MIND DE-CODER 114
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‘I am about to embark upon a hazardous and technically unexplainable
journey into the outer stratosphere.’
The Wizard of Oz
ICHIKIO AOBA COLORATURA
Quite simply, a lovely way to open the show. Coloratura is the
opening track from her eighth studio album, LUMINESCENT CREATURES, released
earlier this year. On it, the Japanese singer, songwriter, composer and
multi-instrumentalist Aoba deftly melds her featherlight voice to an album of
exquisite jazz-infused folk that builds a vast landscape of entrancing sounds
in which to lose yourself. What with the world the way it is these days, this
record is a balm. Sublime.
MELIN MELYN THE MILL ON THE
HILL (INTRO)
This also is something of an unalloyed treat. The Mill On The Hill
serves as a whimsical intro to the debut album from psychedelic Welsh Wizards
Melin Melyn. Released earlier this year, the album takes the listener on a
joyous and unpredictable journey to the utopian Melin Village, where the
townsfolk bask in the beauty of the songs created in the eponymous mill. But
disaster looms - a landlord from a nearby city wants to knock down the mill and
build a carpark! The album documents the problems facing the mill in a
multi-coloured palette of sound that takes in psych-pop, surf rock, and
country-tinged whimsy enriched with a surreal charm all of its own. That being
said, it sits nicely alongside the playful psychedelia of fellow Welsh artists
Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and The Soft Hearted Scientists, which makes you wonder
what they’re putting on their breakfast cereal over there, and can I have some?
SPIRIT SPACECHILD/WHEN I TOUCH
YOU
I came quite late to Spirit’s TWELVE DREAMS OF DR. SARDONICUS, but that’s
no surprise - released in 1970 it’s an album strangely out of place. That being
said, it’s an outstandingly psychedelic affair that’s difficult to capture - it
just exists in its own expansive world, overbrimming with ideas. The dreamlike Spacechild
melts into When I Touch You which explodes, then contracts, like the
blink of a third eye. A truly unique listen.
ANDY BELL I’M IN LOVE . . .
I’m going through a bit of an Andy Bell phase at the moment - his own
musical vision is ticking a lot of boxes for me. I’m In Love . . . is a
dreamlike cover of The Passions’ 1981 hit I’m In Love With A German Film
Star and features Neu!’s Michael Rother on guitar and Mind De-Coder
favourite Dot Allison on vocals, so you can see why I might be interested. You
can find it on the Ride guitarist’s third solo release PINBALL WANDERER,
released earlier this year, an album equally at home to krautrock rhythms,
loose-limbed Madchester grooves, psychedelic melodies and Arthur Russell-style
experimental textures. Right up my street, then.
ANDY BELL AND MASAL THE SLIGHT
UNEASE OF SEEING A CRESCENT MOON IN BLUE MIDDAY SKY
This one got me with the title alone. It’s taken from the 2023 release,
TIDAL LOVE NUMBERS, an album of immersive, ambient astral jazz recorded in
collaboration with the Essex-based Masal, a duo who weave harp, Theremin, and
electronics into beautiful aural journeys. It’s a mesmerizing trip -
sympathetically mastered by Andy’s Ride bandmate Mark Gardener – landing
somewhere in the neighbourhood of Spacemen 3’s ‘DREAMWEAPON, with the four
pieces subtly ebbing and flowing from pastoral picking to psychedelic bliss to
noisy drones and back again, all punctuated by heavenly harp.
ANDY BELL AND MASAL HALLOGALLO
The love affair continues - this is a Cover of Neu!’s peerless Hallogallo,
recorded live at The Social, London, 2023.
GAL COSTA OBJETO SIM, OBJETO NÃO
Behold the sound of full-on psychedelic production! Objeto Sim,
Objeto Não (‘object yes, object no’,
according to my trust Google translator) is taken from the album GAL, released
in 1969 by Gal Costa, one of the key instigators of Brazil’s Tropicalia
movement. It’s a lot heavier than anything else released at the time, setting a
high watermark in terms of overall insanity and complete experimental freedom -
not even the rambunctious Os Mutantes stepped this far out into psychedelia -
but it’s a mind-blowing experience, awash in the political power and cultural
experimentation that characterized the best years of Tropicalia. Astrud
Gilberto it ain’t.
GRAF ZEPPLIN YOU’RE IN MY MIND
Thrilling garage-psych from the little-known Chicago-based band Graf
Zepplin, who recorded their only single, You’re In My Mind, in 1968,
while still at school (the band split up when they graduated in 1969). Their
name more or less originated when they misspelled Zeppelin on the bass drum and
thought it was easier to go with the incorrect spelling rather than buy a new
one.
THE RASCALS SATTVA
Come 1968 The Young Rascals had moved on from their traditional rhythm
and blues mannerisms, dropped the ‘Young’ from their moniker, and embraced
psychedelia with purpose and vigour. ONCE UPON A DREAM was very much influenced
by SGT PEPPERS but this was an album that more than lived up to the comparison,
replete with expansive sound effects, orchestral arrangements, and dreamy
harmonic vocal flourishes. Sattva, with its sitar, tabla and tamboura,
is this album’s Within You, Without You, but without Harrison’s sneering
superciliousness.
TESS PARKS CHARLIE POTATO
Tess Parks first became widely known with a series of collaborations
with Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe. Her current release,
POMEGRANATE, is a dreamlike mix of psychedelia and melancholy, ethereal beauty
and pain. The blissful Charlie Potato is heavily reliant on
chiming bells, Wurlitzer piano, and a soft flute to create a dreamy atmosphere
that grabs at the attention.
EMMA ANDERSON I WAS MILES AWAY
(MASAL SPECTRAL MIX)
Last year’s PEARLIES was a melodic mix of dreamlike hypno-pop. Later
that year, SPIRALÉE, a new version of the album appeared, reimagined by the
likes of Julia Holter, LoneLady, The Orielles, deary, Daniel Hunt (Ladytron),
Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, MEMORIALS, Concretism, original album producer
James Chapman, aka Maps, and Masal who are leaving their prints all over the
show.
THE HELLERS THE PIANO LESSON
The Hellers were a particularly strange band who managed to straddle
that precise point where the psychedelic and the kitsch met. Producer Enoch
Light commissioned an LP from Hugh Heller in 1968. Heller - a publicist who
used to put together albums of skits and short musical satires that his agency
privately distributed to industry people - joined forces with his agency’s
commercial jingle composer Dick Hamilton, and together they wrote 12 light
comedy tracks. The two brought in Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog
synthesizer, to give their arrangements a space-age feel. The result is a mix
of Perry-Kingsley’s kitsch outer-worldly music, the Lawrence Welk Show, and the
Partridge Family Show called SINGERS, TALKERS, PLAYERS, SWINGERS AND DOERS. One
for the collectors, to say the least.
I then played the last few minutes of a track called Bombshell, taken from
the album ROOM 29, a collaboration between Chilly Gonzales & Jarvis Cocker
released in 2017.
SOFT HEARTED SCIENTISTS SHORT
WAVE RADIO AND THE IONOSPHERE
A short ambient doodle from Soft Hearted Scientists, taken from a series
of unreleased recordings I appear to have come across online some time ago, but
the provenance of which entirely escapes me.
ANGELINE MORRISON OPHELIA
The enchantingly lovely Ophelia is the title track from the
latest release by British multi-instrumentalist musician, songwriter, and
academic, Angeline Morrison. It’s a bewitching mix of songs rooted in an
otherworldly landscape of hauntological folk music. Magical.
BEAUTIFY JUNKYARDS
RADIOACTIVITY
A spectral cover of Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity taken from the band’s
eponymous debut album, released in 2013, on which they explore many of their
influences, taking in60s and 70s psych folk, tropicalia, and kosmische covers
lovingly re-crafted for the XXI century.
MOON WIRING CLUB CAT NIGHT
MOON
The woozy Cat Night Moon, is taken from last year’s release, CAT
LOCATION CONUNDRUM - an album of malleable, enchanting, elongated, lurid,
dreame-drift musick(e) with trademarked Moth Damaged Beats™. The myriad sounds
of CAT LOCATION CONUNDRUM evoke Edwardian seaside shoegaze reveries c1986,
woodland-based Stendhal Syndrome scenarios, Mock Tudor Monorail excursions
around Britain in miniature, a Jazz Noir nightclub hip interplanetary
Happening, deconsecrated charity shop stockroom arcane rituals and the
exquisite bliss of necrotic tissue damage within feverishly ostentatious
locations.
THE SMASHING TIMES CAN I HAVE
SOME TEA
The decidedly anglophile charm of the Baltimore-based Smashing Times - a band very much at home to
the noisepop days of C86 and The Pastels - is noticeably evident in the
slightly off-kilter Can I Have Some Tea, taken from last year’s MRS
LADYSHIPS AND THE CLEANERHOUSE BOYS.
SOFT HEARTED SCIENTISTS FLY BY
DRAGONFLY
The wait is over - it seems like an age since the Soft Hearted
Scientists released the fantastic WALTZ OF THE WEEKEND (it has, in fact, been a
year) - but the new album, THE PHANTOM OF CANTON will soon be available for
those seeking a little Welsh magic in their lives. Those of us who have
pre-ordered our copy already have been in the happy position of being able to
download the first seven tracks as something of a taster. Fly By Dragonfly appears
to have been influenced by the spaghetti western soundtracks of Ennio
Morricone, specifically the music chime scenes in ‘For A Few Dollars More’ as
Lee Van Cleef’s character exacts revenge for the murder of his daughter. It
promises to be an astonishing listen, painted in bright colours and infused
with hallucinatory flourishes. Now might be a good time to empty your piggy
banks.
FRIAR TUCK WHERE DID YOUR MIND
GO
Friar Tuck is actually a pseudonym for Wrecking Crew guitarist Mark
Deasy, one of several personas he adopted when he wished to avoid certain
contractual obligations regarding the use of his own name. Where Did Your
Mind Go is taken from the 1967 release, FRIAR TUCK AND HIS PSYCHEDELIC
GUITAR, produced by Mind De-Coder favourite Curt Boettcher, who also supplies
wordless vocals. It sits somewhere between an exploitation knock-off and a
genuinely weird psychedelic artifact that sounds as if it was knocked out in a
day. A curio - enjoy.
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