MIND DE-CODER 79
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LSD wanted to tell me something. It gave me an inner joy, an open-mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation. Albert Hoffman
VIC MARS EXT – DAY – OVERGROWN GARDEN
The new release from A YEAR IN THE COUNTRY, called THE SHILDAM HALL TAPES, is an aural delight to lose yourself in. Inspired by a lost, semi-mythical film from the late 1960s, set in a country mansion in the English countryside, the notes that accompany the release add the following intriguing account:
Amidst rumours of aristocratic decadence, psychedelic use and even possibly dabbling in the occult, the film production collapsed, although it is said that a rough cut of it and the accompanying soundtrack were completed but they are thought to have been filed away and lost amongst storage vaults.
The fragments of footage and audio that have appeared seem to show a film which was attempting to interweave and reflect the heady cultural mix of the times; of experiments and explorations in new ways of living, a burgeoning counter-culture, a growing interest in and reinterpretation of folk culture and music, early electronic music experimentation, high fashion, psychedelia and the crossing over of the worlds of the aristocracy with pop/counter-culture and elements of the underworld.
The Shildam Hall Tapes takes those fragments as its starting point and imagines what the completed soundtrack may have sounded like; creating a soundtrack for a film that never was.
Of course, this may be something of a hauntological prank, as the internet remains strangely quiet about an aristocratic seat under the name of Shildham Hall, or any otherly goings-on therein, but this makes it the perfect vehicle for the equally mysterious Vic Mars, about whom little is known other than that he seems to be responsible for a number of audiological musings inspired by nostalgic memories of a childhood in rural Herefordshire. I’ve squeezed the track between the intro to a short documentary I recently came across that discusses the trans-dimensional concept of E-8 - a weird, 8-dimensional mathematical object that for some strange reason appears to encode all of the particles and forces of our 3-dimensional universe - as a less theoretical alternative to string theory, which somehow fits his spectral electronica like a pair of much loved driving gloves. You can check out his other works here and more about the very fine A YEAR IN THE COUNTRY project here. You’ll just have to take my word for it regarding E-8.
PINK FLOYD POINT ME AT THE SKY
Point Me At The Sky, released in 1968, remains one of Pink Floyd’s lesser-known singles, released in that difficult transition period between Syd’s departure and the band finding a new direction that focussed more on spaced-out, exploratory album releases and experimental soundtracks. An early collaboration between Dave Gilmour and Roger Waters, it was rather superseded by its b-side, Careful With That Axe, Eugene, which was later included on two different Pink Floyd albums and played regularly at concerts throughout the early 70s. These days they seem rather embarrassed by it, apparently having produced it under duress from the record label to continue producing the sort of catchy psychedelic whimsy that Syd was famous for. It has a gentle, Barrett-esque, sense of childlike-wonder to it before blasting off into a heavy section that would have been quite at home in 1968, but it failed to chart and I understand it was the last non-album single the band ever released.
CHIMERA SONG IN E
Following on from Pink Floyd, there’s a connection here to Chimera, whose legendary lost masterpiece of late '60s acid folk/baroque psychedelia, the unreleased 1969 album HOLY GRAIL, was partly produced by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason who, like Rick Wright, makes a cameo appearance. Consisting of cousins Francesca Garnett and Lisa Bankoff, the two girls were discovered in Rome in 1968 while playing a festival by Wright who agreed to manage them. Song In E is the perfect introduction to the band – acid folk loveliness combined with baroque embellishments and studio experimentation to produce an album of dreamy, pastoral weirdness. Due to record company going’s on, the album was never released at the time and remained shelved until 2017. Future Fleetwood Mac guitarist Bob Weston also stars.
CHILDREN OF THE ITALIA CONTE SCHOOL TREES AND FLOWERS
A trifling little piece of filler, but none the less pleasant for all that, taken from the album MUSIC FOR CHILDREN (‘SCHULWERK’), out of print since 1958, but recently re-released by the very fine Trunk Records which excels at this sort of thing. Originally conceived in the early 1930s at Günterschule in Munich - a progressive institute where physical training and eurhythmics were practised with a view to co-ordinating the development of children’s minds and bodies - MUSIC FOR CHILDREN is a series of practical examples of songs, rhythmic exercises, instrumental pieces and speech training designed to enable the children to express themselves fully and freely. Trees and Flowers is a speech exercise whereby the names of trees and flowers are used to demonstrate the rhythm, sound and meaning of the words - the gentle daffodil contrasts with the prickly blackthorn, for example. You get the impression that Broadcast, and the late Trish Keenan in particular, grew up listening to this sort of thing.
JIM GHEDI FORTINGALL YEW
Pastoral loveliness from Jim Ghedi, taken from his most recent release, A HYMN FOR ANCIENT LAND, an album imbued with the subtleties of nature, place and space. Ghedi is a 6 & 12 string guitarist and folk singer whose work explores connections to the natural environments and heritage of rural communities and landscapes across the British Isles, including the village in which he grew up along the Yorkshire/Derbyshire borders. Inspired by long rambles through the woodlands around his home in Moss Valley (near to where Derbyshire turns to South Yorkshire), the combination of gorgeous fingerpicking and verdant orchestration has an arcadian air that’s equal parts Bert Jansch and Robert Kirby. The bucolic ambiance of Fortingall Yew is dedicated to the oldest known living tree in the UK, a 2,000 - 3,000 year old senior tree located in the churchyard of the village of Fortingall in Perthshire.
LADY JUNE THE LETTER
Lady June, née June Campbell Cramer, was a Bohemian artist and poet who was something of an honorary member of the Canterbury set. Numerous musicians lived and hung out in her flat in the Maida Vale area of London, which is most famous as the place where a drunken Robert Wyatt fell out of a window, paralyzing him from the waist down in 1973. Her debut album, LADY JUNE’S LINGUISTIC LEPROSY, released in 1974, is an eccentric collection of odd, whimsical, and rather surrealistic spoken poems, delivered in a quirkily aristocratic manner. Produced and arranged by long-time friend Kevin Ayers, it also features contributions from Brian Eno and pioneering electronic musician David Vorhaus (of White Noise fame – although I use the term ‘fame’ lightly). It’s an extraordinary melange of semi-spoken pastiche and nonsensical nursery rhyming that’s very much of the countercultural scene time, but oddly moving in its own way. One suspects we’ll not see its like again.
LAKE RUTH THE GREAT SELKIE
New York’s Lake Ruth features English folk quartet’s The Eighteenth Day Of May’s Allison Brice on vocals, which makes me ridiculously happy for a start. Long disbanded now, they favoured Fairport Convention’s debut album as their starting point, with Brice their Judy Dyble. Lake Ruth cast their net a bit wider, taking in 1960's sonic experimentation, baroque psychedelia, library obscurities, vintage pop noir, Giallo soundtracks, krautrock and jazz and are as fine as that list suggests. They are not without a certain folk inclination, however, and are heard here offering up a frankly gorgeous interpretation of the traditional Shetland ballad The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry for last year’s NEW AND IMPROVED ACTIVE LISTENER SAMPLER, on which Allison Brice’s voice haunts like a cooling memory across a fevered dream.
LISA KNAPP TILL APRIL IS DEAD
Lisa Knapp’s album TILL APRIL ID DEAD: A GARLAND OF MAY is, quite simply, an astonishingly beautiful soundworld of waywardness and invention. I’ve not heard anything quite so enchanted for a long time. Essentially a celebration of May - its songs, dances, fertility rites and wyrdlore – the album combines traditional folk songs with found sound, acoustica and electronica to create something that is steeped in the timelessness of tradition and yet somehow outside of time. Till April Is Dead is wonderfully strange, existing somewhere between Kahimi Karie’s more outré experiments and Broadcast’s analog pastoralism: various aphorisms and proverbs concerning the season are layered and looped over and around each other. Sayings from French, German, Spanish, Gaelic and English folklore become entwined simple plucked strings before Knapp sings a lighter than air rendition of Hal-An-Tow, a song made famous by the Watersons and the Albion Band. Bewitchingly delightful.
GWENNO DEN HEB TAVES
Or A Tongueless Man, according to the helpful, bilingual lyric sheet that accompanies this shimmering peach of an album, the Cornish language LE KOV, released earlier this year by the fairly wonderful Gwenno Saunders. (“Look, papa, a peach…shimmering”). The joy of the album is that you don’t need to speak Cornish to understand that you're listening to something special – in fact, if you did, you’d be one of about a thousand people left who do speak Cornish. Instead, LE KOV, which translates as ‘place of memory’, is a luminous album, glimmering with a psychedelic iridescence that takes in Serge Gainsbourg, White Noise (again), Cornish folk singer Brenda Wootton and Broadcast (again), that transcends language and speaks instead to that mythical Lyonesse of the heart.
LISA KNAPP WHERE’S TROY
More winsome weirdness from the lovely Lisa Knapp
HALO MAUD JE SUIS UNE ÎLE
Hailing from the French proggy, psychedelic and experimental pop scene that birthed Melody’s Echo Chamber and Moodoïd, Halo Maud's ethereal songs flit between English and French language, which combine playful loops and percussion with lush French dream pop. Pulling from the yé-yé acts of the 1960s and injecting that chanson spirit into the world of synth-driven pop and psych-infused electronica, multi-instrumentalist Maud Nadal sound is not, in fact, a million miles away Gwenno’s spacey strange melodies, so you can see the attraction, although Halo Maud injects a darker, torch song ambiance to her songs – DEBUT-era Bjork and Francois Hardy also work as familiar touchstones. Je Suis Une Île (‘I’m an Island’) is the title track from her debut album, released earlier this year, and deliciously deconstructs an earlier single (Du Pouvoir/Power) by playing it backward to gloriously disorientating effect.
THE SILVER FUNZ BIRCH (betula sp.)
ARIANNE CHURCHMAN FOXGLOVE (digitalis purperea)
PAPER DOLLHOUSE GORSE (ulex europaeus)
MARY STARK LAVENDER (lavandula angustifolia)
I’ve conflated these four tracks into one continuous piece, as each last only some 90 seconds and work best when listened to as a whole. They’re taken from the album THE FOLKLORE OF PLANTS VOLUME 1, released last year by Folklore Tapes, an open-ended research project exploring the vernacular arcana of Great Britain and beyond. The driving principle of the project is to bring the nation’s folk record to life, to rekindle interest in the treasure trove of traditional culture by finding new forms for its expression. For this release, they explore the myths, plant lore and symbolic language of the UK’s native flora over 31 songs in styles that include ambiance, drone, folk, spoken word and abrasion. In addition to the LP, the contents include two pamphlets, a postcard, a packet of seeds, and a link to a short 16mm film. The package is filled with historical value, medical advice, sonic beauty and who knows - perhaps flowers, perhaps a tree - only time will tell.
REVBJELDE FOR ALBION
Revbjelde (pronounced REV-BA-JELD) are a multi-instrumental band from Berkshire who inhabit a sonic landscape of woozy rustic psychedelia that’s part 70s British folk horror and part kosmiche folk, filtered through a glorious floral pageantry of village recitals, pagan prayer and mayday follies. Their debut album, THE WEEPING TREE, released earlier this year, is both mysterious and beautiful, effortlessly shifting between the ethereal to freak-folk experimental improvisation, industrial electronics, field recordings, ethnic percussion, tape loops, jazz excursions, and cosmic spaced-out breakdowns – all without ever losing a pastoral cohesiveness. It really is that good – possibly my album of the year.
THE ADVISORY CIRCLE THE MECHANICAL EYE
It’s always a cause for celebration in these here parts when Jon Brooks delivers a new release from The Advisory Circle. WAYS OF SEEING is an affectionate and absorbing hauntological study based around the theme of photography, inspired by late 70s and early 80s library music. It’s a truly beautiful thing to behold, with Ghost Box’s Julian House producing one of his most gorgeous sleeves yet - the elegantly simple artwork and typography, reminiscent of 80s photographic manuals and magazines, is rendered on metallic gold foil packaging. I mention this because with Ghostbox, like 4AD or Factory records before it, the packaging is every bit as important as the music contained within. It’s a meticulously produced and melodically rich affair that owes more to the 80s than previous works (Duran Duran have been cited) with a familiar sense of English reserve and pastoralism. I, as ever, am drawn to those curious tracks that remain ever-inspired by government information films, Open University documentaries and “what’s through the arch window?” mysticism.
US AND THEM LADY RACHEL
Swedish folk duo Us And Them create a dreamy cover of Kevin Ayres’ Lady Rachel on their new album ON SHIPLESS OCEAN, a record laced with beautifully mellow psychedelic folk quite at home to comparisons with Sandy Denny, Donovan, Bert Jansch, Vashti Bunyan, and, indeed, Grantchester Meadows/Cirrus Minor-era Pink Floyd, say. Now filled out with bucolic string and woodwind arrangements plus added Mellotron, Lady Rachel throws everything into the mix - Mellotron, Moog, mixed percussion, acoustic and electric guitars produce a sound that seems to bend colour.
THE DEEJAYS STRIPED DREAMS CHECKED FEAR
If ever a band deserved the soubriquet ‘60s beat combo’, it was The Deejays, a band who only begun to transcend their origins as London mod/freakbeat rockers towards the end of their career, but did so with the rather excellent Striped Dreams Checked Fear from their second album, HAZE, released in 1967. Unable to get arrested in England, they relocated to Sweden in 1963 where they spent the next five years finding fame and fortune releasing covers of the material their more successful peers were producing back home in England. They never really gained any recognition outside of Sweden but I understand that they’re remembered quite fondly there.
THE HELLENES CHESTERENE
Band-leader Matt Piuci seems to have some pedigree in LA’s Paisley Underground but of this I know little – I was never a fan of that scene, despite completely getting their reference points, and I pretty much ignored it and continue to do so now (weird, I know, but, hey…). To some extent his current project is not a million miles away from that sound (or least one version of that sound) - melody-rich, texturally-complex, psychedelic pop that owes as much to Big Star as it does Gram Parsons-era Byrds but Chesterene, the opening track from the album I LOVE YOU ALL THE ANIMALS, really stands out, reminding me Gorky's Zygotic Mynci covering ABBEY ROAD. Make of that what you will.
NATHAN HALL AND THE SINISTER LOCALS CARNIVAL OF THE DAMNED
How blessed we are to have a second album by Nathan Hall and his Sinister Locals so soon after last year’s MUTE EFFIGIES. TUNGUSKA TYDFIL is, at first listen, a less realized album, as if he were emitting lysergic melodies and had to get them down on tape as quickly a possible, but repeated listens reveals an… eclectic 16 track record that has influences as disparate as the incidental music to ‘Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)’, ‘Red River Rock’ by Johnny and the Hurricanes, Ghost folk, Early post Syd Pink Floyd, the manic harpsichord flourishes of DA CAPO-era Love, deranged Circus music, Ghost town pianos, Spoken Word sound collages and Procul Harum – which is pretty much as fab as it sounds - but for me, Carnival Of The Damned is the stand-out track, channelling as it does (to these ears) the spirit of Ennio Morricone with Hall’s very own Soft Hearted Scientists’ Isabella (Keep Riding The Road To The Sea). Splendid, and ever so slightly creepy.
THE GREEN PAJAMAS JANUARY GIRL
SUPERNATURAL AFTERNOON, released last year, is essentially a compilation of recent recordings and digital singles released over the past 20 years or so, but it sounds like a cohesive work in its own right and stands as a proper album as opposed to a random selection of 45s tracks. The Green Pajamas have been releasing records for some 30 years or so now, but can they ever have released a single as elevated as the sublime January Girl? (Hint: yes, but I particularly like this track).
ENTOURAGE DAYS (early version)
Entourage, also known as The Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble, were a deeply experimental band and something of a performance arts collective, often accompanying dance and theatrical productions or joined onstage by dancers. This early version of Days, which originally appeared on their 1976 release THE NEPTUNE COLLECTION (famous, if that’s the right word, for being sampled by Four Tet on his track She Moves She) sounds like a lost krautrock classic by way of John Cale or La Monte Young. It can be found on the album CEREMONY OF DREAMS, released earlier this year, a collection of outtakes, alternate takes, or partial demos of tunes later completed by the full band. Their compositions crisscross jazz, minimalism, classical music, global folk traditions, and improvisations in a hybrid fusion of their own creation that are able to weave the melodies of Iraq with the moodiness of Country & Western should they wish – which they often do. Entourage really does sound that cool.
EX-DEBS INTERMEZZO
Ex-Debs are two ex-punks from Oregon who grew tired of all the screaming and yelling about shit and were looking for a way to make something melodic without turning into a good-time party band. Their 2016 release VIEWER.PICTURE, a cassette-only release but now available on Bandcamp, combines organ, drums and singing with live dub effects thrown into the mix and sounds not dissimilar to Tuxedo Moon had they been gigging around Bristol in 1979, say. Lo-fi tunes made with a D.I.Y. post-punk sensibility, in fact.
SIOUXIE AND THE BANSHEES (THERE’S A) PLANET IN MY KITCHEN
Recorded during their imperious psychedelic phase as the b-side to Dear Prudence, circa 1984’s HYAENA, when The Cure’s Robert Smith was brought in to replace John McGeogh, (There’s A) Planet In My Kitchen, sounds like a record entirely indebted to LSD. Playfully experimental, I could never really be doing with it at the time, but having played The Beatles’ Dear Prudence on last week’s show, I was reminded of its existence so gave it a spin for the first time in, ooh 34 years, and was pleasantly blown away by its vibe. There’s not much to be said about it, but one can imagine the band sitting in Siouxie’s kitchen, tripping balls on some California Sunshine and just jamming the song into shape - a jazzy, lysergic affair, ever so slightly beholden to THE FAUST TAPES but none the worse for that.
JULIAN COPE STARRY EYES
By the time the arch-drude came to record his neo-pagan masterpiece JEHOVAKILL in 1992 he was immersed in a Neolithic headset, using newly found insights to expose the clash between Christianity and Paganism, social and gender conflicts, the ills of modern society, ecology, and extraterrestrial contact. Starry Eyes was originally recorded for the Fear loves This Place EP, the only single released from the album, although it later appears on the JEHOVAKILL deluxe edition that was released in 2012. I actually play the first part of it backward, on which Copey bemoans the plight of the city dweller (albeit, the city dweller in New York) before giving us a quick précis regarding the mythology surrounding Neolithic temples across the UK. This eventually resulted in two magnificent tomes in which he explores megalithic Europe, but that would be later. For now, I leave you here.
