Wednesday 9 December 2020

NATHAN HALL AND THE SINISTER LOCALS - ON THE BLINK


I don’t often do album reviews - it may become a thing - but a new release from Nathan Hall and The Sinister Locals (he of Mind De-Coder favourites The Soft Hearted Scientists fame) is always cause for cheer in these here parts and I thought I’d just take a few moments to share the joy.


Recorded in a white-hot blaze of frustration following the postponement of a nearly completed Sinister’s album due to Covid restrictions, Hall seems to have played all of the instruments himself in his heroic attempt to release a new record. ON THE BLINK, a title that aptly sums up 2020, comprises 22 tracks that cover a huge range of styles, from radio-friendly 3 or 4-minute psych-pop singles such as Serpent on the Path, On the Blink, Stand and Deliver (already a firm favourite with this show) and When we are no Longer Numb to sprawling epics and song suites like The Wrong Song, Angels Understand and The Sea is in the Trees/The Sea Ignites the Stones.


Despite its provenance (or perhaps because of - who knows?), this is, nevertheless, an album to captivate the senses; colourful; buoyant; full of understated psychedelic flourishes and whimsical lyricism that have all the charm of a children’s playground chant. Songs often shimmer beneath a lysergic haze, others sparkle like dewdrops in a sunlit meadow - there’s clearly something in the water in Wales (or at least growing on the golf courses). Rather than the usual reference points (Syd Barrett and early Pink Floyd in general) a far more useful comparison exists with P.G. Wodehouse - there is a playful lightness of touch with the instrumentation, and the wordplay delights and enchants. With 22 tracks there’s going to be a certain amount of eclecticism - Hall himself references Ennio Morricone, dub reggae, JJ Cale and The Beatles - but what holds it all together is his ability to knock out a melody that would have Paul McCartney in his Sgt. Pepper’s heyday scrabbling to take notes.


Overall, the album manages to mix lockdown seriousness with a playful, kaleidoscopic outlook, and I find myself feeling envious at the noises Nathan Hall must hear in his head.


You can check out his albums here

Enjoy 



Monday 30 November 2020

MIND DE-CODER 98

MIND DE-CODER 98
To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page

‘The world is full of magical things, waiting for our senses to grow sharper’

                                                                                                                                  W.B. Yeats

PINK FLOYD     FLAMING


This is the 2011 remastered version of the song which originally appears on Pink Floyd’s debut album, the classic PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN, of course, which was released in 1967 and remains, to this head, the greatest psychedelic album of all time and pretty much the benchmark against which all others are measured. Flaming remains as an exuberant piece of playful nursery-psych as you’re ever likely to hear, and one which sends us whirling through Syd Barrett’s acid wonderland in two minutes and forty-two seconds - unicorns are encountered and buttercups catch the light. Yippee, indeed. 

THE TEA COMPANY     COME AND HAVE SOME TEA WITH ME

In your hipper circles, tea was very much a euphemism for marijuana, although why this is so has been lost to the psychedelic mysts of tyme (although there’s a very enjoyable article about it in a recent issue of the trusty Shindig! magazine). Having clearly partaken of an odd cuppa or two, New York’s The Naturals changed their name to The Tea Company in 1967 and released their only album, COME AND HAVE SOME TEA WITH THE TEA COMPANY in 1968. Sitting somewhere between the far superior Vanilla Fudge and The Beatles, the album strikes a balance between West Coast flower child idealism and east Coast Velvet Underground style noise rock with added stereo sound effects - Come And Have Some Tea With Me, which opens the album, pretty much sets out their stall and drips with lysergic touches, including a music box, echoed horns and the sound of tea being poured into a cup.

SHIRLEY COLLINS     SONG OF SELF DOUBT

This is actually the opening track from the debut album, ANDROMEDA, by Alex Rex, the nom de guerre of Alex Neilson, formerly the drummer with much-lamented psych-folksters Trembling Bells. Song Of Self Doubt, however - a sparse assemblage of spoken words layered upon bright chimes and birdsong - is voiced by the legendary folk singer Shirley Collins, and provides a beautiful moment on an album otherwise characterised by songs of self-loathing and family tragedy.

THE DOORS     LOVE STREET

I’m no great fan of The Doors, me, finding them too beholden to the lumpen blues for my tender tastes, but you’d have to be a black-hearted Shakespearian villain to resist the charms of Love Street,  Morrison’s ode to girlfriend Pamela Coulson. Taken from their third album, 1968’s WAITING FOR THE SUN, Ray Manzarek’s keyboards delight and charm in equal measure making this, by far, one of the loveliest songs the band ever produced.

BLOSSOM TOES      LOOK AT ME I’M YOU

This is the opening salvo from the debut release by Blossom Toes, WE ARE EVER SO CLEAN, released in 1967, at the height of flower-power. It is sometimes described as the greatest pop-psych album ever produced, or, at the very least, ‘Georgio Gomeslsky’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, after their manager - the former Stones/Yardbirds svengali - who forced a new name and a new lysergic direction on an r’n’b covers band formerly called The Ingoes. It certainly touches on all those bases covered by Pink Floyd and The Beatles - tea and cakes are consumed on the lawn, budgerigars and balloons waft by on a summer’s breeze, and pharmaceuticals are ingested in Royal Gardens. Ignored at the time of its release, it is now considered something of a lost classic - a whimsical and melodic musical-hall vision of London’s sun-drenched Summer of Love. 

THE YARDBIRDS     THINK ABOUT IT

Think About It  is the absolutely blistering b-side to The Yardbirds 1968 release Goodnight Sweet Josephine. This was to be their last single before the split, and the a-side was nothing to jump up and down about, but this track, which features a barely restrained guitar wig-out Jimmy page would later re-purpose a year later for Led Zeppelin’s Dazed And Confused, was the shape of things to come.

JOHN CARTER AND RUSS ALQUIST     THE LAUGHING MAN

John Carter was a remarkably prolific songwriter who left his fingerprints on a number of hit records throughout the sixties and seventies but seldom released anything under his own name. The Laughing Man, released as a single in 1968 with fellow song-smith Russ Alquist, is something of a psychedelic oddity that falls just shy of being a novelty track due to its almost disturbing weirdness. By all accounts, much tea was consumed during the creation process.

WIMPLE WINCH     LOLLIPOP MINDS

Wimple Winch (old English for ‘Deep Well’, linguist fans) were one of the few Merseybeat bands who managed to incorporate psychedelic components into their sound. Originally calling themselves Just Four Men, they didn’t start gaining their cult following until they changed up their sound a bit, although their fame, such as it was, didn’t extend much further than the environs of Stockport. They released a handful of singles that sadly failed to set the charts alight but recorded a lot more. Over the years all these tracks have been anthologised on a number of albums - the whimsical Lollipop Minds (typical lyrics include: “Oh what pretty little beautiful lollipop minds we have/Butterfly's a fellow always dressed in yellow”), recorded after they split in 1967, can be found on the compilation TALES FROM THE SINKING SHIP, released in 2009. Erol Alkan is a fan.

JIGSAW    NORTHERN SKETCH #2/SAY HELLO TO MRS JONES/NORTHERN SKETCH #3

I don’t pretend to know much about the band Jigsaw, although I understand they enjoyed much success around the world and even wrote the hit song Who Do You Think You Are, much beloved by fans of Candlewick Green and St. Etienne, but their debut album, LETHERSLADE FARM, released in 1970, is a thing apart. Essentially it’s a concept album about musical theft, and the title refers to the hideout used by the Great Train Robbers in 1963. We get an assortment of musical styles that take in a Frank Sinatra pastiche, prog-rock classicism, the blues, and in the case of Say Hello To Mrs Jones, a Zombies-esque imitation, but that’s just the half of it. Littered amongst the tunes you’ll find the Northern Sketches, interviews with crooked managers, and a story arc about a pop star (whose stolen music we’re listening to) complete with interviews and vignettes from his life.  I return to these vignettes throughout the show but, really, file under: They don’t make them like this anymore. 

SIMON AND GARFUNKEL     SCARBOROUGH FAIR/CANTICLE

 

The loveliest of all songs by Simon and Garfunkel, I think, taken from their 1966 release PARSLEY, SAGE, ROSEMARY AND THYME. It’s a song with a story, of course - Martin Carthy arranged it in the form we know today, based on the traditional English ballad that’s at least 300 years old, but, much to his displeasure, it was a young Paul Simon who took that particular chord progression, and alongside Art Garfunkel’s counter-melody, turned it into the song we know today. No matter how often I come across it, it still has the power to stop me dead in my tracks, transfixed by its almost celestial grace. Time and repetition have not dimmed its transcendent beauty.

LINDA THOMPSON     EMBROIDERED BUTTERFLIES

Well, this is really quite lovely - Linda Thompson, one of Britain’s finest interpretive singers, puts a poem by my favourite poet, Brian Patten, to music, on a very rare album of his poems recorded in 1972. The album, VANISHING TRICK, was released in 1976 and features contributions from the likes of Richard Thompson, Martin Carthy and Neil Innes, but Linda’s interpretation of Embroidered Butterflies absolutely shines. The album is next to impossible to find but a couple of her contributions appear on Disc 1 of the recent career retrospective by Richard and Linda Thompson, HARD LUCK STORIES 1972-1982.

THE ROLLING STONES     LADY JANE


On which Brian Jones picks up the dulcimer, Jack Nitzche provides accompaniment on the harpsichord, and Mick Jagger takes on the role of troubadour, and the band invent baroque pop - Lady Jane, taken from their 1966 album AFTERMATH, is by far one of the loveliest tracks the band ever recorded. My favourite story regarding the album doesn’t even feature the Stones, though. It is said that when considering names for their album REVOLVER, released later that year, Ringo suggested calling it AFTER GEOGRAPHY. I’ve always been slightly disappointed that they didn’t run with that one. 

THE EXECUTIVES     MOVING IN A CIRCLE

Deeply psychedelic vibes from Australia’s The Executives, who hid the trippy Moving In A Circle away on the b-side of their 1968 release It’s A Happening World. Although this was a big hit at home, they were never really known outside of Australia - a move to the United States came to nothing, but, back home in Sydney, their polished sound was considered the equivalent of the 5th Dimension, or the The Mamas and The Papas, who seemingly had a big influence on their sound.

THE BEATLES     PENNY LANE


Penny Lane is McCartney’s sunny hallucinogenic yin to the dense experimental yang of Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever on what is possibly the greatest single release of all time. Stylistically the two songs couldn’t be more different, but both display a surreal sense of hallucinatory lyricalism - on Penny Lane it’s both sunny and raining, summer and winter - that suggest the band were very much at home to LSD at this point. Bizarrely, some people don’t like The Beatles, but if Penny Lane, released as a precursor to SGT PEPPERS in 1967 at the height of the Summer of Love, doesn't put a melon-sized grin on your face every time you hear it, then I’m afraid that something has died within you; you might even have worms wriggling and writhing away in the space where your joie de vivre used to be.

THE SPENCER DAVIS GROUP     AFTER TEA


Another tea reference - there was clearly something in the water in 1968 (apart from tea leaves, I mean). Following Steve Winwood’s departure, the group briefly dabbled in psychedelia, but to no avail. After Tea was the last minor hit for The Spencer Davis Group before they broke up in 1969. Spencer Davis, of course, sadly passed away earlier this year.

 PERMANENT CLEAR LIGHT     PEASANTS AND PEONS

 

Superb baroque-pop loveliness from Finland's top, and for all I know, only psychedelic group, Permanent Clear Light, but what a sound they produce. The shimmering Peasants And Peons is taken from their second album, COSMIC COMICS, released earlier this year, but with one foot firmly embedded in 1968 (whilst the other is busy shuffling around the early 70s Finnish prog-rock scene - about which I know nothing, tbh). Keyboards and mellotrons abound and, all in all, it sits somewhere very nicely between early Pink Floyd and The Dukes of Stratosphear, which should give some indication of just how much I love this album.

JEAN-EMMANUEL DELUXE & FRIENDS     OUVERTURE ROUENLLYWOOD

The absolute far-out and gone trippiest track on this evening’s show comes courtesy of Jean-Emmanuel, probably best known for running the record labels Martyrs du Pop and Euro-Visions as well as the celebrated author of a 2013 book documenting France's yé-yé pop music scene of the 1960s. ROUEN DREAMS, released earlier this year, is almost entirely French-sung project around a loose inner narrative depicting "a kind of trip to Hollywood from a French point of view." Inspired by the pioneer of lo-fi/DIY production R. Stevie Moore and, bizarrely, MOR singer/songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan, it’s a hip mix of spoken-word sections and trippy, lush chamber-pop and deeply lysergic passages of ambient psychedelia - and a couple of Gilbert O’Sullivan covers. Weird.

ANTON BARBEAU     COWBOY JOHN MEETS GREENSLEEVES

What to make of this? Cowboy John Meets Greensleeves does exactly what it says on the cover - a surreal singalong that, for some reason, morphs into Greensleeves and entirely works. This is taken from Anton Barbeau’s most recent album, MANBIRD, released earlier this year - kooky and catchy, the whole album is a dreamlike exploration of Barbeau’s subconscious, described by the man himself as a “Jungian travelogue of memories, dreams and reflections”. This, obviously, is a recommendation.

NATHAN HALL AND THE SINISTER LOCALS     STAND AND DELIVER


The hypnotically compelling Stand And Deliver is taken from the ON THE BLINK EP, a taster for the upcoming album of the same name from the wonderful Nathan Hall and The Sinister Locals. I understand that Ennio Morricone, dub reggae, JJ Cale and The Beatles will all get a look in so, as you might imagine, I’m positively a-quiver with anticipation.

CAM’S JAMS     PAISLEY CURTAINS (HITS OF SUNSHINE)

 

Cam’s Jams (Cameron Cowles to his mum) has produced an album that is entirely in love with psychedelia in all of its kaleidoscopic manifestations - a psychedelic pop influence runs throughout the ravishing VOL. 1, released last year, but essentially what your getting is something akin the The Strawberry Alarm Clock - groovy, harmonic loveliness that’s gentle on the senses, except for when it needs to rock out. Paisley Curtains (Hits Of Sunshine) captures its vibe precisely - experimental, lysergic and very, very pretty.

KOOBAS     CONSTANTLY CHANGING 


Koobas have the distinction of being the least well-known of Brian Epstein’s post-Beatles charges from the Merseybeat era. Despite some good press and highly visible gigs - they opened for The Who and toured with Hendrix - their singles failed to chart and by the time they came to record their only album they’d already decided to split. With the pressure off they were clearly able to enjoy their time in the studio, including little jokes and skits between the off-kilter psychedelia. Released in 1969, a year after the group had gone their separate ways, the eponymous album was doomed to obscurity. These days, of course, it fetches ridiculous sums on eBay.

 THE FREEBORNE     A NEW SONG FOR ORESTES

The Freeborne were a youthful, prestigiously talented, Boston-based psychedelic band whose success appears to have been hampered by their very youthfulness - they were unable to tour their only album, the marvellously monikered PEAK IMPRESSIONS, released in 1968, due to the fact that three of the band were still high school students. It’s not as though they didn’t have the musical chops - they opened for The Velvet Underground and Love when those bands visited Boston, but somehow, success eluded them. It didn’t help that they were lumped in with the so-called ‘Bosstown Sound’, a faux-musical movement devised to compete with the rather more successful San Francisco Sound - just ask Ultimate Spinach how that worked out - a pity, because the album is great, featuring a highly psychedelic sound that often pre-figures 70s prog, taking in Byrds-like harmonies, pulsating bass, tricksy time signatures, swirling farfisas, baroque pianos, harpsichords, cellos and, in the case of A New Song For Orestes, a cod-poetic spoken outro in the style of The Moody Blues. Well worth checking out, if you’re a fan of this sort of thing, which, clearly, I am. (Orestes, of course, was the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. He is the subject of several Ancient Greek plays and of various myths connected with his madness and purification which retain obscure threads of much older ones – but I expect you already knew that. He probably appreciated a new song after all this time).

CHRISTINA VANTZOU     SNOW WHITE


Christina Vantzou is a composer of ambient chamber music. Her most recent release, MULTI NATURAL, released earlier this year, is an hallucinogenic marvel, abstract and non-linear, coming in and out of focus in an almost quantum fashion, as the sounds appear and dissolve with one’s focus. Snow White shimmers like a dreamworld with its own internal logic. In a show packed with proper songs, I wanted to include something smudged and woozy to get lost in.

KAVUS TORABI     PEACOCK THRONE

A mind-bending track from Kavus Torabi - one of the newer members of what remains of Gong these days - on what amounts to his debut solo album, HIP TO THE JAG, released earlier this year. It’s a cosmic mix of avant-garde space-rock and vintage 60s psychedelia that combines surreal experimentation with hypnotic manipulation. Marvellous.

CONSTANTINE     MY DEAR ALICE


Wyrd-folk loveliness from Constantine, a psychedelic troubadour from Chicago who recommends his music to fans of Mark Fry, Trader Horne and Donovan which, to me, at least, makes his exploratory and transportative missives utterly unmissable. The sitar-soaked My Dear Alice is taken from his acid-drenched IN MEMORY OF A SUMMER’S DAY, released earlier this year, a gorgeous psych-folk masterpiece that’s both evocative and hugely emotive. Absolutely seek this album out.

SKIP BIFFERTY     INSIDE THE SECRET

Highly regarded in the music industry, but shackled to a manager with a reputation for violent methods of negotiation, Skip Bifferty (I’ve never liked the name) should have been so much bigger than they were, but no one wanted to touch them. Their one album, eponymously titled, recorded in 1967, was both whimsical and innovative, featuring cutting-edge psychedelic studio production and some great songs, as evidenced by the slightly menacing Inside The Secret. Unfortunately, their record company held the album back for some 10 months or so, long after any enthusiasm for the project had dispersed, and initial pressings were flawed with sub-standard sound quality, botched graphics and mislabelled mono and stereo editions. The zeitgeist had passed. The band, once the darlings of a London bursting into vivid technicolour have been largely forgotten, but at least some of them evolved into the The Blockheads, which gives you some idea of how very accomplished they were. 

COLORAMA     AND


This swirling slice of kaleidoscopic fancy, And, opens the album CHAOS WONDERLAND, the latest release from Carwyn Ellis. It’s an eclectic mix of multi-coloured psych-pop, cosmic tiki-flavoured psychedelia, soulful balladry, carnival-organ funk and soft-spoken latin rhythms.

WAX MACHINE     TIME


This transcendentally lovely track is taken from the album EARTHSONG OF SILENCE, the debut album from Brighton’s Wax Machine. It’s a kaleidoscopic mix of classic 60s psychedelia, tropicalia, jazz and folk, produced by Kikagaku Moyo’s Go Kurasawa, which should give you a pretty good indication of where this album is coming from and, indeed, where it might take you. Celestial flute playing, wandering guitars and sugary vocals are front and forward, creating a soundspace that’s blissfully cosmic, allowing the mind to float both hither and thither, as the universe expands and collapses like a mossy eiderdown in the Sussex countryside.

THE KINKS     AUTUMN ALMANAC


The Kinks, of course, didn’t really do psychedelia, but with Autumn Almanac they managed to raise the prosaic to the level of enchantment and on this, the stereo mix of their brilliant 1968 single, someone turned the psychedelic button up to at least 8 for the final few seconds of the fade out

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Monday 26 October 2020

MIND DE-CODER HALLOWEEN SPECIAL 2020


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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