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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MIND DE-CODER 97

MIND DE-CODER 97

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

The war on drugs has always been a war on people.

                                                                    Natalie Ginsberg

 

THE MOODY BLUES     THE DAY BEGINS

With the release of DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED in 1967, the Moody Blues had created something entirely new – a stereophonic-concept-symphonic-rock album which combined high-art pomp with a psychedelic sensibility and early prog-rock leanings. Nobody was expecting it – least of all their record company who were expecting an adaptation of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 for Decca's newly formed Deram Records division in order to demonstrate their latest recording techniques, which were named "Deramic Sound". The Moody Blues had other ideas, and in collaboration with the London Festival Orchestra set about recording one of the defining documents of the blossoming psychedelic era, and one of the most enduringly popular albums of its day. The Day Begins works as something of an overture for the album as a whole, featuring elements of the album’s ground-breaking hit-single Nights In White Satin in orchestral stylee before concluding with a poem by drummer Mike Edge. The whole thing could have been a toe-curling embarrassment, but through sheer creative genius it is, in fact, every bit the equal of SGT. PEPPERS and PET SOUNDS which had previously set the bar almost impossibly high for studio innovation. This track is taken from the original 1968 recording and not the 1978 remix which has pretty much been used since it was discovered that the master tapes had deteriorated, just in case you’re concerned about that sort of thing. 

 

AGITATION FREE     IN THE SILENCE OF THE MORNING SUN

Considered for decades to be among your Krautrock's second-string artists, Agitation Free nevertheless quickly established a reputation as one of the pioneers of Berlin’s underground music scene. Whilst their first album owed more to trippy cosmic-psych excursions with added exotic middle-Eastern embellishments and ethnic found-sounds (it really is that good), their second release, SECOND, released in 1973, largely eschewed  the Floydian explorations for a larger sonic palette which combined free-jazz, rock, avant-garde and progressive rock with a free-spirited funkiness. The superb Silence Of The Morning Sunrise, with electronic birds chirping along to tranquil electric guitars gliding along the organ's mist layers, is very nearly as transcendentally lovely as the title suggests.

 

 BETWEEN     AND THE WATERS OPENED

Between were a band heavily steeped in the Indian Classical tradition infused with the minimalist, avant-garde goings-on of Stockhausen, Cage, and Reich (et al.) and influenced by the writings of Jung and other philosophical musings of the time – so what you get is something deeply psychedelic and progressive – in other words, entirely forward-thinking and krautrock in nature. Their second album AND THE WATERS OPENED, released in 1973, fuses all of these influences together and throws in some Spiritual Jazz and medieval vibes for good measure. The title track has an otherworldly beauty to it which expresses the serenity of meditation, despite the conga freak-out which appears out of nowhere halfway through it.

 

SAIRIE     SCARLET AND BLUE

Spectral psych-folk from Brighton’s Sairie whose debut EP, released earlier this year, opens with the mesmerising title track Scarlet And Blue, whose ringing autoharp and smoothly pitched vocal legato is strongly reminiscent of Gwydion Pendderwen’s Spring Strathspey, a big favourite of mine and up there with Anne Briggs’ Blackwaterside and Magnet’s Willow Song (I can offer no greater praise). Elsewhere the spirit of Judy Dyble’s post-Fairport band Trader Horne looms large. This is early days for the band but I find myself very much looking forward to an album in the near future.

 

POPOL VUH     JA, DEINE LIEBE IST SÜßER ALS WEIN

Or Yes, Your Love Is Sweeter Than Wine, as Popol Vuh draw inspiration from the Song of Songs, the ancient love poems attributed to King Solomon in your Old Testament texts. This is sacred music, crafted from the same synthesis of Eastern and Western popular, classical and devotional traditions that the band visited with the Hosianna Mantra some two years before. Taken from their 1975 release, DAS HOHELIED SALOMOS (THE SONG OF SOLOMON), the album has a timeless, healing quality – vocalist Djon Yun’s voice is serene and ethereal whilst band-leader Florian Fricke’s vision is never less than evocative, taking in sweeping, cosmic swathes of subtly shifting rhythms, tempos, and textures. Sublime.

 

MR ELEVATOR     ALONE TOGETHER

The woozy and buoyant Alone Together is the stand-out track on the new album GOODBYE, BLUE SKY, released earlier this year by the Californian acid-soaked outfit previously known as Mr. Elevator And The Brain Hotel. Previous albums were more at home to keyboard-driven psych-rock, but this album is an altogether more expansive affair, featuring swathes of synths with vintage tones and a cinematic lustre.

 

 KOOBAS     CIRCUS

I’ve always had a soft spot for Koobas, who were one of those bands whose careers never really took off. Signed by Brian Epstein, their early career, at least, mirrored that of fellow Liverpudlians, The Beatles, what with both of them playing Hamburg and touring England in the sort of package deals that would feature Helen Shapiro as the main draw, but come 1965 while The Beatles were playing Shea Stadium, Koobas were resident group in the Rock Ballroom at Butlin's Holiday Camp in Ayr, Scotland. Their only album, recorded after they’d already decided to call it a day, is, nevertheless, a celebratory affair, taking in reverb-drenched psychedelia, fuzzed-up guitars, drum-breaks straight out of The Beatles playbook, entirely incidental spoken-word interludes, a couple of truly great songs and, in the case of Circus, a bizarre sound collage inspired by the spirit of the times but not something that I imagine you’ll ever want to hear again. Released in 1969, the album sunk without a trace – the band no longer existed to promote it, and psychedelia, as far as the record-buying public was concerned, was so 1967, and that was that as far as Koobas were concerned. But I remain a fan.

 

JULIAN COPE     GREED-HEAD DETECTOR

I was driving along Highway 1 the other day. The sky was blue, the mountains and hills crystalline in the early Spring sunshine, I had the road to myself, a song in my heart, and Julian Cope’s 20 MOTHERS playing loud as hell on the stereo. It was a transcendent moment. I haven’t played the album in a few years, but greeted it like an old friend. Released in 1995, this was the album that celebrated Cope’s move to the Wessex countryside where the forces aligned and he took on the role of the ecstatic visionary. The album remains an entertaining and avowedly eclectic collection of love songs and devotional songs, ranging from pagan ur-rock through to sci-fi pop and bubblegum trance music. Greed-Head Detector (always good for a rousing sing-a-long) seems to speak across the years to a post-Brexit, Covid-infected present-day England, ruled over by a bunch of, and not to put too fine a point on it, corrupt, half-witted, unprincipled, incompetent, shameless, hypocritical, bungling, inept, disdainful, mendacious and contemptuous mountebanks, led by a blustering humgruffin who is the very definition of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. All together now, and as loud as you can: “Fuck, fuck, fuck you, fuck, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”

 

THE MOON     I SHOULD BE DREAMING

Low-key cult psychedelia from The Moon - a kind of second-tier supergroup in the late sixties who featured an ex-Beach Boy (not one of the famous ones) - who understood that backward guitars and cymbals are the very essence of psychedelic pop and that the studio is just one more instrument in the psychedelic arsenal of swirling arrangements. Sadly, the record-buying public disagreed and the group’s two albums were destined for that aforementioned cult-status amongst collectors of this sort of thing. The spacey psych-pop gem I Should Be Dreaming, is taken from the band’s first album, WITHOUT EARTH, released in  1968 - an album that sits somewhere between SGT. PEPPERS and The Left Banke, which should be all the recommendation you need to check it out.

 

THE CROMAGNON BAND     THUNDER PERFECT

At the very least, the name suggests a Scandinavian sludge-metal band, but the Cromagnon Band seem to have grown out of a team of hip-hop producers who decided to have a go themselves and set about reverse engineering hip-hop - on acid - to see what made it tick, threw in some Moog and Rhodes heavy psych-funk and ended up with a sound  that featured on compilations from Andy Votel and Doug Shipton’s Finder Keepers label and sampled by The Go! Team, without having yet released a record. Thunder Perfect - a timeless distillation of cop-show funk - is the b-side to Green Smoke, a vinyl 45 no less, and their debut release, a psyched-up dose of cinematic breakbeat business in the 70s tradition, released as a single last year. An album, it is to be hoped, awaits in the wings.

NILSON     HERE AND NOW/LIFTING THE VEIL

Two tracks from the new album, HERE AND NOW, by Nilson because it ticks so many boxes - acid-folk, hauntology and ambient psychedelic excursions combine to create the state of  hallucinatory, hypnagogic wyrdness I get when trying to fall asleep after watching The Wickerman (for the umpteenth time) or Jonathan Miller’s 1966 adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. Pastoral loveliness sits side by side with woozy spectral wanderings, Radiophonic Workshop explorations, Italian Giallo soundtracks and the sort of phantasmagoric landscapes conjured-up by  Quentin Smirhes, Delia Derbyshire, English folk songs, the spirit of Public Information Films, and the echoes left behind from when Broadcast and the Focus Group investigated those witch cults in the radio age. It’s both haunting and haunted, beautiful and strange - Nilson appears to have taken in all the same reference points which I enjoy here on Mind De-Coder, but has gone off and made his own contribution to the genre, whereas all I appear to do is play these things on the radio. He is to be lauded - Mind De-Coder’s album of the year and available on Bandcamp here.

 

PINK FLOYD     INSTRUMENTAL IMPROVISATION

This track pretty much does what it says on the label - in 1967 Pink Floyd were filmed at former landlord Mike Leonard’s house for an edition of the BBC show, Tomorrow’s World. The band performed an untitled instrumental to accompany a demonstration of Mike’s sound and light experiments. The episode was broadcast on BBC1 TV on 17 January, 1968.

 

 CAIRA PARAVEL     ANDMOREAGAIN

Caira Paravel gives Love’s classic andmoreagain the hymnal quality of a canticle on her debut album MIRROR MIRROR, released in 2018. Consisting largely of a number of sparse, haunting and introspective cover of songs by the likes of Donovan, Anne Briggs, Vashti Bunyan, Joan Baez and, delightfully, Mary Poppins, the album inhabits a space where the musical textures wander between medieval, musique concrète, gospel, and avant-garde folk. Linda Perhacs’  PARALLELOGRAMS is a good reference point, as is Espers’ THE WEED TREE, but, truly, this an album of timeless wonders, and one to clasp close to your heart.

 

CAROL OF HARVEST     PUT ON YOUR NIGHTCAP

Kraut-folk loveliness from Carol Of Harvest, who released their only eponymously titled album in 1978, long after the world had moved on from caring about pastoral-prog acoustic explorations if, indeed, it could ever truly have been said to have cared in the first place. Formed in Bavaria in 1976, the group split shortly after the album’s release, having failed to find an audience - a pity really because, as far as mellow, trippy acid-folk goes, CAROL OF HARVEST, enjoys a timeless (that word again) quality - keyboards and synthesisers weave spacey textures and soundscapes into a delicate folk tapestry woven by the rest of the band. The sixteen-minute  Put On Your Nightcap sets the tone for the album with spacey arpeggiated guitar parts, astral synths, and sixteen-year-old singer Beate Krause’s mournful vocals. Named after a Walt Whitman poem - - a song of the grass and fields - the band were a fleeting presence which has, of course, made their only album, all the more desirable.

 

BROADCAST     MICROTRONICS 06

In 2003 Broadcast released a 3” CD called MICROTRONICS VOLUME 1: STEREO RECORDED MUSIC FOR LINKS AND BRIDGES, which was sold during their tour to promote their album THE HA HA SOUND. It consists of 11 instrumental tracks, the longest lasting no more than 2:09 minutes and it pretty much does what it says on the label.

 

PETER MICHAEL HAMEL     THE VOICE OF SILENCE

Holy, meditative music from Peter Michael Hamel, who, following the demise of Between in 1975, has continued to pursue a long and illustrious career that has taken in experimental operatic and orchestral work in the minimalist tradition. His 1973 album, THE VOICE OF SILENCE, is a devotional piece heavily influenced by Indian Classical sounds - he even sings using the Hindustani musical form of Khayal. It’s a long piece, but go with it - it will take you somewhere pretty far out...

 

QUENTIN SMIRHES     QUENTIN AND THE FISHER PRICE CLOCK

...and back to earth with a bump - but not necessarily our Earth, because the remarkable Quentin Smirhes (otherwise known as film-maker Sean Reynard to his mum) appears to occupy a world all of his own. This little gem appeared on YouTube last year.

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MIND DE-CODER 96

MIND DE-CODER 96

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

The true voyage of discovery is not so much in seeking new landscapes as in having new eyes

                                  Marcel Proust

 

LA DÜSSELDORF     VÖGEL

Not so much a track as one minute and thirty seconds or so of relaxing birdsong from the album VIVA, released in 1978 by La Düsseldorf, Klaus Dinger’s relatively more successful post-Neu! outfit, on an essential album in your Krautrock circles otherwise characterised by washed-out synthesizers, swirling guitar work and Dinger's trademark motorik rhythms.   

THE KUNDALINI GENIE     MANTRA

The swirling, heavy vibes of the it’s-all-in-the-title Mantra is taken from the album 11:11, the fourth studio album from Glasgow’s experimental psych-rockers The Kundalini Genie, released earlier this year. The album features transcendental sitar, droning hypnotic fuzz rock, 60’s British Invasion inspired melodies, dreamy, spaced-out soundscapes and blissed-out melodies. It’s good – I like it.

THE LEFT BANKE     THERE’S GONNA BE A STORM

      

By the time American baroque-pop band The Left Banke released their second album, their seventeen-year-old wunderkind songwriter and pianist Michael Brown – responsible for the exquisite Pretty Ballerina - had long gone, and taken his producer and arranger dad with him. It turns out that the remaining trio had a few tricks of their own up their sleeve, though, and in 1968 released THE LEFT BANKE TOO, an adventurous and psychedelically informed album which included the intoxicating There’s Gonna Be A Storm. (Two songs on the album feature backing vocals from one Steve Tallarico, who several years later would tie a scarf to his mike stand, change his name to Steven Tyler, and become the lead singer with Aerosmith – fact fans.)

PAPER GARDEN     A DAY

Paper Garden were a New York outfit whose only album, the eponymously titled PAPER GARDEN, released in 1968, was very much influenced by The Beatles’ REVOLVER and The Zombies’ ODESSEY AND ORACLE, with just a touch of SGT PEPPERS’ thrown in for its more out-there embellishments – it is, then, a very fine psychedelic release in its own right, if not entirely original in its scope. The elaborately arranged and entirely tripped-out A Day demonstrates just how ambitious the band were but, despite some good reviews, the album failed to find a home and the band split in 1970.

THE WOLFGANG DAUNER QUINTET     A DAY IN THE LIFE

An absolute bonkers cover of The Beatles’ A Day In The Life (they even miss out Paul's bit) from the Wolfgang Dauner release, THE OIMELS. Wolfgang Dauner, of course, was that rarest of things, an internationally renowned German jazz musician, but he was also freewheelingly experimental and unafraid to branch out into psychedelia and nascent krautrock inventiveness. Alongside his free-jazz explorations, Dauner also composed music for films, radio and television broadcasts, as well as knocking out a children’s opera, but for fans of your psychedelia, it’s his 1969 release with the Wolfgang Dauner Quintet that should really invite your interest.

THE DREAM     THE DOTING KING

The Doting King positively ripples with waves of lysergic ambience. Released in 1968, this was just one of three singles released by The Dream. The little-known Dutch band were forever doomed to be the psychedelic bridesmaid - never the tripped-out bride - opening for the likes of Pink Floyd, The Kinks and even Steppenwolf, but somehow eluding a success of their own.

PINK FLOYD     JULIA DREAM

The almost diaphanously lovely Julia Dream, b-side to the much unloved It Would Be So Nice, released in 1968, and the first track to be sung by Syd’s replacement David Gilmour. It's a haunting song, airy and mysterious, augmented by Rick Wright’s ambient mellotron; but with Syd’s departure, the band had lost its way and was searching for a way forward. This track wasn’t particularly it, but it’s by far one of the loveliest they ever recorded.

THE AVANT-GARDE     YELLOW BEADS

Yellow Beads, released in 1967, was little more than a cynical cash-in on the whole flower children hippie-vibe (à la Scott Mc Kenzie’s rather more famous paean to San Francisco) by the duo Elkin Fowler – who would go onto work with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen – and Chuck Woolery – who would go on to find fame as a game-show host. Despite the fact that there’s nothing particularly avant-garde about their sound, and that the duo played little part in the counter-culture they professed to celebrate, the single has enough psychedelic embellishments to make you sit up and take notice, should it ever be playing on a transistor radio near you.

ZWEISTEIN     ORGAN DREAMS (A VERY SIMPLE SONG)

Whereas Zweistein were very much the real deal, and their 1969 album, TRIP, FLIP OUT, MEDITATION is pretty much the holy grail of Krautrock avant-garde releases. In fairness, you’d only ever want to listen to it once, consisting, as it does, of a series of soundscapes created out of collaged sounds, home-built instruments, manipulated noises and organic stylistic hypnotic episodes which essentially escape classification. Spread over a  triple album it’s something of a challenging listen that demonstrates just how far out the counter-culture was actually willing to go in the late 60s. Organ Dreams, which closes side two, is one of the more pleasant tracks on an album of astounding sonic experimentation.

THE ROLLING STONES     SING THIS ALL TOGETHER

Over the years I’ve come to completely re-evaluate THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES REQUEST and now find it enormously enjoyable. Yes, it’s the band playing at being The Beatles (although never quite reaching Pepperland), and yes, they’d lost their way somewhat, but in the spirit of 1967, and in spite of, or possibly because of, the band’s travails during that momentous year, it remains something of a statement – unfocussed, fey and experimental, but definitely a statement - and, anyway, I’ve always been a fan of psychedelic excess. Sing This All Together probably isn’t as half as playful as they no doubt thought it was, but it always puts a smile on my face. John and Paul sing along too. I suffer from profound anemoia when it comes to 1967 - I suppose it comes from being only two at the time and being brought up on a council estate in Essex where the sixties never happened.  

I follow it with Julius Fučík’s unintentional screamer march Entry Of The Gladiators taken from the soundtrack to the ROLLING STONES ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS because I’m also a fan of Easter eggs, although I’m not entirely sure that it is an Easter egg if you have to point it out…

KEITH SEATMAN    ON THE PIER AND DOWN TO THE SEA

…but it does lend itself rather nicely to this track by Keith Seatman, whose music is an anachronistically repurposed assemblage of sounds, melodies and technologies plundered from different time zones. His most recent album, TIME TO DREAM BUT NEVER SEEN, released earlier this year, is an evocative sound collage, skillfully assembled to bring sounds from the past into the present, finding a new purpose for them as part of a historical narrative. The woozy, amusement arcade din of On The Pier And Down To The Sea is bad-trip psychedelia shot through with wistful and whimsical melodies, filtered through the crumbling, half-remembered memories of bank holiday day trips to Margate.

PAUL WELLER    FOURTH DIMENSION

Paul Weller is, I presume, rapidly, and, no doubt, reluctantly, turning into a national treasure. So be it. His current release, ON SUNSET, plays with a sonic palette which retains his passion for soulful balladry and pastoral vibes but finds space for disco, field recordings, electronic abstraction, G-Funk, and hauntological experimentation – in the case of Fourth Dimension, more or less all in the same track. Elsewhere, the psychedelic production takes in folk, music hall, baroque pop, and house beats in a way that ought to stir the heart of any fifty-five year- old Jam fan who’s still able to give The Style Council’s difficult fifth album the occasional airing. (That would be me, then.)

HELIOCENTRICS     PEOPLE WAKE UP!

There’s just a touch of the Cinematic Orchestra about this track, but its trip-hop beats are merely part of an epic odyssey that eventually takes in funk, jazz (but not jazz-funk, you’ll be relieved to hear), psychedelia, electronica, and avant-garde noodlings presented with the disorienting asymmetry of Sun Ra, the cinematic scope of Ennio Morricone, the sublime fusion of David Axelrod, Pierre Henry’s turned-on musique concrète, and Can’s beat-heavy Krautrock. Taken from their current release, THE INFINITY OF NOW, album closer People Wake Up! is psychedelia at its most psychedeliadelica-est.

THE BYRDS     MIND GARDEN

David Crosby’s Mind Garden, taken from The Byrds’ 1967 release, YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY, was much unloved by the rest of the band (and fans alike) but I’ve always had a soft spot for it – it’s a truly psychedelic piece, lacking all rhyme and rhythm (McGuinn’s pet peeve with the piece, truth be told) but featuring, instead, backward guitars, an atonal raga rock ambience and, hey, Crosby’s message of openness in the face of life’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Some people think it betrays a certain drug-addled self-indulgence, but by any standard, and like it or not, this is The Byrds at their most questing and experimental and my love for the band remains unabashed.

FRANK HUNTER AND HIS ORCHESTRA     MIST OF GORONGOZA

An exotic indulgence of my own – the ravishing Mist Of Gorongoza, taken from big-band trombonist Frank Hunter’s only dip into the limpid pool of exotica, 1959’s WHITE GODDESS, is a sultry combination of enchanted jungle exotica and its weirdly attendant sub-genre, space-lounge music. Although never regarded as one of the giants of the genre, Hunter’s sole album, which incorporates the ondioline, wordless vocals, chromatic bongos, Chinese bells and the almost certainly made-up buzzimba, is highly regarded by fans of your exotica and a much-sought-after item by collectors of this sort of thing.

Things begin to get messed up here as I attempt to create a sort of sonic melange of sounds that takes in a number of tracks by several artists associated with your avant-garde circles. These include…

CLAUDIO ROCCHI    IL RAMI E GLI ARMONICE

Quite. You can find Il Rami E Gli Armonice (or The Branches And The Harmonics, Italian translation fans) on the aptly titled 1976 release SUONI DI FRONTIERA (or FRONTIER SOUNDS) by Italian avant-garde composer Claudio Rocchi. It sounds like the sound-track to a psychedelic dream sequence - a collection of electronic sound sketches comprised of pulsing, rhythmic tones, sheets of pure abstraction, fragments of voice and environmental sound, captured and spun wild by tape loops and space-age sounds. Not for the mildly curious, I suspect.

JUSTIN HOPPER     INTERMISSION ANNOUNCEMENT

Anglophile Justin Hopper is an American writer whose work explores the intersection of landscape, memory, and myth through non-fiction, poetry, site-specific writing and audio pieces. He most recently tops and tails the Ghost Box release, INTERMISSION, a digital compilation of entirely new work from regular members of the label’s roster and some special guests. It’s a gentle flow of nostalgic ambient and twee-tronic gestures, comprised of preview tracks from forthcoming releases and material especially recorded for the compilation during the global lockdown. Ghost Box releases never have much to say about quotidian reality but these responses to the situation have seeped through from the universe next door. Hopper’s narration, which appears throughout the album’s tracks, encourages us to string together the gaps or pauses in collective cultural memory and tie them into a meditative narrative for downtimes like the lockdown.

While that was playing I included a few more moments from Zweistein and Claudio Rocchi, as well as Grace Slick’s isolated vocals for Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit because it seemed like such a good idea at the time (and still does), and then…

A.R. LUCIANI   BOMBARDMENT

Bombardment is taken from the album ELETTROENCEFALOGRAMMA by obscure Italian composer A.R. Luciani, an artist who operated and, I believe, continues to operate, on the extreme outer limits of musical endeavor. Drawn from original tapes recorded during the 1970s, the album, released last year, spans the heyday of Luciani’s work in which he embraced the possibilities of new music at the dawn of an unprecedented sonic epoch, as it were. It’s something of an acquired taste, then, and not, it turns out, one you’d wish to play at a dinner party, say, unless you were keen to get rid of your guests before the dessert arrives.  

P-FUNK ALL-STARS     LOST DOG (MIX 1)

Outrageously funky and tripped-out vibes from George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic/P-Funk All-Stars which, in this instance, features a collaboration with GIVE OUT BUT DON’T GIVE UP-era Primal Scream - it features the sadly late Denise Johnson on vocals. Lost Dog (Mix 1) is taken from the POLICE DOGGY EP, released 1995, but was only ever made available in Japan. I came across it for the first time last week and can’t keep from playing it. Marvellous.

THE ORB     ITAL ORB (TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED MIX)

The Orb’s most recent release, ABOLITION OF THE ROYAL FAMILIA, sees Alex Paterson et al. pay tribute to the golden age of ambient house whilst taking a dig at the royal family’s historical endorsement of the East India Company’s role in the opium trade. It sounds like it shouldn’t work but, as always, their playful use of samples combined with the sort of reggae-influenced ambient-house influences that they more or less invented manages to celebrate the last 30 years of electronic music and remain relevant. Ital Orb (Too Blessed To Be Stressed Mix) begins with a news item about the effect of “killer dope” on a baby squirrel before taking a voyage off into inner space.

P-FUNK ALL-STARS     LOST DOG (MIX 2)

I couldn’t decide which version I liked most, so decided to include both. This version enjoys a dubbed-up quality that sits rather nicely with The Orb.

THE ORB     AFROS, AFGHANS AND ANGELS IN DUB (HOODIE WOOD MIX)

This track is taken from the deluxe version of the album which takes the original mixes and dubs them up even further. Afros, Afghans And Angels In Dub (Hoodie Wood Mix) glides off into the inner realms, a beautiful ambient piece that comes across as equal parts Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Eno’s An Ending (Ascent).

SONORA CASINO     ASTRONAUTAS Y MERCURIO

Released in 1972, Sonora Casino's TROMPETEROS was essentially just the sort of South American easy listening album that traded in the classic tropical sounds of cha cha cha, bolero, guaracha and, on occasions, boogaloo before finding its way to a charity shop near you, but something must have been in the water for the album’s closing track, because the almost magical Astronautas Y Mercurio is a cosmic descarga full of electronic effects, filtered voices, and fierce guitars with wah-wah and raw distortion turned up to 11 that’s closer to the true sound of psychedelia than anything the band had ever attempted before. There’s certainly nothing else like it on the album – in truth, there’s nothing else like it anywhere. Truly mind-blowing.

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