MIND DE-CODER 60

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MIND DE-CODER 60

Music that contains space for the listener to occupy as thinker, creator and dreamer; music that envelops, dislocates and bewilders; music which is trance inducing through repetition but essentially forward facing and unconcerned with historical accuracy, authenticity, fashion or tradition and music that rewards deep listening is still the root of the sonic psychedelic experience, and long may it remain so.

                                                           John Doran, Sept 2014,The Quietus

ALVIN LUCIER     I SITTING IN A ROOM

This extraordinary track, which is all over the show, was created in 1969 by Alvin Lucier, a composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. Much of his work is influenced by science, exploring the physical properties of sound itself: the resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media. It sounds mostly unlistenable to, I know, but, really, it fits the show like a velour glove. On this piece, I AM SITTING IN A ROOM, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The space acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound. All the recorded segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and constitute the work. He’s actually performed this piece numerous times, if perform is the right word, several of which have been recorded. This particular version was made on October 29th and 31st, 1980, in his own living room and consists of thirty-two generations of speech. It lasts 40 minutes and you’ll be pleased to know I don’t play it all, but it pops up throughout the show creating something of an ambiance, I’m sure you’ll agree.

KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD     LONELY STEEL SHEET FLYER

This is track four from the Gizzard’s (as I’m choosing to call them in this instance) marvellous QUARTERS! LP, which has rarely left the household phonogram since I came across it a few months back. Lonely Steel Sheet Flyer worms its way irresistibly into your head and hangs around long after its 10 minutes and 10 seconds have taken off into cosmos – this is gorgeous, warped psychedelia that unspools like a lazy summer afternoon. A bit like I do, really.

 ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY, DON CHERRY AND RONAL FRANGIPANE     RAINBOW ROOM

Rainbow Room is taken from the soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal, audacious and dazzling psychedelic masterpiece, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, which caused something of a scandal at the 1973 Cannes Festival. Entirely financed by John and Yoko, the film is a kaleidoscopic dissertation on the nature of enlightenment that’s all but impossible to describe, given its emphasis on surreal visuals over narrative, but which might be usefully summed up as “trippy as nobody’s business”. The soundtrack itself is less so, but manages to take in psychedelic rock and esoteric folk music, subtle tone poems to grand-scale orchestral themes, vintage dance music and a little Tuvan throat singing along the way. For 40 odd years or so this was the holy grail for collectors of your psychedelic soundtracks, remaining unreleased following a dispute between Jodorowsky and the film’s producer Allan Klein (that Allan Klein who saw off The Beatles). This year, however, saw its release on both CD and a rather handsome vinyl edition – it should be an absolutely crucial addition any psychedelic going’s on you have going on.

KATIE GATELY     PIPES

This stunning piece is constructed entirely of Gately’s own snipped, processed and layered vocals (and effects), a process so complex that it took six painstaking months to assemble. Released as a cassette-only release in 2013, Pipes is seemingly influenced by the spirit of Arthur Russell and Gregorian chant but remains sonically unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. At times it can be unbelievably tense both in the varying moods and tones, but Gately’s mixture of ambient vocal pulsing and complex rhythmic textures are never less than mind-blowing. Apparently if you slow the track way down you’ll find a pop song in there somewhere.

THIGHPAULSANDRA     THE GOLDEN COMMUNION

This is the title track from THE GOLDEN COMMUNION, the latest transgressive release from former Julian Cope collaborator and sonic explorer, Thighpaulsandra (Tim Lewis to his mum, I hope). In a show not shy of sonic experimentation this is nevertheless an astonishing piece of music which, over its 24 minutes, takes the listener on a journey through orchestral and experimental soundscapes that trip dramatically through balletic chamber music, wayward electronic forces, synth slipstreams, dense drones and psychedelic soul. It’s a captivating listen and one which is sustained throughout the whole album which reveals and revels in the dizzying and often overwhelming psychedelic highs dancing hither and tither from its grooves.

 JULIA HOLTER     MY LOVE, MY LOVE

This spellbindingly gorgeous track is taken from the album REMEMBERING MOUNTAINS: UNHEARD SONGS BY KAREN DALTON, on which Holter is one of many contemporary female artists (Josephine Foster, Marissa Nadler and Isobell Campbell shine) given a sample of Dalton’s unrecorded song lyrics (verses, snippets, poems) to put to music. Dalton herself never recorded her own songs; her two albums, released in the late 60s early 70s and now generally lionized as lost folk classics, contained no original compositions, so chances are she never intended to record these songs at all – it is left to the artist to find their own way into the lyrics and channel Dalton’s broken heart through their own melodies. Holter’s sparse minimalist take on My Love, My Love perfectly captures her own avant-garde experimentation and gets it exactly right, honouring the spirit of Dalton’s own captivating aesthetic; full of memory, love and loss the song turns the pain of loneliness into something almost transcendentally lovely.  

MAX RICHTER     PATH 5 (DELTA)

And speaking of transcendental loveliness, Max Richter’s Path 5 (Delta) is almost indescribably sublime. Richter is known as an influential voice in your post-minimalist circles, commissioning and performing works by minimalist musicians such as Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, and Steve Reich, but I’ve always kept an eye on him because of his work with Amorphous Androgynous, Keli Ali and Vashti Bunyan. His latest release, SLEEP, is an 8 hour therapeutic project designed to reinforce and reflect, well, natural sleep patterns. In essence, the listener is required to press play as they ready themselves for bed, nod off to sleep somewhere between the patient piano chords of track 1 (Dream 1) and the vocal-and-organ ululations of track 4 (Path 3), and re-emerge after eight hours of music to a gentle crescendo of stretching strings, wordless harmonies, and long-tone bass near the close of its final track (Dream 0). In the meantime, Richter’s slow-motion electronics-and-chamber-ensemble hybrid shifts between and slowly recycles parts of the whole, unfolding like a mix between Arvő Part and the glacial slow-motion of Sigur Rós, say, that not only reflects but embodies the process of sleep’s half-remembered patterns. Given that nobody has the time to listen to the whole piece, Richter has also released an accompanying album, FROM SLEEP, which lasts a mere hour, from which this dream-like recording is taken.  

HARUMI     TWICE TOLD TALES OF THE POMEGRANATE FOREST

Harumi is one of the great lost psychedelic artists of the 1960s – a Japanese ex-pat (with a woman’s name, apparently) he managed to convince the legendary Tom Wilson (of the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Mothers of Invention, Sun Ra, Nico fame – you know the one) to produce his only album, simply called HARUMI, in 1968. In many ways it’s simply a product of its times, offering up a respectable mix of blue-eyed soul and psychedelic pop with all the attendant phasing, occasional baroque orchestration, Japanese folk stylings, vibraphone and wacked out instrumentation you could hope for. Sides three and four however take the listener somewhere completely different. You may never want to listen to it twice, but listened to under the right conditions, you could lose yourself in the strangely meditative, late-night, tripped-out stream-of-consciousness minimalism of Twice Told Tales Of The Pomegranate Forest, and you may need to leave a trail of psychedelic breadcrumbs in order to find your way back.  No one ever heard from Harumi again. He never made his way back.

THE ORB     INTO THE FOURTH DIMENSION: ESSENES IN STARLIGHT

It’s easy to forget from a distance of, oh, 25 years or so, just how revelatory The Orb were back in 1989-90. Their debut album, ADVENTURES BEYOND THE ULTRA-WORLD, blew my mind and opened up whole new vistas of music to explore. Into The Fourth Dimension: Essenes In Starlight is taken from their second John Peel session, recorded October 13^th, 1989, and was released on vinyl a year later, simply as THE ORB: PEEL SESSIONS, a welcome relief to those of us who were wearing out their taped-from-the-radio copies from over-use (in these digital days it all seems so delightfully vintage, I know). The improvisational genius of the performances is boggling, with Alex Patterson and Thrash manipulating enormous blobs of tripped out samples, effects and hallucinatory mood changes to create what was to become ambient dub, I suppose - don't blame them if subsequent acts were unable to produce anything quite as good as this, I've never been entirely convinced that The Orb have either.

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MIND DE-CODER 34

To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page

MIND DE-CODER 34

“It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience".

                                             Aldous Huxley

DJ FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION     TADESSE TESFARMICHAEL

 This is the opening track from a sampler collection by DJ Female Convict Scorpion (known as Josh Pollock to his mum) called THE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO DJ FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION, released in 2012. It originally appears on his debut album PATIENCE CLEVELAND, which he released in 2005. I don’t know why he called it Tadesse Tesfarmichael because that appears to be the name of a highly respected dentist in San Jose, but I expect he had his reasons.  DJ Female Convict Scorpion composes psychedelic music with turntables, samplers, and the like and in many ways he’s the leading name in West Coast non-hip-hop psychedelic turntablism since 2004. Possibly available for weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and funerals.

MOON WIRING CLUB     ANOTHER DREAME

A new album from Moon Wiring Club’s Ian Hodgson is always a cause for celebration round these here parts but with his 2012 release, BREAD TODAY, TOMORROW SECRETS, Hodgson went one step further – two releases with the same name; one on CD and one on vinyl, each with a different tracklisting and a different vibe, but each starting with the same track – Another Dreame. After that the CD version has a cracked hip hop thing going on amidst the Edwardian banquets, singing birds and Bressian-wielding cats, whereas the vinyl version is almost entirely beatless, with the emphasis on tonal mood and atmosphere which, in this case, comes across like a particularly lysergic Hammer Horror film soundtrack. I got so excited I decided to make use of both liberally throughout the show.

Please enjoy your trip.

BASIL KIRCHIN     ONCE UPON A TIME (EXCERPT)

 I’m performing Basil Kirchin a grave disservice by only playing a small excerpt from this track, one of two that make up the album QUANTUM, recorded in 1973 but not released until 30 years later by the fairly fabulous Trunk Records. It offers an intriguing glimpse of Kirchin's particular oeuvre of sonic weirdness, in which he borrows from free jazz, musique concrète, and splices them together with field recordings (animals, insects, trams), his wife and autistic children. It's all based on Basil's theories of sound and that when you slow down or speed up sound, you open up new doors, and new sound is revealed.  The first side, titled Once Upon a Time, starts off with the squawking of geese before a gentle drone calms things down, then a child's voice, possibly one of the autistic children Kirchin recorded off and on in a ten-year period in Switzerland, repeats "something special will come from me." More bird noises are mixed with some skronky free jazz that builds with intensity, with an ominous organ drone thrown in. At times, the horns and the bird chatter become so entwined it's hard to know which is which, but sadly you don’ get to hear much of this, as I cut it after the child’s voice, but you owe it to yourself to hear the rest of this album.

MOEBIUS AND PLANK     NEWS

 Marvellous. Krautrock goes reggae on the 1980 release RASTAKRAUT PASTA by Moebius and Plank, where the inner-city Bavarian vibes meet Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry at his most absurd and mixes it with a Faust thing at their most far out. Opener, News, samples TV news over a heavy bass slide trombone groove; except, as Julian Cope notes in his ever trusty KRAUTROCKSAMLER, it’s not a slide-trombone at all , that’s just the effect created on this kosmiche masterpiece of anti-world music. I shall be returning to it later in the show,

MOON WIRING CLUB     DUSKY EVESDROPPER

 Pretty much sounds as the title suggests. From the CD version.

ILL WIND     PEOPLE OF THE NIGHT

 Ill Wind were a little known psychedelic folk outfit from Boston who only released the one album, FLASHES, in 1968, and never really had the chance to develop their sound. They were badly served by producer Tom Wilson, who’d worked with the likes of the Velvet Underground, The Mothers of Invention and Simon and Garfunkel but who could find little to interest him in the making of this album, which is a pity because some of the songs, like People Of the Night, are pretty cool and would have benefited from a surer touch. When the album was released every copy was damaged so had to be recalled. By the time it was re-released the world had moved on, and that was the end of Ill Wind who, apparently, blew no one no good.

VLADIMIR USSACHEVSKY & OTTO LUENING     INCANTATION

 A little something from legendary electronic composer Vladimir Ussachevsky who, in the early 50’s, with collaborator Otto Luening, created the first music using magnetic tape – specifically those reel-to-reel tapes, with which some of the most astounding musical innovations were realized.  Incantation is taken from the 1968 album TAPE MUSIC AN HISTORIC CONCERT, a recording of a live concert, performed by the two, in 1952 at the Modern Museum of Art which would radically change the way music was created forever and is, therefore, well worth two minutes of your time.

PERRY LEOPOLD     SERPENTINE LANE

 In the United States, at least, Perry Leopold is often referred to as the godfather of acid-folk, having combined his love of folk music, classical and the LSD based acid-rock to produce an album of progressive folk loveliness called EXPERIMEN IN METAPHYSICS, released in 1970, that, despite having a print run of only 300 copies, most of which, in the spirit of the times, were given away by Leopold on street corners where he used to busk, was truly a historical book mark in folk. His next album, CHRISTIAN LUCIFER, from which this track is taken, recorded in 1972, but not actually released until the year 2000, was an equally psychedelic affair and, if anything, even more lovely than his debut album, causing his clavinet player to remark that this record had ‘fulfilled the promise of psychedelia in a way that nothing else had before”.

CHAPTERHOUSE     SOMETHING MORE

 The first of four shoegazing tracks in this evening’s show, starting with Chapterhouse and Something More from their debut album WHIRLPOOL, released in 1991. Hardly representative of the scene’s harder guitar white-out’s, which the band were certainly capable of (they started out supporting Spacemen 3) it captures much of its prettiness, the combination of both being what attracted me to it in the first place.

MOON WIRING CLUB     SPIRITS CLUSTER

 More hauntological going’s on from TODAY BREAD, TOMORROW SECRETS, this time a track from the LP version.

RIDE     DREAMS BURN DOWN

 The definitive track on Ride’s definitive album, as far as I’m concerned. I was always a big fan of their effortless noise, bought the first three albums and all the early EPs but kind of gave up on them more or less the same time they gave up on themselves (that would be roundabout the time of their last album TARANTULA). Dreams Burn Down, originally found on their third EP, FALL, released earlier in 1990, however, opens side two of their debut album NOWHERE, and had everything that the short-lived shoegazing scene promised – whir, whoosh, haze and swirl all caught up in a storm of dense, hypnotic guitars and trippy as hell.

THE FLOWER PEOPLE     (LISTEN TO THE) FLOWER PEOPLE

 I know, what can I say? But I watched This Is Spinal Tap again the other night and was feeling a bit playful.

MOON WIRING CLUB     WOMBWOOD PATTERN

 Another unsettling track from the 2012 CD release TODAY BREAD, TOMORROW SECRETS.

COSMIC JOKERS     KINDER DES ALLES

Our second Krautrock track on the show, Kinder Des All ( or Children Of All) (possibly), takes up all of side 1 of their second release, GALACTIC SUPERMARKET, released in 1974. I say ‘their’ but the band, a kind of krautrock supergroup featuring members of Ash Ra Tempel, lesser-known act Wallenstein and producer Dieter Dierks were secretly recorded jamming at epic acid-fuelled sessions by the endearingly reprehensible Ralph-Ulrich Kaiser who then edited and mixed the sessions only to release them without the group's knowledge on his own Kosmiche Music label as The Cosmic Jokers. This is wildly cosmic spaced-out psychedelic rock that reaches far into the interstellar aether – sadly I had to edit it somewhat, otherwise it would have taken up the rest of the show, but given the way it was created in the first place, I can’t imagine anyone complaining, except the band of course.

THE BELBURY POLY     THE ABSOLUTE ELSEWHERE

 A hauntological piece from THE WILLOWS, the debut album by The Belbury Poly, released in 2004, and an album that pretty much set the Ghostbox record label, and, therefore, the hauntological agenda.  The Absolute Elsewhere, like the rest of the album, is a knowingly spooky piece and so it’s fitting that THE WILLOWS comes with a quotation from that great English writer of ghost stories, Algernon Blackwood: “It's the sound of their world, the humming in their region. The division here is so thin that it leaks through somehow. But, if you listen carefully, you'll find it's not above so much as around us. It's in the willows"

HOLISM GAEA     AH, SUNFLOWER

In your cosmic, psychedelic, hauntological, acid folk circles you can’t really go wrong with a track called Ah, Sunflower and Israeli duo, Holism Gaea, don’t disappoint. Ah, Sunflower is a surprisingly gentle and almost-melodic song, taken from their album BLAKESIAN WILLIAMNESS, released 2012, in which the poem by William Blake is made to shiver: “…where youth pined away with desire, and the pale virgin shrouded in snow, rise from their graves and aspire, where my sunflower wishes to go”.

ELLA FITZGERALD     SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

Quite simply one of the most perfect recordings I’ve ever heard. I believe she covered this Gershwin classic a couple of times, and I don’t know on which album this version first appears, but you can find it on the 2007 Verve compilation, GOLD. While it’s playing, however, you can hear excerpts from electronic pioneer, Tod Dockstader’s piece Ariel Song, and sound designer Alan R. Splet’s Space Travel With Changing Choral Textures.

SLOWDIVE     SOUVLKI SPACE STATION

For many Slowdive were the quintessential Shoegaze group – they barely seemed to move on stage and yet quivering waves of sound just radiated from them. Souvlaki Space Station is from their second album, SOUVLAKI, released in 1993, in which they dropped the swathes of oceanic sound of their previous album and replaced it with a lighter, swirling sound in which the guitars stretch in slow motion layers and the vocals seem to call out desperately. This dubby affair is absolutely stunning – gorgeous.

MOON WIRING CLUB     MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

An LP track.

LUSH     SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

No one did shimmering guitars like Lush, and this track, released in 1990 as a 12” single, is almost transcendentally beautiful. There was a time back then, in fact, when I thought that this was most perfect single ever made and, in truth, I’ve not heard much since then that’s made me change my mind. There was something about their sound, and Miki Berenyi’s featherweight falsetto, that made each song, no matter how lovely, sound like the girl you loved most in the world letting you down gently – sweet, broken and fragile; and shimmering.

MOEBIUS AND PLANK     SOLAR PLEXUS

The second track from Moebius and Plank’s brilliant album, RASTAKRAUT PASTA, and this time a more traditional krautrock workout that pretty much takes you as far out, or indeed, as far in as you can go.

PEOPLE LIKE US     THE SOUND OF THE END OF MUSIC

 People Like Us is the name under which sound artist Vicki Bennett releases her surreal audio collages that take in, mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio. The Sound Of The End Of Music is taken from her most recent album, WELCOME ABROAD, released in 2011, and I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s not a mash-up because this isn’t a case of taking the vocals from one track and laying them over the music of another – I think it is what it is – two tracks, The Doors’ The End, and Julie Andrews’ The Sound Of Music played at the same time. It shouldn’t work but it does and causes the peculiar experience of listening to one song or the other, but not both, at the same time, even though that’s exactly what you’re doing.

BASIL KIRCHIN     SPECIAL RELATIVITY (EXCERPT)

Another excerpt from QUANTUM, only this time from Side 2 and a track called Special Relativity, one long piece that fills up the whole side. The piece moves from simple, childlike melodies to sections where the strings and brass get into intense, free-form freakouts, while the voices can shift from calm and playful to frantic. The shifting emotional mood gives the piece a theatrical quality as it moves from one strange tangent to another but, sadly, I give you just the closing moments, although I’m really quite tempted to play the whole track in a later show. Hopefully the snippets I’ve offered will have aroused your curiosity and you’ll go out and find the whole thing. What I’ve used, however, closes the show very nicely.

Thank you for listening.