MIND
DE-CODER 94
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Reality is a crutch for
people who can’t cope with drugs
Lily
Tomlin
FRANK
AND JO BYERS TORCH LIGHTING CEREMONY
#1
This
evening’s show is largely built around the fantastic EXOTIC SOUNDS OF TIKI
GARDENS, a privately pressed recording
made available to the guests of Tiki Gardens, a 10 acre, Polynesian-inspired
kitschy utopia in Florida which featured statues of tiki gods, gift shops, a
restaurant serving exotic food and drinks, and peacocks strutting through lush,
Tahitian-style gardens, owned and operated by your hosts Frank and Jo Byers.
Recorded in 1967, the album gives the guests a little something to remember
their stay by.
We
shall be returning to Tiki Gardens throughout the show. Some of us wish that
we’d never left.
EDGAR
FROESE EPSILON IN MALAYSIAN PALE
EPSILON
IN MALAYSIAN PALE was Edgar Froese’s second album, and the one which most
sounds like his day job in Tangerine Dream – fans of PHAEDRA will feel right at
home here. Released in 1975, the album consists of two tracks inspired by
Froese’s visit to a Malaysian jungle while on tour – the 17-minute long title
track is a lushly exotic dreamscape featuring synthesised flute and strings, jungle
calls and atmospheric swathes of spacious mellotron. Beautiful, serene and
hypnotic. The cover does not lie.
ELOY ATLANTIS’ AGONY AT JUNE 5TH –
8498 13 P.M. GREGORIAN EARTHTIME
I
only include the first seven minutes or so of the preposterously titled
Atlantis’ Agony At June 5th – 8498 13 P.M. Gregorian Earthtime
because it’s what I think of as the interesting part of the track – after this, it devolves into the sort of prog-rock exercise that puts me in mind of early Genesis.
Interestingly enough, OCEAN, the album from which it is taken, outsold both
Genesis and Queen in Germany, Eloy’s home turf. Released in 1977, OCEAN was the
German prog-rocker’s seventh, and most successful release – a concept album
based around the rise and fall of Atlantis, full of symphonic spacerock, watery
atmospheres, laser-ish guitars and choirs of synthesisers. Too prog to be
considered krautrock, this is an album very much of its time – Pink Floyd meets
Yes on the way to a Moody Blues concert. All swept away by Punk, of course.
THE
ORB DRIFT
While
the next track by Emtidi gets going, I include within the intro this short
piece by The Orb from their 2018 release, NO SOUNDS ARE OUT OF BOUNDS. It pretty
much does what it says on the label but The Orb do this sort of thing so much
better than anyone else.
EMTIDI TOUCH OF THE SUN
Pastoral
krautfolk loveliness from Emtidi, a duo made up of Maik Hirschfeldt from
Germany and Canadian Dolly Holmes, which resulted in the transcendent SAAT
(‘Seed’, in English – an almost perfect title for this arcadian, little-known
gem of an album). Released in 1972, SAAT is full of dreamy melodies, ethereal
synths and, what I’m choosing to call, acoustic essences. Touch The Sun,
at 11 minutes, which features harpsichords, Hammond organ and the ubiquitous
mellotron, is a wild blur of eerie keyboard tones, off-set by vocalist Dolly
Holmes’ plea for unity.
ART LOVE IS REAL
Mystic
vibes from Art, formerly The V.I.P.s who only released the one album, 1967’s
SUPERNATURAL FAIRY TALES before evolving into the slightly more successful
Spooky Tooth. The very best thing about the album is the cover, designed by Hapsash
and the Coloured Coat members Michael English and Nigel Weymouth. – after that, it’s all hard-rocking psychedelic blues that owes more to Blue Cheer and The
Yardbirds than it does to your classic psychedelia, but for the gentle Love
Is Real they take on a soft-psych experimental groove which is the second-best
thing about it. On the whole, there is
no third-best thing.
REVBJELDE VERDANT GREEN
I
would be misleading my listener if I were to claim that the second album by
Revbjelde hasn’t taken me by surprise.
If you’d have asked I might have replied that I was expecting something
of a pastoral nature, replete with parping brass, folk strings, ethereal
harmonies and jangling dulcimers – the sort of thing that might find itself at
home on the Ghostbox catalogue – at least, that’s my memory of their first
album which, admittedly, I haven’t played as much as I ought recently. For
their second album, HOOHA HUBBUB, recorded whilst enveloped in a
post-referendum smog, the band have chosen, instead, to channel a grooving Louisiana
swamp rock straight out of the Bayou, alongside krautrock-inspired motorik
beats, twisted glam, post-punk jazz improvisation, industrial soundscapes and
acid folk. Verdant Green is the acid-folk one. By way of Vanuatu. And
possibly the moon. Surprisingly, it hangs together rather well.
BRÖSELMASCHINE GEDANKEN
Gorgeous
acid folk from Bröselmachine, a krautfolk group whose only eponymously
titled album, released in 1971, enjoys a pastoral, meditative sound enriched
with influences of Indian raga, Celtic chants, and European art music of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance. On Gedanken (‘thoughts’, I believe), lush
acoustic guitar passages, psychedelic embellishments and idyllic flourishes
abound. I think Julian Cope once heard this track and said: “I want S.T.A.R.C.A.R.
to sound just like this but with knobs on”.
DON
RANDI TRIO, CURTIS AMY’S COMBO AND THE EXOTIC STRINGS SACRED IDOL
Exotic
Polynesian vibes from the Don Randi Trio, and friends, taken from their 1966
release JUNGLE ADVENTURES IN MUSIC AND SOUND, my current go-to album for all
things exotique. The internet has very little say about it. Don Randi was a keyboard
player, bandleader and songwriter who worked with Phil Spector, Nancy Sinatra
and The Beach Boys amongst countless others; Curtis Amy was an American West
Coast jazz musician known for his work on tenor saxophone; I think the Exotic
Strings, in this instance, was entirely made up for this project, but the Exotica
craze had more or less passed by now, so is this album pastiche? An homage? I
don’t know, all I do know is that it makes me want to drink Mai Tai cocktails by
the dozen, garnished with unnecessarily florid adornments. You know the sort I
mean.
DRUID
CHASE TAKE ME IN YOUR GARDEN
Take Me In Your Garden was the only single released by Druid Chase – the stage name
for American singer Audrey Kirby who, I understand, was very big in Germany at
the time. Released in 1967, this is a mystical Exotica-soaked pop extravaganza,
featuring sitar and mellotron. Gorgeous.
BOOGARINS NO RETURN
This
is a very tripped cover of The Kinks’ No Return, which originally
appeared on their 1967 album SOMETHING ELSE. Boogarins, a Brazilian psyche band
covered the track for a 2017 compilation given away by Mojo Magazine –
SOMETHING ELSE – A TRIBUTE TO THE KINKS, but it also appears as a bonus track
on the deluxe version of their 2018 album LÁ VEM A MORTE. It’s a
mesmerising recording - the song shimmers beneath a lysergic haze of deeply
textured psychedelic flourishes. I believe Chrissie Hynde gave it a go once,
too, but that version seems to have passed me by.
THE
SAN SEBASTIAN STRINGS PUSHING THE
CLOUDS AWAY
In
1967, singer, composer, and all-around American renaissance woman Anita Kerr
was operating out of Los Angeles. In addition to forming a new version of her
vocal group the Anita Kerr Singers, writing and recording jingles for radio and
television, and working as the choral director for The Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour, she began a new collaboration with poet and songwriter Rod McKuen on an
instrumental/spoken word LP called THE SEA. With McKuen's supple voice
providing romantic meditations on the natural world and Kerr acting as
composer, arranger, and conductor to a studio orchestra that would be credited
as the San Sebastian Strings, THE SEA and its successors THE EARTH (1967) and THE
SKY (1968) were quintessential volumes in the late-'60s easy listening
movement. Rod McKuen was one of the best-selling poets in the United States
during the late 1960s. Throughout his career, McKuen produced a wide range of
recordings, which included popular music, spoken word poetry, film soundtracks
and classical music, but he’s most famous for his translations and adaptations
of the songs of Jacques Brel – it was he that turned Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas
into the classic If You Go Away, and for translating Le Moribund
into Season In The Sun into a best-selling pop hit for Terry Jacks in
1974. It’s an album I’ll often put on during postprandial drinks, just to see
if anyone feels like leaving yet.
FIRE
AND ICE, LTD. THE HOUSE OF SATURN
You’d
be forgiven for thinking that this track is taken from the sort of soft-core jazz-lite album
that was regularly aimed at the sort of squares who would buy, well, Exotica
records – but listen more closely. This is, in fact, what psychedelia sounded
like before it became codified into a series of tropes that were repeated
endlessly throughout the rest of the 60s. Nothing wrong with that, of course. I
happen to be a big fan of your codified psychedelic tropes – nothing brings a
smile to my face like a backward guitar solo – but this is what psychedelia
sounded like before The Beatles recorded REVOLVER, say. Fire And Ice, Ltd. Were
way ahead of the game, appearing on the semi-legendary album LSD: A DOCUMENTARY
REPORT, an LP created and released in 1966 by Capitol Records as a response to
the burgeoning use of LSD among American teenagers. The band consisted of pianist
and organist Tony Scott, and flutist, poet and vocalist Paris Sheppard, who, on
tracks like The House Of Saturn, would improvise free-flowing verse in
the manner of Chet Baker channeling the stoned poetry of Jim Morrison. Their
only album, THE HAPPENING, released in 1966, is a psych/beatnik artifact
recorded spontaneously as a jam, featuring hip jazz flutes and cool organ vibes
which took them beyond, rock, or jazz, or folk, into something rather more
progressive and experimental.
NO
STRANGE IN PELLEGRINAGGIO ALLE FONTI
DI ORFEO
…or,
On Pilgrimage To Orpheus Sources, as our trusty Google translate would
have it. Italian krautrockers No Strange offers up a confection of acid
folk/indo-raga psychedelia on their new album MUTTER DER ERDE. In
Pellegrinaggio Alle Fonti De Orfeo has a transcendent bucolic charm that puts
one in mind of tripping through misty water meadows at dawn, hugging oneself to
keep warm and otherwise in awe of the countryside around you.
DIES
IRAE TRIP
Trip is an ethereal space rock excursion that would not be out of place on
Pink Floyd’s MEDDLE. Sadly, this is not a direction that Dies Irae (Day of
Wrath, as anyone who knows anything about your Latin liturgy will know) chose
to explore further on their debut album, FIRST, released in 1971. Rather than
pursue a kosmische direction, this is a German band that eschewed krautrock
experimentation for heavy Black Sabbath riffs, but Trip, a celestial psychedelic
exploration, at least lives up to its name.
LEVITATION
ROOM DREAM (WITHIN A DREAM)
Dream (Within A Dream) enjoys a hazy iridescent quality that envelops the listener
in a lysergic balm. Taken from their most recent album HEADSPACE, the
Californian band explores a cosmic swirl of possibilities, taking in folk, jazz,
raga and soul with a psych-pop sensibility.
ALAN
BLACK ALAN WATTS
A
little something from mash-up artist and screen-writer Alan Black, taken from
his 2010 release CRIPPLE CRAB CRUTCH, a wildly imaginative release that takes
in the paranormal, the historical, the literary, the philosophical and the
religious, film excerpts, strange old recordings, perplexing radio shows, Bill
Hicks, and an old Disneyland attraction. As the title suggests, this track
features spoken excerpt from the Alan Watts lecture Images of God (part 2)
over a couple of tracks from New Zealand composer and multi-instrumentalist David
Parsons: Varuna Deva and Lahaul Valley.
BHOPAL’S
FLOWERS I FEEL FREE
Bhopal’s
Flowers sitar-centric take on psychedelia suggests a world where Hindu deities
dance in the sky of the American desert.
From Canada by way of France, the band combine a love affair with Love
and The Byrds with a Hindustani classical vibe which recently resulted in this
sterling cover of Cream’s I Feel Free, available on YouTube as a sort
of acid-drenched gift to help us through these difficult times.
BALDUIN RAINBOW EYES
Swiss
multi-instrumentalist Balduin returned last year with his 10th
album, LOOK AT ME, I’M YOU – a swirling sugar-rush of 60s psychedelia and
technicolour electronica. Manfred Mann’s unreleased Rainbow Eyes is just
one of a number of whimsical covers which includes tracks by The Kinks, Tages
and The Tremeloes, as well as psych-pop originals. I’m not entirely sure the
original Rainbow Eyes, a paean to LSD if I ever heard one, ever made it
beyond the demo stage but Balduin’s mind-bending version is awash with synaesthesia
– time slows, speeds up and the song glows with the sort of colours one
associates with a kaleidoscopic ravishing of the senses.
THE
PRETTY THINGS PARACHUTE
For
their final album of the decade, The Pretty Things delivered a rather poetic
discourse expressing disillusionment with the 60s dream – PARACHUTE, released
in 1970, looks both backwards and forwards and in doing so captures a sound
somewhere between MEDDLE-era Pink Floyd and The Beatles’ WHITE ALBUM. That
being said, the title track is all ABBEY ROAD with something akin to Beach Boy
harmonies, and an ascending closing note that will take you to the
stratosphere.
SMALL
FACES OGDEN’S NUT GONE FLAKE
On
the bonus disc that accompanied the 50th anniversary of the album’s
release, this recording of the title track is referred to as the Alternate
Take – Phased Mix – Stereo version, but to me, it sounds like the original
mix reversed, which makes it nothing less than perfect. I’ve never enjoyed this
album as much as I thought I ought, but this track is pure psychedelia, turned
up to 11. I love it.
