MIND DE-CODER HALLOWEEN SPECIAL
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“Satan is his father – and his name is Adrian!”
(from ‘Rosemanry’s Baby’)
THE CREED TAYLOR ORCHESTRA HEARTBEAT
A deceptively restrained start to the show featuring the music of Creed Taylor from his debut album SHOCK, released in 1958. Creed, of course (he writes, authoritatively) was a legendary jazz producer who signed John Coltrane, a move which resulted in some of not only Trane's greatest work but some of the finest jazz to be laid down on wax in the 1960's. SHOCK was put together as part of a series of albums that used music and effects to tell a story. Using studio musicians and old tape loops to create a spooky brilliant mental thing, SHOCK is a truly groundbreaking album and rightly considered a total classic in the Space Age Bachelor / Exotica canon, if there is indeed such a thing.
KRZYZTOF KOMEDA ROSEMARY’S LULLABY
Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ features a young Mia Farrow battling creeping paranoia and satanic witch cults in modern day New York. It’s a brooding, creepy film, filled with unbearable unease. The equally unsettling Rosemary’s Lullaby features Mia Farrow’s wordless vocals and a simple, wistful melody – something soft, absent-minded, contented – that Polish composer, Krzyztof Komeda (Chris to his friends, I expect), returns to several times throughout the film, each time layering another layer of dread to the rising tension at the heart of the film.
In a weird coda to the overall spookiness of the film, shortly after it was finished, Komeda was pushed off a rocky escarpment by Polish writer Marek Hlasko under circumstances still considered ‘uncertain’ following a drinking party in Los Angeles. He never recovered from the resulting cerebral haemorrhage, and died in Warsaw a few months later.
MAGPAHI CORPSE
Sound artist Alison Cooper brings a similar feeling of unease to the otherworldly prettiness of her contribution to the Folklore Tapes release DEVON FOLKLORE TAPES IV: RITUALS AND PRACTICES, made available as a tape cassette in 2012. The record label and research projects’ fascination with the ancient arcana and cultural mysticism of the British Isles is reflected in the fairytale folk of Magpahi, whose whimsical acoustics and sepia stories chart Britain’s hidden histories. Magpahi weaves together a rich tapestry encompassing six different forms of ritual from the West Country, largely informed by the work of the late folklorist Theo Brown. The beguilingly lovely Corpse, as the title suggests, focusses on the salting down of a corpse at an isolated Dartmoor inn; elsewhere her songs explore the plaiting of corn dollies in the field, tied from standing sheaves; the dangers of picking the white flowers of stitchwort (which may result in being spirit-led away by malignant pixie folk); and the work of witches and charmers in Devon, including their use of snakeskin for curses.
The aptly titled Creepin’ is the opening track to the Psychic Markers second album, HARDLY STRANGERS, and it kicks this second outing off in ghoulish, gothic fashion. Psychic Markers appear to be a band that, in a suitably Frankenstein fashion, seems to be made up of the various bits and pieces of other bands, resulting in weird and wonderful pop songs built on layers of ambient texture and rhythmic patterns.
JANIE JONES WITCH IN WHITE
Janie Jones is a living legend - she first achieved notoriety in August 1964, when she attended the film premiere of the British documentary about London nightlife ‘London In The Raw’, wearing a topless dress; she had a hit single with the cackling novelty record Witches Brew 1966; worked with performers as diverse as Marc Bolan and Jimmy Webb whilst rubbing shoulders with Cliff Richard, Paul and Barry Ryan, Dusty Springfield, Ken Dodd, Tom Jones and Lulu; hosted notorious Kensington sex parties in the early seventies that saw her get sent down for seven years in prison for controlling prostitutes (she served three) where she befriended Moors murderer Myra Hindley and made numerous television appearances on her behalf insisting that Hindley was a reformed woman and should be considered for release (in fairness to Jones, she completely changed her mind about that in 1986 when Hindley finally confessed to her crimes); had The Clash write a song about her on their 1977 debut album (and later appeared in the video to Babyshambles 2006 cover); had a comeback single produced by Joe Strummer in 1983 with a band that featured both members of The Clash and The Blockheads called Janie Jones and The Lash; and published her memoirs, “The Devil and Miss Jones’, in 1993 – so, a life well-lived, then, and as far as I know, she’s not gone yet. The late sixties heavy rocker Witch In White was never released at the time, but appears on the compilation album WE’RE IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD OF JONIE JONES, a round-up of all five of her 1965-70 singles, as well as the 1983 comeback single House of the Ju-Ju Queen and it’s b-side, Sex machine, and a bunch of demos, outtakes and alternates. I feel a biopic is in order.
THE KNACK THE SPELL
The Knack (not the band that recorded the 5 million seller My Sharona, sadly) were an American garage rock/psychedelic rock band from Los Angeles who were active in the 1960s. The Spell is the b-side to a 1967 release Softly, Softly (which featured Frank Zappa on piano, fact fans). They were creative and clever, had a way with a tune, experimented with exotic instrumentation but, despite being touted by their manager as ‘being better than The Beatles’, they weren’t and, having released four singles, split in 1969.
MARK FRY THE WITCH
Mark Fry’s debut, DREAMING WITH ALICE, released in 1972, is one of the greatest English acid folk albums of all, and for much of its existence, also one of the rarest – possibly because, at the time, it was never actually released in England. Recorded by a 19 year old Fry for an Italian sub label of RCA, it presented a beautifully naive kind of psychedelic folk featuring mostly acoustic instrumentation augmented by flanged vocals; trimmings of flute, sitar and bongos; extended jams pushing a couple of songs past the 6 and 8 minute mark; dubby reverb effects; backward tapes; abrupt editing; and of course there is the Lewis Carroll connotation of the title - a touchstone of all psychedelia. The album enchants listeners with dreamy vocal melodies of utter beauty and picturesque tunes which take you onto a trip out to the English countryside on a gentle and warm spring morning and into a fairytale world – a world, in the case of this particularly bewitching track, that takes a slightly darker turn, but which remains gloriously trippy throughout.
KILL THE HIPPIES BURIED ALIVE (JUST DAYS BEFORE RETIRING)
This is a genuinely unsettling track from Cleveland punk trio Kill The Hippies. Normally they’re more at home to Devo but in 2015 they went in to the studio and recorded an album of Halloween sound effects, fittingly titled SPECTACULAR HALLOWEEN SOUND EFFECTS VOL. 1, for their sixth album, and it pretty much does what it says on the label. Chilling, and not in a good way.
JOHN MARTYN I’D RATHER BE THE DEVIL
This radical re-working of American delta blues singer Skip James’ I’d Rather Be The Devil is taken from Martyn’s stone-cold classic SOLID AIR, released in 1973 and one of the greatest folk albums ever recorded, although to call it a straight folk album is to ignore the complexity of its arrangements, which owed as much to the smoky world of jazz, blues and spacerock as it does the folk club background from which Martyn came. In fact, this track has an otherworldly, avant garde vibe to it, underscored by Martyn’s use of the Echoplex tape delay machine which gives the track a fuzzy, hypnotic tone that, under enhanced circumstances, say, is almost entirely captivating.
PINK FLOYD CAREFUL WITH THAT AXE EUGENE
I may have been stretching a point in order to include this track – I’m reasonably certain that the ‘axe’ in question may be the popular rock idiom for a ‘guitar’, and that at some point Pink Floyd may have employed the services of a roadie called Eugene – but let’s not get too hung up on pedantry. This is the version of the track that appeared on the b-side to their post-Syd 1968 single Point Me At The Sky, and not the live version that appears on UMMAGUMMA, but both have something of a slightly menacing spirit to them and show the band experimenting with a heavier rock sound.
THE ATTACK STRANGE HOUSE
The Attack only released four singles in their two years together, and in that time moved from a blistering mod/soul sound to freakbeat psychedelic rockers. The phantasmagorical Strange House was never released at all, but it can be found on the compilation album ABOUT TIME!: DEFINITIVE MOD-POP COLLECTION 1966-68, released in 2006, which collects together both sides of all their 45s, joined by a pair of numbers recorded during a BBC radio session and a clutch of unreleased studio recordings. It enjoys a mod-psych whimsy to it that suggests the band were no strangers to the LSD experience and it might have been nice to see how they developed this sound – sadly they were let go by their record company and a nascent attempt at recording an album was lost when the label recorded over the tapes after they dropped the group. These days they remain a footnote to the fickle world of psychedelic pop.
HAUNTED HOUSE MUSIC COMPANY TAKE A TRIP THROUGH THE HAUNTED HOUSE IF YOU DARE
A 15 minute sound trip through a haunted house taken from the album HAUNTED HOUSE, released in 1985 on tape cassette. This track is pretty much a montage of all the individual tracks that appear on Side 2 of the tape. It’s spooky good fun but under normal circumstances (that is to say, if you had access to a FF button) you wouldn’t necessarily make it to the end - shrieking cats abound.
THE GRAVEYARD FIVE MARBLE ORCHARD
Garage-psych chills from The Graveyard Five – a Californian band possessed by a haunting and eerie ambiance that was inspired by the ghostly settings of a cemetery. Marble Orchard was the (far superior) b-side to their only single, The Graveyard Theme, released in 1968. The band actually consisted of four members, with the unaccounted fifth member represented by a coffin, so, as you can see, they had this whole novelty thing going for them. Not that it did them any harm - the band were a popular live attraction in the Bay Area, opening for Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Loading Zone, and Jefferson Airplane, among others. A second single was recorded but an LSD induced breakdown resulted in the lead guitarist/singer destroying the group's equipment, and the Graveyard Five disbanded before the single could be released.
ROWAN AMBER MILL THE BOOK OF THE LOST (OPENING TITLES)
THE BOOK OF THE LOST is a marvellous concept – a collaboration between purveyors of woodland folkadelica, The Rowan Amber Mill, and Emily Jones, the daughter of cult sixties folk artist Al Jones, inspired by a love of 60s and 70s cheap British horror movies and folk horror, resulting in a soundtrack to a cult TV show that never was. Haunted by sneaked childhood viewings of the likes of The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Psychomania , the group set upon the task of constructing in meticulous detail a number of their own lost folk horror movies (complete with synopsis, cast and crew, production companies and what have you) and, from that basis, writing and recording songs and dialogue pieces inspired by these imaginary creations. To tie up this dark gathering of lost films, they chose the device of a decidedly low budget, hastily slung together television series which would play these movies (fittingly in the “graveyard” slot) and thus was born THE BOOK OF THE LOST, released in 2014. It’s a gorgeous listen, combining dark folk narratives and spellbindingly lovely pastoral psychedelia with the spirit of MR James. Marvellous.
KENNELMUS THE RAVEN
The only album by Kennelmus, 1971’s FOLKSTONE PRISM, is an occasionally inspired mix of surf music, spaced-out psychedelia and schizophrenic weird shit that, since I discovered it, has rapidly become a Mind De-Coder favourite. The Raven, of course, is a whacked-out rendition of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic gothic poem that plays to their best and worst tendencies – an over-the-top production that combines proto-punk vocals with primitive electronic squeals. Think Vibrasonic versus The Butthole Surfers.
A genuinely spooky track from Paper Dollhouse, a UK duo who fuse (very) subtle dream pop with ambient textures and field recordings. This track - a startlingly hallucinatory and cold, icy piece that for all the world sounds as if someone is interviewing a ghost – is taken from side two of the DEVON FOLKLORE TAPES IV: RITUALS AND PRACTICES release. Haunting (literally).
THE HARE AND THE MOON feat. ALASKA & MICHAEL BEGG FRACTURE IN THE FOREST
This ethereal track by The Hare And The Moon has a preternatural loveliness to it. The band themselves no longer exist, other than a ghostly presence on the internet. They lived in the forest and their main occupations were knitting, necromancy, dollmaking and devilry, however, they sometimes made music too. When they did they liked to throw their love of MR James, Arthur Machen, ghost stories, Black Sabbath, Pentangle and The Wicker Man into their cauldron and give it a good stir. Fractures In The Forest appears on the 2016 release FRACTURES, compiled by A Year In The Country, a website dedicated to exploring the undercurrents and flipside of bucolic dreams.
FRACTURES is a gathering of studies and explorations that take as their starting point the year 1973, a time when there appeared to be a schism in the fabric of things; a period of political, social, economic and industrial turmoil, when 1960s utopian ideals seemed to corrupt and turn inwards. It takes as its reference points a selected number of conspicuous junctures and signifiers: Delia Derbyshire leaving The BBC/The Radiophonic Workshop and reflecting later that around then “the world went out of time with itself”. Elsewhere, electricity blackouts in the UK and the three day week was declared; The Wickerman was released; eerie children’s TV show for ‘older viewers’, The Changes, was recorded but remained unreleased (gave me the shivers as a kid); and The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water was first shown and gave kids across the country sleepless nights.
Alaska is a Spanish-Mexican singer, DJ, and television personality famous in Spain and Latin America, and one of the founding members of the La Movida Madrileña, the cultural and artistic movement that followed the end of Francoist Spain.
Michael Begg is an award winning composer and sound artist and musician whose music is located in the place where formal composition and electronic erosion meet - that liminal space coloured by longing and discomfort.
A carefully researched show, then.
LADY JUNE TOUCH-DOWNER
On a show featuring weird music, this track is one of the weirdest of all. Lady June—the honorary title given to her due to her upper-crust, aristocratic voice (by all accounts she sounded like a really stoned Judi Dench) and the fact that she was the de facto London landlady of many a progressive musician from the Canterbury set—was a sort of free-spirited hippie bohemian poetess and multimedia performance artist who ran with the crowd that included The Canterbury Set, Steve Hillage, members of Henry Cow, Hawkwind, Hatfield and the North, Tim Blake and David Bedford, while her enormous twelve room Maida Vale flat was seen as London’s premier smoking salon. In 1973 she recorded LADY JUNES LINGUISTIC LEPROSY, which set her surrealist poetry to music by her longtime friend (and longtime tenant) Kevin Ayers and Brian Eno, a neighbor who lived nearby. The recording was primarily made in the front room of her apartment with Ayers on guitar, bass and vocals, and Eno playing guitar, bass, a couple of entirely made-up instruments and something called ‘Lunar Lollipops’, with Gong’s drummer Pip Pyle and David Vorhaus of White Noise mixing. Following her death in 1998, she was cremated and guests at her wake tied little parcels of her ashes to helium balloons and let them go into the Mallorca breeze, her island home since 1975.
ADRIAN ELEDGE THE DEVIL IN THE MIRROR
I don’t know much about this gentleman at all, but he appears to be something of a psychedelic musician who makes his releases available on his Facebook page. The Devil In The Mirror – A Lo-Fi Psychedelic Halloween Song (to give it its full title) was recorded last year using a deliberately lo-fi method for that authentic haunted garage-psych sound, and that’s all I can tell you about it. – but anyone who’s dropped acid, looked in the mirror and NOT seen the devil looking back hasn’t really been trying.
ANTON SZANDOR LAVEY THE HYMN TO SATAN
Anton Szandor LaVey (Howard to his mum) was, of course, the founder of the Church Of Satan and author of The Satanic Bible. As an organization it seemed to be less about getting up to naughty goings on and more of a vehicle for worship of materialism and the self, for which he claimed no supernatural inspiration – this being the 60s, there was a lot of nudity involved as well. More of a showman than an out-and-out believer in the occult, his lifestyle owed more to the trappings of Hugh Hefner than Alistair Crowley, say, and he seems to have enjoyed a helluva good time (as it were) pretty much making up the religion of LaVeyan Satanism as he went along. The Hymn To Satan, on which he calls upon the many names of Satan, can be found on THE SATANIC MASS, recorded in 1967 at Church of Satan headquarters, known as The Black House. I dozed off listening to this, once, and rather wished I hadn’t. Weird dreams, to say the least.
THE STONE TAPES THE OWL AND THE DRUID STONE
This (frankly) eerie track can be found on what amounts to a hauntological concept album called AVEBURY, the debut release from The Stone Tapes - Kat Beem (a classically trained pianist, poet and actress) and M. Peach (soundologist, musician and photographer). The concept of the album is pretty much based on that great hauntological touchstone, The Stone Tape, Nigel Kneale’s terrifying TV play after which the group take their name. Broadcast on BBC Two as a Christmas ghost story in 1972 the story explores the theory that the impressions of emotional or traumatic events can be recorded into rock and replayed under certain conditions. Told from the point of view of its producers, AVEBURY unfurls from a chance encounter with an elderly neighbour, one George Albert Wilberforce, who gifted them a box of tapes. Wilberforce “had been a researcher of sound phenomena, and the tapes held recordings that he’d made during the course of his travels” and it transpires that the tapes were made by recording stone using special modified equipment. The sounds he captured are claimed to represent “the vestiges of time itself, or are proof of ghosts”. The album combines these eerie sounds with a gripping drama made up of telephone conversations between Kat from the band and the Vicar of Avebury and the vicar’s wife in which their reminiscences of George Wilberforce and the events that ensue become increasingly creepy. It’s a remarkable piece of work - a collage of storytelling and electronics that actually feels like a sound recording of a lost BBC ghost story. The Owl And The Druid chatters synthetically into life with multiple layers of incantations and muttered chants, a solitary processional drumbeat sounding behind the crescendo of deranged voices and echoed howls. This is either musick to play in the dark because of its disquieting power or to always listen to with the lights on, depending on your dispensation and nerve. The album was originally given a limited release on cassette loaded with high-quality music-grade ferric tape in 2016. Since then it has been made available on CD and you can also download it here. Thoroughly recommended.
ANNELIES MONSERÉ TRACES
For her third album, DEBRIS, released in 2016, Belgian composer Annelies Monseré has produced a piece of work seeped in ethereal vocals combined with doom and drone-infused ambient folk textures that illuminate the subtle beauty that exists in the darkness. Think Nico with a glockenspiel and you won’t go far wrong.
SCARY SOUND EFFECTS JULIE’S NIGHTMARE
Pretty much does what it says on the label – I found this track on an album called SON OF SCARY SOUND EFFECTS, released in 1995. Don’t be put off by the cover (although there does seem to be some focus on pirates) – this is a fairly definitive set of spooky Halloween sounds for your enjoyment.
SONFEED JESUS IS MY FRIEND
There’s naught more scary than a Christian in full swing, and this track has to be seen to be believed.
