnic stage act the rivalled
Hendrix and The Who, which resulted in the blissed-out flower children of UFO
dodging exploding television sets and fireworks during their performance. They
were never invited back.
CHAZ BUNDWICK MEETS THE MATTSON 2 SONMOI
Chaz Bundwick (Toro Y
Moi to his fans) has been making idiosyncratic music since his debut in 2010.
Musician and producer, his music has taken on many forms but he is often
identified with the rise of the chillwave movement in 2010 and 2011. Earlier
this year he teamed up with The Mattson 2, a jazz duo from California, and
together they produced the album STAR STUFF, an album that takes as its
starting point Serge Gainsbourg’s louche production, David Axelrod’s avant
garde themes, library records, desert jams, acid-soul struts and neon-punk-jazz
which results in the kind of spectacular celestial jazz-prog that is currently
ticking all the right boxes for me.
SAINT ETIENNE ANGEL (BROADCAST REMIX)
I’ve always been
grateful for this one collaboration between Saint Etienne and Broadcast and
wish it could have led to more. Saint Etienne’s particular blend of retro pop
classicism always shared something with Broadcast’s own hauntological retro stylings,
and we can only imagine what we’re missing (well, I can; you, more reasonably,
might have no interest in it whatsoever). This track was featured on their 1996
release CASINO CLASSICS, a round-up of remixes, B-sides and especially
commissioned pieces; in this case, the remix was released long before the
original saw the light of day some years later on a fans-only release NICE
PRICE! in 2006.
BECK CANCELLED CHECK
Beck’s follow-up to
the hugely successful ODELAY was the deceptively simple MUTATIONS, released in
1998. By comparison to the former, it’s a subdued collection of acoustic-based,
stripped-down, spacey folk-songs that nevertheless reveals more psychedelic layers upon
each listen. Cancelled Check appears
to be an old-timey country tune pitched half-way between country blues and
lo-fi folk that then scatters off into off-time drumming and random sound
effects that sounds as if it were pulled from a spaghetti Western. Marvellous.
THE BYRDS I SEE YOU
My love for The Byrds
is unabashed (at least until they went hairy in 1969) and I See You is one of their great album tracks. Taken from their
ground-breaking 1966 release THE 5TH DIMENSION, their first without principle
song-writer Gene Clark, I See You
simply soars through the premise of it bubble-gum pop restrictions by featuring
two Coltrane-type/Ravi Shankar inspired 12-string guitar solos that Roger
McGuinn perfected for the album’s lead single Eight Miles High. The Byrds invented so many genres – this is the
album where they invented psychedelic rock.
PETER BAUMANN MEADOW OF INFINITY PTS. 1 AND 2
As the cover suggests,
this is very much an album of two halves. Peter Baumann was one of the founder
members of Tangerine Dream and was still a member when he released this,
ROMANCE ’76, his debut solo album in 1976. Virgin-era Tangerine Dream are all
over side 1 of the album, which is very reminiscent of STRATOSFEAR and ENCORE,
both of which were released either side of this album. Side 2, however, largely
taken up with Meadow Of Infinity, is
a very different affair, mixing orchestral instruments - cellos, human voices,
percussion – with mellotron and flute-like sounds to create a semi-classical
tone poem that places it firmly in the kosmische era of krautrock. There’s
actually a bridge to the two parts that I’ve left out but this, nevertheless,
is something of a trip.
THE JIMI HENDRIX
EXPERIENCE IF 6 WAS 9
The second outing from
Jimi Hendrix and the boys because, really, EST was more along the lines of a
‘thing’ than a song, say, and If Six Was Nine is by far (the second) most
tripped out track on AXIS: BOLD AS LOVE; it soars with studio trickery over a
tidal wave of guitar and a cacophonous army of Moroccan flutes.
DZYAN KHALI
Dzyan are one of the
lesser-known Krautrock bands but their third and final album, ELECTRIC SILENCE,
released in 1974, is life-affirmingly bold, taking in that exotic far-Eastern
sound that other bands at the time were flirting with and taking it into the
far-out realms of opium-den weirdness. Khali features two mellotrons, creating
a swirling universe of sound for the sitars to float, trance-like, within, and
is very beautiful and very strange. This is truly one of the lost gems from the
Krautrock era
THE SUFIS LIGHT TUNNEL
A splendid tripped-out
interlude from The Sufis, whose eponymously titled debut album, released in
2012, is steeped in lysergic Rick Wright style organ work, vocals run through oscillators
and all manner of vintage sounding studio trickery. This is what I want the
light at the end of the tunnel to sound like.
SPROATLY SMITH THISTLE DOLL
This haunted offering
of psych-folk wyrdness can be found on the recent release from the A Year In
The Country Project, FROM THE FURTHEST SIGNALS, released earlier this year,
which takes as its initial reference points films, television and radio
programs that have been in part or completely lost or wiped during a period in
history before archiving and replication of such work had gained today’s technological
and practical ease. Curiously, such television and radio broadcasts may not be
fully lost to the wider universe as they can travel or leak out into space and
so may actually still exist far from their original points of transmission and
places of creation, possibly in degraded, fractured form and/or mixed amongst
other stellar noises and signals. The explorations of FROM THE FURTHEST SIGNALS
are soundtracks imagined and filtered through the white noise of space and
time; reflections on those lost tales and the way they can become reimagined
via hazy memories and history, of the myths that begin to surround such
discarded, lost to view or vanished cultural artefacts.
From The Furthest
Signals is released as part of the A Year In The Country project, which via the
posts on its website and music releases has carried out a set of year long
explorations of an otherly pastoralism; the undercurrents and flipside of
bucolic dreams, the further reaches of folk music and culture, work that takes
inspiration from the hidden and underlying tales of the land and where such
things meet and intertwine with the lost futures, spectral histories and
parallel worlds of hauntological dimensions. You can check them out here.
THE ZOMBIES A ROSE FOR EMILY
Barely recognised at
the time of its release in 1968, The Zombies’ second and final album, ODESSEY
AND ORACLE, has since garnered a reputation as one of the great lost
psychedelic masterpieces of its times. In actual fact, it’s not particularly
psychedelic at all, but like The Beatles’ SGT. PEPPER’S, it is an album
entirely informed by the spirit of
psychedelia. Rather than employ the psychedelic tropes of, say, backwards
guitars and astral exploration, ODESSEY AND ORACLE is an album of ornate,
baroque arrangements, intricate song-writing craftsmanship and radiant
harmonies, which expanded the limits of pop. Even the Emily of the title has
less to do with Syd Barret’s muse and is based instead upon a short story by
William Faulkner published in 1930. The misspelling of “Odyssey”, by the way,
is due to the fact that they were too nice to correct their mate who painted
the cover just for them.
SHARRON KRAUS GILDEROY (HEART’S DELIGHT)
This enchantingly
decorous song is taken from the 2015 release SHIRLEY INSPIRED, a 3-cd homage to
Shirley Collins, one of the iconic figures of the folk revival movement from
the end of the fifties right to the end of the seventies. Sharron Kraus, a British
artist very much in the school of subdued yet haunting folk herself, interprets
Gilderoy (Heart’s Delight), a piece
of music inspired by Shirley and Dolly's version of Gilderoy, a Scottish folk song that can be traced back to before
the 17th Century, recorded by Shirley and her sister Dolly on their final
album, FOR AS MANY AS WILL, in 1978. I believe all of the artists on this
album, which include Graham Coxon, Belbury Poly, Will Oldham, Meg Baird, Angel
Olson and lee Renaldo to name just six, gave their songs freely as part of a Kickstarter
campaign that funded 'The Ballad of Shirley Collins' - a film that is currently
being made about the Collin’s life.
ALULA DOWN SOUTHAMPTON SONG
Autumnal, brumous,
candlelit folk from Alula Down, two members of Sproatly Smith (although I don’t
know which members; if you were to
show me a photograph of the band, I wouldn’t be able
to pick them out or anything) but I get the impression that this is more than a
side-project. Southampton Song has an
air about it that puts one in mind of Nick Drake in all of his beautiful
melancholy (or, indeed, melancholic beauty, but they all say that). It’s taken from the album FLOTSAM, recorded in 2013
at home with flotsam, voices, acoustic & electric guitars, a xylophone,
double bass, frame drums, saucepans, spades, wine glasses, ambient sounds from
outside the backdoor, a piano (that needs tuning), a banjo, shruti box, and
melodica, so you can see why I might like them. I think at one time they may
have been called Loud Flowers. Anyway, quite spectral and lovely.
ANDWELLA’S DREAM LOST A NUMBER FOUND A KING (excerpt)
This is just the first
two or three minutes of a track in which the song that follows isn’t nearly
half as good as the intro which precedes it. Andwella’s Dream were an Irish
psychedelic rock band, formed in 1968, who remain largely unknown, I think,
because despite using a number of psychedelic tropes - heavy progressive
rock-tinged psychedelia with keyboards and folk-pop psych with strings and away
with the fairies-type lyrics – they were never able to transcend them, and thus
ended up sounding like a lot of other bands at that time. This track is taken
from their only album under that name, LOVE AND POETRY, released in 1968.
ENDURANCE BENEATH THE CHERRY TREE
Another track chosen
from a never less than prolific A YEAR IN THE COUNTRYSIDE project, this one
entitled THE RESTLESS FIELD, released earlier this year, and one on which the
land as a place of conflict and protest as well as beauty and escape is studied.
It’s a study filled with ancient-sounding folk, eerie reels, drones, found sounds,
and electronica. Along the way it takes in an exploration and acknowledgment of places
that are spectrally imprinted with past conflicts and struggles in the landscape
and rural areas of the British countryside, in contrast with more often
referred to urban events. References and starting points include The British Miners’
Strike of 1984 and the Battle Of Orgreave; Gerrard Winstanley & the
Diggers/True Levellers in the 17th century; the first battle of the English
Civil War in 1642; the burying of The Rotherwas Ribbon; the Mass Trespass of
Kinder Scout in 1932; Graveney Marsh - the last battle fought on English soil;
the Congested Districts Board- the 19th century land war in Ireland; and The Battle
Of The Beanfield in 1985, none of which would count for anything if the music
wasn’t up to much, but I always find these albums enormously enjoyable. I’ve no
idea who Endurance are/is at all, though.
THE OWL SERVICE SPRING STRATHSPEY
Like Willow’s Song, I think Spring Strathspey is one of the most
sublime pieces of music ever written, and like Willow’s Song, it invites those musicians who have been spell-bound
by its wondrous charms to have a go themselves, if they think they’re fey
enough. The Owl Service are an Essex-based alternative folk collective who took
their name from a slice of English cult culture, Alan Garner’s spellbinding
novel of pre-Christian ritual set in a remote corner of Wales, which in turn became
a late 1960s TV series that’s often considered a touchstone for hauntological
musings. This gorgeous interpretation can be found on their album THE PATTERN
BENEATH THE PLOUGH PARTS 1 AND 2, released back in 2011 as a collection of all their music
released in that year, and it really is as ravishing as you could wish for.
EUROS CHILDS SKY/SEA
A charming little
piece from Euros Childs, whose new album, REFRESH!, released earlier this year,
is full of such doodling’s. In fact, it’s made up in its entirety of them and
very nice it is too. Some might even say charming.
BEAUTIFY
JUNKYARDS REFRESCO ELÉCTRICO
A lovely little track
taken from their 2014 release THE BEAST SHOUTED LOVE (I’m sure we must be due a
new one any day now), an album of exquisite hauntologically-inspired acid-folk
that would suit any room that possesses a working lava lamp. Magical.
RIDE INTEGRATION TAPE
This is the ambient
one on their new album WEATHER DIARIES, released some 21 years after their
previous album TARANTULA (the one which no one bought). It’s all very nice and
good, and all, but it doesn’t entirely satisfy the palette jaded by all those
years. I was really looking forward to it, especially when I heard Mind De-Coder
favourite Erol Alkan was on board as producer, but despite that, it doesn’t
have anything as remotely transcendent as Dreams
Burn Down on it. Maybe we’re all a bit older now. That being said, and I
don’t wish to damn it with faint praise, there’s nothing bad on it either; it's full of lovely little flourishes; it
just doesn’t make me fall in love with the girl in the trouser shop, and at
their best, Ride were always able to do that.
TANGERINE DREAM PHAEDRA
Tangerine Dream always
pushed at the boundaries of exactly what psychedelic music could be, even if
that wasn’t their explicit aim, but with PHAEDRA, released in 1974, they
discover new dimensions as the title track weaves its way through a soundscape
full of exquisite texture and rhythms, thanks to the addition of the newly
invented analogue sequencer, which takes the music off into psychically
ravishing directions. Enjoy this music and slip away into a dreamscape of ever
changing colour.
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