MIND DE-CODER 94

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 5^TH – 8498 13 P.M. GREGORIAN EARTHTIME

I only include the first seven minutes or so of the preposterously titled Atlantis’ Agony At June 5^th – 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 10^th 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 50^th 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.

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