MIND DE-CODER 88
In an empty, unarticulated space our mind loses our
sense of time as well. Our mind loses our sense of time and we enter the
twilight of the immeasurable. Dämmerung des unermesslichen.
Thomas Mann
PETER COOK AND DUDLEY MOORE THE BEE SIDE
Quite literally the b-side to their 1967 single The
L.S.Bumble Bee, a satire upon all the fuss being stirred up in the popular
press regarding LSD use amongst the cognoscenti of the swinging London set, of which
Pete and Dud were undoubtedly a part and a remarkably well-informed part at
that. The b-side is done in the style of a Dagenham sketch taken straight from
Not Only...But Also in a knowing style that suggests the pair knew of that
which they were talking about.
THE DIRTY FILTHY MUD FOREST
OF BLACK
The unpromisingly monikered Dirty Filthy Mud were little-known garage
act who released just the one single in 1968, a fuzzed-out slice of propulsive
rock that I’m pretty sure has been co-opted by Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve at
some point or other in their career. It’s just the sort of thing they’d go for
- audaciously obscure with an electronic pulse that owes more to the likes of
United States Of America and Fifty Foot Hose than Uncle Joe And The Fish who
were, at the very least, an inspiration. I just read that last sentence back to
myself - I could be talking gobbledegook.
THE CHAPTA
JOURNEY TO THE SUN
New Zealand’s Chapta unleash their inner Spinal Tap
(in their Listen To The Flower People phase) for this
gloriously dippy track, taken from their debut album, the fittingly entitled
THE CHAPTA - ONE, released in 1971 (although, rather disappointingly, their
second and final album was called OPEN DOOR). Hailing from Christchurch (one of
New Zealand’s least rock ‘n’ roll cities - let’s face it), the band released
five singles in the couple of years they remained together and were highly
regarded at the time - sadly they’ve been swallowed by the mists of time - you
may have to ask your parents about them.
JEAN LE FENNEC
MES ENFANTS D’AUTRE PART
Generally regarded as one of the weirdest French
psychsploitation albums to emerge from the 6os, Jean Le Fennec’s PHANTASTIC,
released in 1969, is a bizarre mix of spacey instrumentation, distorted vocals
and far-out synthesiser effects that comes over like a cross between Serge
Gainsbourg and Bruce Haack channeling the spirit of Syd Barrett. Jean Le Fennec
remains a tantalizingly obscure figure in your psych-pop circles, although a
bit of research reveals that he may have been Belgian and also responsible for
the space-age cosmic krautrock release PLANÈTES released in 1981 under the name Jean Hoyoux, if
that’s any help.
THE HARE AND THE HOOFE LADYE LOVIBONDE-GOODWIN PAVANNE
A marvelous, marvelous band - The Hare And The Hoofe
are a polymesmeric force of cosmic far-outedness whose eponymously entitled
debut album provides a head-spinning mix of bonkers psychedelia which critical
opinion places somewhere between The Who, The Stooges, ELO, Sparks, Pink Floyd,
Brainiac, Bowie, Judas Priest, and, if I may throw my own tuppenth worth into
the hat, Cranium Pie. Available as a gatefold double LP, Disc One rounds up the
‘hits’ so far and includes the mind-bending Ladye Lovibonde-Goodwin Pavanne,
whilst the second consists of a rock opera featuring time-traveling
scientists and giant laser-eyed robots. So, a proper band then. It
really is as good as it sounds.
THE TRANSPERSONALS
TO FIND HER EVERYWHERE
To Find Her Everywhere is a song so
transcendentally gorgeous it instills within the listener an almost-state of
narcotic bliss, which it pretty much defines as ‘falling in love,
drinking red wine and taking strange drugs’ - which is kind of hard to
disagree with. Taken from their debut release SAY GOODBYE TO FREE WILL (THE
PERILS OF CHEERLEADING), an album of majestic psychedelia, released in 2011,
this track is simply sublime and is the musical equivalent of being
intoxicatingly loved-up.
TANGERINE DREAM
FLUTE ORGAN PIECE
This track is taken from Tangerine Dream’s recent
18-CD boxset IN SEARCH OF HADES: THE VIRGIN RECORDINGS 1973-1979, a lavish
and, indeed, definitive statement of this period in the band’s history. It
features newly remastered versions of all the albums released in this
creatively fecund period and includes a number of bonus discs, including a
selection of out-takes from their PHAEDRA sessions, recorded in 1973, from
which the rather lovely Flute Organ Piece is taken. PHAEDRA pretty much
marked the end of Tangerine Dream’s truly experimental stage - after this album
they would veer more towards the Vangelis scheme of things, but here they largely eschew melody for experimentation and atmosphere, the music
creating an introspective soundspace of colour.
ROKUROKUBI TARKA
Rokurokubi is the stage name of Brighton based
singer-songwriter Rose Dutton whose debut album, SATURN IN PISCES, is an
astonishing collection of lush acid-folk songs redolent of times spent jamming
in woods and otherwise getting it together in the country. The songs explore
kaleidoscopic fairy tales of love, lost innocence, longing and revenge that
exist somewhere between the traditional folk canon found in Cecil Sharp House
and the psychedelic folk re-imaginings of the 1970s. Absolutely spell-binding.
SOFT HEARTED SCIENTISTS PLEASE
READ ME
This track sees the welcome return of Soft Hearted Scientists with a
cover of the Bee Gees 1967 psych-pop gem Please Read Me, recorded
especially for the wonderful Fruits De Mer record label. An understated
flourish of sitar introduces the song, which then soars like a magical white
kite on the gentlest of lysergic breezes. It really is quite captivating. The
b-side is just as lovely and features an SHS original which will, no doubt,
find itself in the next show. Croeso yn ôl, bechgyn.
I’m playing this song for my good friend Rhys who loved this band and
who sadly passed away before I could play him this record. Wherever you are
now, brother, I hope it’s full of stone circles, magic mushrooms and comely
maidens with pupils the size of dinner plates.
MEG BAIRD AND MARY LATTIMORE
IN CEDARS
Ambient folk gorgeousness from Espers’
Meg Baird - who could sing a shopping list and make it sound celestial -
and acclaimed harpist Mary Lattimore, whose enigmatic, spectral experimental
harp sounds move and unfold like nature itself. Their first album together,
2017’s GHOST FORESTS, plays to both their strengths, but rather than produce
the album of exquisite pastoral loveliness you’d expect, the pair have made an
album that’s altogether stranger, exploring the sound of light on water here
and seismic geopolitical anxiety there, both ethereal and earthy, bucolic and
avant-garde, in which Baird’s voice is as much the instrument as Lattimore's
harp. Beauty, previously unimagined, awaits.
JUSTIN HOPPER & SHARRON KRAUS WITH THE BELBURY
POLY WANDERER
This track is
from the latest Ghost Box release,
CHANCTONBURY RINGS, a spoken word and music project by Justin Hopper, author of the
book ‘The Olde Weird Albion’, folk musician Sharron Kraus, and Belbury Poly’s
Jim Jupp, whose production permeates the album with a hauntological ambiance
that takes in distorted pipes, ghostly morris dancers, accordion groans and
dark synths. Equal parts folk, electronic music, poetry, prose and found sound,
the album is a poetical, autobiographical and psychogeographical account of
Chanctonbury Ring, a pre-historic hill fort that sits atop Chanctonbury Hill on
the West Sussex Downs. Evocative, to say the least, and completely compelling.
CARL TURNEY & BRIAN
CAMPBELL LO SATURNALIA!
“Mid-winter is the low ebb of
the year, the heart of the lifeless season when the sun describes a wearily
flattened arc across the sky: its luminosity dimmed and wan, its passage brief.
Shadows lengthen, branches grow bare and bony, temperatures drop and darkness
prevails. There is a need for cheer, for hope and conviviality, for reminders
of Spring’s renewal to come. Old mid-winter rites and rituals...bring a little
warmth and light to this chill time of scarcity and spiritual despond”.
Thus reads the accompanying
notes to THE FOLKLORE TAPES CALENDAR CUSTOMS VOL.III - MID-WINTER RITES AND
REVELRIES, the label’s exploration of the other side of winter. Each of
the artists contributing to this limited edition cassette compilation from
Folklore Tapes - an open-ended research project exploring the myths,
mysteries, magic and arcana of Great Britain - researched a
particular mid-winter ritual and, informed by their findings, conjured a soundpiece in response. The Clinic’s Carl Turney and Brian Campbell looked to
Saturnalia, the ancient Roman festival of Saturn - a period of general
all-round merrymaking and good cheer, and, otherwise, a pagan pre-cursor to Christmas - as their
inspiration, and take us on an hallucinogenic sleighride through the season
with acousmatic carolling, text-sound collage, composed music and augmented
field-recordings. Perfect for these crisp evenings when the smell of woodsmoke
fills the air.
THE COMET IS COMING TIMEWAVE ZERO
The Comet Is Coming inhabit a
boundaryless world in which cosmic jazz, grime, dubstep and psychedelic rock
wash over each other to create a potent brew that owes as much to Slimzee and
808 State as it does The Mahavishnu Orchestra or Sun Ra’s
space(d) excursions. Taken from their second album, TRUST IN THE LIFEFORCE OF
THE GREAT MYSTERY, released in 2019, Afro-beat rhythms carry Timewave Zero, pushing
the limits of jazz beyond conception, but in a good way.
GRAND VEYMONT UPIE
Grand Veymont are one of those
bands that we fans of Stereolab and Broadcast turn to when we’re looking for a
percolating hauntological fix, although Upie,
taken from their eponymous debut album, transcends the band’s influences
and shows just how far-out they can go when they become untethered. Taking
their name from the highest peak in the Vercors Regional Nature
Park in South Eastern France, this French band excel at combining a pastoral
kosmische vibe with the rhythmic pulse of Can and Neu! and the more off-kilter
moments of Air to create what they call a krautrock salon.
MOON WIRING CLUB PHANTOM FUNGICIDE
Ian Hodgson’s Moon
Wiring Club picks up on a latent oddness and hauntological nostalgia associated
with GHASTLY GARDEN CENTRES for his latest release. Phantom Fungicide is
a woozy, discombobulating trawl through the ramshackle aisles of your nearest
Placemakers gardening section.
THE OTHER WITHOUT NATURE HAS MADE A GARDEN IN THE WILDERNESS
AND ITS NAME IS BEAUTY
I came across this track on Day 7
of Julian Cope’s SydArthur Festival - the world’s first
psychic rock ‘n’ roll festival - in which the archdrude invites us to
celebrate, indeed, cerebrate, the full lunar month that separates the deaths of
those two psychedelic giants - Syd Barrett and Arthur Lee -
who passed away within 28 days of each other in 2006. The awesome tranquility
of Nature Has Made A Garden In The Wilderness And Its Name Is Beauty is
presented by Wiltshire duo The Other Without from their current release THE
OTHER WITHOUT 2, a collection of four long blissed-out trips of quiet motion,
field recordings, keyboard swells, birdsong, waves, motifs a-tinkling, and slow
planetary turns.
NATHAN HALL AND THE SINISTER LOCALS GHOSTS ARE NOT AS STRANGE AS BEING ALIVE
Nathan Hall is emitting - not only do we have a new
single from the Soft Hearted Scientists, yesterday saw his new album with The
Sinister Locals, SCATTERSPARKS, arrive in my mailbox. The album features 24
songs that cover a lot of ground, from psychedelic lullabies, communing with
dead Roman soldiers on a boring Bank Holiday, sentient scarecrows, the death of
smugness, vile blood soaked royalty, yummy mummies, hallucinations in a garden
in Devon, a smack down between Winter and Spring, a requiem for Laika the space
dog, a modern take on the House of the Rising Sun theme of corruption in bad
places, a horrible prelude of winter during an August walk in Cardiff Bay near
a deserted fairground, and an Ivor Cutler influenced end of the album song.
As usual, we’re offered a cornucopia of psychedelic
delights, wistful imagery, baroque flourishes, bucolic whimsy and analogue
electronics, and whilst the spirit of Syd is never too far away, these songs
owe more to the visionary soundscapes of Brian Wilson; spacious and light, with
swirling melodies, inventive touches and a lysergic sense of playfulness, this
is an album to charm the senses and entrance the mind.
THE PULSELOVERS
THE EDGE OF THE CLOUD
For its latest release, the very fine A Year InThe Country brings us ECHOES AND REVERBERATIONS, a field recording-based mapping of
real and imaginary film and television locations that is, in part, an exploration
of their fictional counterparts’ themes - from apocalyptic tales to never-were
documentaries and phantasmagorical government-commissioned instructional films
via stories of conflicting mystical forces of the past and present; scientific
experiments gone wrong and unleashed on the world; the discovery of buried
ancient objects and the reawakening of their malignant alien influence;
progressive struggles in a world of hidebound rural tradition and the once
optimism of post-war new town modernism.
Each track contains field recordings from the spectral
will-o’-the-wisps of locations’ imagined or often hidden flipsides. The
Pulselovers present The Edge Of The Cloud, inspired by K. M. Peyton’s
book ‘Flambards’, which was filmed for
television in 1978, and tells the story of Christina Parsons and her struggle
to find her place in a world of Edwardian tradition (a privileged life in the
titular country manor where servants, horses and fox hunting are a way of life)
and modernity (suffrage, aviation, emancipation and independence). The track
features field recordings made near Sawley Hall, Yorkshire where the series was
filmed, but I do wish they’d been able to include snippets of David Fanshawe’s
stirring Theme For Flambards - I always enjoyed it and don’t think I’ve heard
it in 40 odd years.
MOON WIRING CLUB
AN ETERNITY IN GARDEN RETAIL
Room for one last trip around the garden centre as spectral presences dip in
and out of earshot like potentiality just beyond grasp.
Owl Service end titles music
Al Stewart was a key figure in your British
folk circles. He played at the first-ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew
Yoko Ono before she met John Lennon, shared a London flat with a young Paul
Simon, and hosted at the Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s. His
debut album, BEDSITTER IMAGES, released in 1967, is an engaging but slightly twee
recording, replete with observational storytelling, poetic lyrics and baroque
orchestration. He would go on to better things but the album is not without a
particular charm all of its own. I include the outrageously throwaway My
Contemporaries because it brings a smile to my face each time I hear it.
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