MIND
DE-CODER HALLOWEEN SPECIAL 2020
To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page
Hell is empty and the devils are here
William
Shakespeare
ANTON
LAVEY PROLOGUE
This
is Anton Szandor Lavey (Howard to his mum) - charismatic occultist and founder
of the Church of Satan - recorded live
at the Church of Satan, from the album THE SATANIC MASS, on Friday the 13th of September in the Year III Anno Satanas (1968 to you and me). The recording contains the first ever authentic audio
documentation of a satanic ceremony and features a recording of the
baptism of LaVey’s daughter, Zeena. Prologue
is one of several recitations from LaVey’s ‘Satanic Bible’, although this,
like much of his work, was cribbed from Ragnar Redbeard’s rather unpleasant
book ‘Might Is Right’, much beloved by white supremacists and black magicians.
By contrast, I think LaVey was mostly into it for the sex and drugs.
COVEN
COVEN IN CHARING CROSS
Coven’s debut album, WITCHCRAFT DESTROYS
MINDS AND REAPS SOULS remains a seminal if unrecognized influence on hard rock
and heavy metal. Black Sabbath may have received all the plaudits but Coven’s
1969 release has the distinction of being the first album to fuse occult
themes with rock music, featuring the sign of the horns, inverted crosses and
the phrase ‘Hail Satan’. An album very much of its time, it was also a bit too much of its time: it got caught up
in the hysteria surrounding the Manson Family murders when Manson was
photographed holding a copy of the album outside of a record store in Los
Angeles - shows were cancelled, the album was recalled and the band lost the
support of their record label. They released a couple more albums but
they were a bit half-hearted by comparison. I’m not entirely sure if they ever
toured England, but they appear to have had some funny ideas about Charing
Cross. In an interesting addendum to their tale, when Gene Simmons tried to
take credit for, and even trademark the horns symbol, singer Jinx Dawson
threatened to sue him if he tried - he never followed through.
THE MOVE DISTURBANCE
Disturbance was the b-side to the equally compelling Night Of Fear, The Move’s debut single,
released in 1966. It’s a deceptively jaunty affair about mental illness - a
theme they would return to over the years - which boasts an insane freak-out
for the closing minutes or two. I can’t imagine that there’d been very much
like this back in 1966. I’m not entirely sure that here’s been anything like it
since.
LADY JUNE EVERYTHINGISNOTHING
One of the weirder releases to emerge
from the lesser-known corners of the counter-culture, LADY JUNE’S LINGUISTIC
LEPROSY is an experimental music/spoken word album by poet/artist Lady June, and much loved here on Mind De-Coder where, over the years, I’ve more or less
played every track on it. Released in 1975, it’s an intriguing kaleidoscope of
music and words - it’s much more spoken poetry than singing - recorded and
produced by Kevin Ayers with a little help from the likes of Brian Eno,
Gong’s Pip Pyle and White Noise’s David Vorhaus.
It’s a surreal, whimsical, psychedelic oddity, completely out of sync with the
times which is probably why I love it so. Still, punk rock would be along
shortly and put an end to this sort of indulgence. A nascent Virgin Records are
to be commended for releasing it at all, although I understand that all 5000
copies of its short run sold out, so there was obviously a market for this
sort of thing.
SERPENT POWER LUCIFER’S DREAMBOX
Not the West-Coast psych-folk outfit from
the late 60s with the same name, but a collaboration between The Coral’s Ian
Skelly and The Zutons’ Paul Molloy. Their eponymously titled debut album,
released in 2015, is a darkly lysergic affair that unravels
like a psychedelic comic horror book with twisted tales of alien brain
abduction, phantom bogeymen, sirens, voodoo witch-doctors and
waitresses-cum-serial killers full of creepy organ passages, backwards loops,
hypnotic drumming, phased instrumentation and liberal doses of theremin
culminating in a benign world of warped madness.
NIK TURNER TIME CRYPT
Founding
member of pioneering space-rockers Hawkwind returns to his intergalactic roots
on his 2013 release SPACE GYPSY. It’s pretty much what you’d expect (and,
indeed, hope for) - spacey squiggle effects, chugging riffs, and tripped-out
guitar freakouts augmented by Turner’s signature saxophone and flute
embellishments. The dark, hypnotic Time
Crypt sets the controls for a cosmic
journey to inner-space - Gong’s Steve Hillage comes along for the ride.
THE LOLLIPOP
SHOPPE YOU MUST BE A WITCH
Snarling
garage-punk from The Lollipop Shoppe, whose 1967 single was one of the most
ferocious releases of the sixties. In fact, you might wonder how a group so
fierce ended up with such a deceptively toy-town moniker, and you would be
right to do so. They originally started life as The Weeds but their manager
wasn’t happy with the drugs reference and foisted the more chart-friendly name
upon them (the 1910 Fruitgum Company, anybody?) but to no avail. You Must Be A Witch is taken from their
only album, JUST COLOR, released in 1967, but sadly its winning combination of
garage-rock energy, folk-rock
melodies and psychedelic introspection failed to find an audience and within a
year the band split.
BABETTA THE BEGINNINGS OF MAGICAL KNOWLEDGE (excerpt)
A few short words from Babetta the Sexy Witch (©) taken from
her privately pressed 1974 LP, THE ART OF WITCHCRAFT, on which she reveals the
secrets of exorcism, divination, love spells, and things of that nature in
general. The proprietor of The Sorceror’s Shop of Witchcraft and Magic in LA,
her album is just one of many that were released in the 1970s when the occult
reached a sort of mainstream respectability. Nobody is entirely sure why these
records were so popular (given a certain definition of ‘popular’), but these
days original copies exchange hands for hundreds of dollars. I understand that
Babetta is still a practicing Wiccan and remains a leader of witches throughout
the area.
Whilst Babetta provides a brief history of witchcraft I provide
a suitably spooky background ambiance from...
BELBURY POLY COPSE
Ghost Box Records co-founder Jim Jupp’s
most recent release, THE GONE AWAY, is an evocative and eerie journey through
the dark hinterlands of far-fetched faerie folklore. Banished are the
Tinkerbells and the tiny winged fairies from
19th-century children’s stories - instead Jupp focuses on the malevolent
woodland beings that can make being lost alone at night in the woods such a
primevally unsettling experience.
Vintage electronics, music room instrumentation and folk-ish, kosmiche
melodies provide a channel for ancient, rustic strangeness, passed through the
filter of some long-forgotten children's TV series. In the chilling woodland
dance of Copse, fallen twigs crack
beneath advancing footsteps, whilst a grumbling medieval crumhorn stands firm
in an onslaught of swooshing electronica. The message is clear — you are not safe here.
SABBATH ASSEMBLY JUDGE OF MANKIND
Sabbath Assembly, fronted by the
marvellously monikered Jex Thoth, are an occult rock band who seem to have
formed in order to play the hymns of the Process Church of the Final Judgment
- an Apocalyptic
religious sect that operated as something of a shadow side to the
flower-powered 60s and New Age 70s. (The Process Church opened Chapters in
London, Europe and across the United States, dressing in black cloaks and, for
some reason that I’ve never properly delved into, walked the streets with
German Shepherds. They created their own heavily-designed magazines and
promoted a controversial, quasi-Gnostic theology that reconciled Christ and
Satan - the two would reconcile on Judgement Day - through awareness and love. Marianne Faithful,
Mick Jagger and George Clinton were fans.) The mind-bending Judge Of Mankind is taken from their
2010 release RESTORED TO ONE, an album which re-charges the original hymns of
The Process Church and works them into moving renditions that sit somewhere
between the music of Coven and Amon Düül - earnestly-rendered doom-folk delivered with a psychedelically
enthused proto-metal minor-key conviction. Marvellous.
MOONRITE THE BLACK MASS PT. 1
Very
much cut from the same cloth as Sabbath Assembly (some sort of dark Monkish
cowl, one imagines) comes the French duo Moonrite, who play groovy music of the
gothic-psychedelic variety. Their second album, LET ME BE YOUR GOD, released
last year, plays like a soundtrack to a dubious as yet unreleased 1970s horror
movie.
PEDRO
SANTOS ADVERTÊNCIA
I
was hoping to fit some exotica into the show, and Pedro Santos’ Advertência fits the bill perfectly, sounding to these ears, at least, like the wails of
lost souls being dragged, unwillingly, I suspect, down to the very bowels of
hell itself, or a volcano exploding (which is more exotic, I suppose), or perhaps
both. What Santos was trying to suggest is anyone’s guess, but you can find
this track on his album KRISHNANDA, released in 1968. It’s something of a cornerstone of Brazilian
psychedelia, bringing together elements of folk, afro-soul and samba, bound
together by a lyrical depth that reflected Santos’ own reputation as something
of a philosopher. There certainly can’t have been many records that grooved
like this one while dealing with questions of morality, existence and ego. In
some circles it’s considered one of the best albums ever made, regardless of
origin or genre, but to put that into some kind of perspective, I’ve been
encouraged to play it only when I’m quite certain that I have the house to
myself. One for the curious, then.
LUCIFER
ESP
A sinister little trifle, lasting no more
than 61 seconds or so, which concludes the album BLACK MASS released by
electronic music pioneer Mort Garson under the moniker Lucifer back in 1971. These songs are Garson's
synthesizer interpretations of esoteric phenomena ranging from the Satanic
black mass, to exorcism, to witchcraft, and other occult going’s on. Morton was
the master at this sort of thing building up a cult reputation with such albums
as Mind De-Coder favourite THE ZODIAC:
COSMIC SOUNDS - CELESTIAL COUNTERPOINT WITH WORDS AND MUSIC, on which he
assigned each sign of the zodiac with its own highly psychedelic music.
LIZ
CROW AND HEIKE ROBERTSON WE ARE THE
FLOW
Should you be holidaying in the Cornish village of Boscastle
and you have an hour or two to spare, you could do no better than pay a visit
to The Museum Of Witchcraft And Magic - which strives to tell the tale of the
European war against indigenous love and wisdom - where, amongst the cabinets
of curiosities and tales of those who suffered under the religious persecutions
of a patriarchal belief system which owes obeisance to a jealous sky-god,
you’ll find, in ye olde gyft shoppe, the CD CHANTING, and, indeed, CHANTING II.
Originally recorded as a soundtrack for the museum’s exhibition, they contain,
as the title suggests, a collection of chants gathered by museum caretakers,
Liz Crow and Heike Robertson, from various pagan camps and gatherings around
the country. The origins of the chants are lost to the mists of time but their
music, released in 1998, displays the trust in holding a strong mind with
positive intent singing together.
Beneath the chanting I included a track
from...
THE NORTHERN LIGHTHOUSE BOARD WITCHES FALLS
THE
NORTHERN LIGHTHOUSE BOARD is an album of soundscapes for Victorian séances and
nocturnal forest gatherings; abandoned lighthouses; possessed goats; occulted
moons and haunted dollhouses. Released pretty much anonymously (you try
Googling The Northern Lighthouse Board and see what happens) last year, the
eponymous album is an assemblage of spectral sound vignettes consisting of
sinister synthesisers, found sounds and haunted samples.
MAGPAHI DERWEN ADWY’R MEIRWON
Alison
Cooper, the otherworldly voice and vision behind the fairytale folk of Magpahi,
contributes the startlingly lovely Derwen
Adwy’r Meirwon to the Folklore Tapes Calendar Customs release FORE
HALLOWE’EN. Folklore Tapes is an open-ended online research project which
explores the vernacular arcana of Great Britain and beyond; traversing the
myths, mysteries, magic and strange phenomena of the old counties via
abstracted musical reinterpretation and experimental visuals. FORE HALLOWE'EN,
released in 2014, continues their journey into the darkest alcoves of Britain’s
folkloric roots and journeys back to the origins of Halloween to find the
Celtic festival of Samhain upon which Halloween and the All Saints and Souls
days of the Christian period have been erected. Derwen Adwy’r Meirwon is the Welsh name for the oak at the gate of
the dead - the Pass of Graves - which bore arboreal witness to the Battle of
Crogen in 1165, a triumphant day in the annals of Welsh history in which Prince
Owen Gwynedd ambushed the cocksure army of Henry II and massacred them. The
ancient oak is now fantastically distended with age, its bole bloated with layers
of fungal growth. Magpahi’s fragile vocals, whose melancholy beauty bring to
mind the acid-folk loveliness of Vashti Bunyan, Marissa Nadler and Meg Baird,
invokes the spirit of the oak in its dying days, taking on its voice and
celebrating its longevity and the centuries of history which have passed around
it.
THE
TRANSPERSONALS LUCIFER
I
think that you have to admit by this point that the devil does, indeed, have
all the best tunes. The Transpersonals’ Lucifer,
taken from their 2018 release, ILLUMINATED BY THE LIGHT OF DREAMS, is a
ravishingly gorgeous affair that shimmers tremulously within a lysergic haze.
PORCUPINE
TREE SPACE TRANSMISSION
Well,
this is quite frankly terrifying, a malevolent whisper from across the aeons,
an ancient outer-god hungry (the exact right word) for revenge. It was recorded
in 1989 by English musician and producer Steven Wilson under the pseudonym of Porcupine Tree -
part of a compilation of experimental music recorded on to cassette for a joke
band he’d formed with his friend Malcolm Stocks. Named QUENTIN’S SEAWEED FARM
it was only sent to a handful of people but it gave the band a cult following that
eventually led to the release of the band’s first album proper, ON THE SUNDAY
OF LIFE…, in 1992, which pretty much consisted of TARQUIN’S SEAWEED FARM
and its follow-up cassette-only release THE NOSTALGIA FACTORY. None of this dry
recitation should distract from the overall creepiness of Space Transmission, which puts one in mind of Hastor the
Unspeakable, yearning for release.
A
YEAR IN THE COUNTRY CROSS SECTIONS OF
TIME
This
track, by the A Year In The Country blog curator Stephen Prince, aches with the
passing of time, perhaps the greatest horror of all (don’t you sometimes wish
you could capture a perfect moment in time and experience that moment
forever?). Inspired by the realisation that the limestone hills he looks out
over have been sliced in half, and that they are cross-sections which reveal
the layering of millions of years, Prince’s Cross
Sections Of Time opens THE LAYERING, the most recent release from A Year in the Country, a project which charts year-long journeys through spectral
fields, exploring an otherly pastoralism, the outer reaches of folk culture and
the spectres of hauntology. The album explores the way that places are
literally layered with history, and is an audio slicing through the layers of
time. It journeys amongst the stories and characters of these layers,
including, amongst other aspects, the structures built, events which took place
and different era's technologies and belief systems, reflecting upon how these, and other varied strata, are
layered on top of one another, and/or sit side-by-side, with some being
recorded, while others are forgotten or unknown, becoming part of a hidden or
semi-hidden history.
VINCENT
PRICE THE TALE OF THE WHITE DOVE
Who
wouldn’t want Vincent Price to read them a ghostly tale on All Hallow’s Eve, so
here he is doing just that on the album A GRAVEYARD OF GHOST TALES, released in
1973. On it he recounts spine-chilling tales of a ghastly nature, many of them
written by masters of their craft. The
Tale Of The White Dove can be found in the 1956 collection ‘The Screaming
Ghost and Other Stories’, by Carl Carmer, apparently one of America’s most
popular writers in the 1940s and1950s (how quickly our names fall from time’s
embrace). Price reads these stories with the sort of eerie panache you’d expect
but they come unaccompanied by music, so during the telling of this tale I have
the Northern Lighthouse Board’s The
Occulted Moon playing behind it.
DEVILED
HAM THE RAVEN: I HAD TOO MUCH TO
DREAM LAST NIGHT/ROSEMARY’S BABY
The
theatrical epic The Raven: I Had Too Much
To Dream Last Night/Rosemary’s Baby was pretty much just that - a late
1960s psychsploitation release produced and arranged by Allan ‘Big Al’ Pavlow -
legendary record producer and author - who took blue-eyed soul band The Ascots
and gave them a psych makeover for the album I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST
NIGHT. Musically the album, released in 1968, featured a series of covers given
psychedelic production touches, culminating in the side-long suite that seems
to have bizarrely cobbled together a histrionic cover of The Electric Prunes’ classic
with a deranged, entirely overwrought recitation of Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven (that, frankly, goes on a bit) and an instrumental
interpretation of the theme from Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. There was
minimal advertising and little or no promotion so the record sank without a
trace. these days, of course, it’s a much sought after psychedelic classic but
I think you only ever need to hear this track the once - it does go on a bit.
THE LIVERPOOL SCENE
UNIVERSES: A) GALACTIC LOVE POEM
B) 2 POEMS FOR H.P. LOVECRAFT
The Liverpool Scene grew out of the
seminal 1967 poetry anthology of the same name featuring the semi-legendary
poets Adrian Henry, Brian Patten, and Roger McGough. As a result of the book’s
popularity a band sort of coalesced around poet and painter Adrian Henri
resulting in the 1968 release THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF THE LIVERPOOL SCENE,
produced by John Peel, no less, which combined poetry with a range of musical
styles but which largely incorporated folk, rock and jazz elements. They never
reached the same level of fame as their Liverpudlian counterparts, The
Scaffold, which included Roger McGough, of course, and despite a 1969 tour with
Led Zeppelin, they were more at home on the Uk University circuit. Henri’s
reading of 2 Poems For H.P. Lovecraft
and the equally bleak Galactic Love Poem provides a suitably macabre ending to the show.
CHARLIE THE HAMSTER THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME
Don’t ask. Suffice it to say that there's another 9 verses.
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