MIND DE-CODER 63
To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page
To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page
“If
you want a kinky caper, then suck a blotting paper”
Whispering Jim Narg
ATTICUS ROSS BLACK HOLE
This opening track is taken from the
soundtrack to the movie LOVE AND MERCY: THE LIFE, LOVE AND GENIUS OF BRIAN
WILSON, which was released last year to plaudits and acclaim. Ross does
something very special with score, creating ambient mash-ups of The Beach Boy’s
music that suggest something of the noises in Wilson’s head, waiting to be
willed into existence. Given that, to a genius-lacking degree, this is the
process by which a Mind De-Coder show is put together, it seemed like an
appropriate way to get the show underway.
ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE AND THE COSMIC
INFERNO DANCE WITH SPACE GYPSY QUEEN
For what was possibly their 45th
album release, and certainly their third for 2013, Kawabata Makoto’s Acid
Mothers Temple have adopted the Cosmic Inferno moniker to denote that the
enticingly named DOOBIE WONDERLAND is a hard rock album, although, in this
instance, this is hard rock as played by Sunn O))) at a child’s 5th
birthday party (with balloons and everything). Coming in a little over 13
minutes, Dance With Space Gypsy Queen,
is by no means the shortest track on the album, but it’s the one with a surf
rock riff that will take you to the cosmos and leave you there, jamming with
Weird and Gilly as they kick back with Hawkwind now that David Bowie has left
the arena. In fact, it’s the best child’s birthday party you’ve never been
invited to.
MOON WIRING CLUB WAKE CRITIQUE
More hauntological noodling’s from Ian
Hodgson’s Moon Wiring Club, whose latest release, 2015’s PLAYCLOTHES FROM
FARAWAY PLACES, is my current repository for all things curious and
otherworldly.
THE ROLLING STONES 2000 LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME
I was playing THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES
REQUEST the other day and realised that I still can’t quite decide whether it’s
an under-rated psychedelic classic or drug-addled tosh which, at the very
least, makes it an exceptional album, if nothing else. I also realised that
despite including the very fine 2000
Light years From Home at least twice on the show, it’s always been as part
of mash-up affair; so I thought it time to play the track in all its dark glory.
This is about as far out as the Stones ever got – in order to come back they
had to jettison Brian Jones and, whilst I can imagine that he was difficult, troubled
fellow traveller at best of times, he was for me the embodiment of The Rolling
Stones, and they were never the same again.
THE CROCHETED DOUGHNUT RING TWO LITTLE LADIES (AZALEA AND
RHODODENDRON)
Some bands only have one single in them –
that’s all they need to make good their musical statement to the world – but at
one point The Crocheted Doughnut Ring barely had that. Such was the rush to
release their debut single, Two Little
ladies, in 1967, that they didn’t have time to record a b-side, so producer
Peter Eden took the a-side, all tinkering harpsichord, swirling kaleidoscopic
effects, tinkling teacups and frequent shifts in tempo - the epitome of that
particularly British brand of toy-town psychedelia - and with some deft tape
manipulation, phasing, echo and distortion, vaporised the track into pure
abstraction and called it Nice. Unsurprisingly,
perhaps, this was the side that all the pirate radio stations wanted to play -
according to the legend, it was considered too far out for John Peel to play on
the newly formed Radio One. At some point or other, the two versions were
segued into each other and that’s the version I’m playing here. In actual fact,
Crocheted Doughnut Ring had two or three more singles in them but they never
troubled the charts in England and they were doomed to become little more than
a foot-note in psychedelic history.
STANLEY UNWIN HI-DE-FIDO
The inimitable Stanley Unwin, from his
debut album, ROTATEY DISKERS WITH UNWIN, released 1960, on which the great
comedian draws upon his career as a technician for the BBC to ‘de-mystify’ the
recording process. I’m so taken with track I return to it throughout the show –
unquestionably a bit audibold for the eardrobes.
THE IDLE RACE WORN RED CARPET
The Idle Race appear to have been the
missing link between The Move and ELO, with various band members going on to
join either of those bands. They were in fact a critically regarded band in
their own right, but unfortunately that never transferred into record sales,
and despite famous admirers such as The Beatles and Marc Bolan, the band failed
to catch fire with the public. Worn Red
Carpet was the b-side to the Jeff Lynne composed single, Days Of The Broken Arrows, which also
failed to storm the charts, but stardom beckoned elsewhere.
THE VIRGIN SLEEP LOVE
A terrific little single from The Virgin
Sleep, a short-lived psychedelic rock group (I nearly found myself using the
word ‘combo’ there) who were happy to adopt a few Eastern overtones into their
sound as the Summer of Love reigned o’er olde London Town. Didn’t do them much
good. Their debut single Love,
released 1967, was largely unacknowledged by the listening public, and one more
single later they were gone – a footnote of a footnote.
THE PRIMITIVES ALL THE WAY DOWN
This is one of two versions of this track
produced by The Primitives between the release of their debut album LOVELY but
before the release of their second album PURE in 1989. It was on the b-side to
their single Way Behind Me and
features guitarist Paul Court on vocals and not the lovely Tracy Tracy, who I
think provides tambourine. Oh, well. I like both versions but this version has
a post-Velvets squall to it that I find particularly attractive.
PETE COOK AND DUDLEY MOORE PSYCHEDELIC BABY
Pete and Dud were way ahead of the game –
LSD had barely arrived on the scene and was a delight shared by only the most swingingest
of the London set, and they were already satirising it on a flexi-disc that
came with the December issue of Private Eye in 1966 – possibly the first time
that the word LSD or psychedelic appears in English music. It is also
noteworthy for being the first to name blotting paper as a useful way of
dropping acid. Dudley Moore, by way of a good anecdote, was a patient and
friend of John Riley, the society dentist who spiked John Lennon and George
Harrison’s drink with LSD at a party and so more or less invented REVOLVER,
SGT. PEPPER’S and The Summer of Love the following year. Psychedelic Baby is torturously difficult to obtain – there’s a
YouTube clip of some guy singing the song all the way through by way of example
before asking for someone to send him a link to the song somewhere, anywhere -
but should you be interested, you can find it on an album called THE DEAD
PARROT SOCIETY: THE BEST OF BRITISH COMEDY, released in 1993.
THE NICE
THE DIAMOND HARD BLUE APPLES OF THE MOON
The Nice, of course were one of those bands
who straddled that whole psychedelic/prog crossover - probably invented it, in
fact - and were too clever by half. Keyboardist Keith Emmerson went on to form
Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but it was with The Nice that he first tasted commercial
success. The Diamond Hard Blue Apples Of
The Moon was the b-side to their marvellous take on Leonard Bernstein’s America, released in 1968, to
which they added a bit of Dvořák's New
World Symphony and renamed America
(Second Amendment) – the world’s first instrumental protest record,
according to Emerson. The Diamond Hard
Blue Apples Of The Moon has a spikey feel to it and in no way points to the
pomposity that was to come.
UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA STAGE OR SCREEN
I included this in the show because it
sounds messed up, but then, so do many of the tracks on the band’s third album
MULTI-LOVE, released in 2015. In true psychedelic fashion, the production is as
important as the music, and on this album, singer/songwriter/producer Ruban
Nielson features the studio as an extra instrument, corroding and tripping out
the sounds. Marvellous.
PRIMAL SCREAM PRIVATE WARS
Acid-folk loveliness from Primal Scream’s
current release, CHAOSMOSIS, released earlier this year. Who’d have thought it?
But, in truth, it’s a schizophrenic album that doesn’t quite know whether it’s
one thing or another, touching a number of eclectic bases. On the other hand,
judging by the gorgeous pastoral vibe thing
going on in Private Wars, psych-folk
might be an intriguing way forward for the band so obviously in search of a
direction. Can you see Bobby Gillespie putting aside Maggot Brain for The
Garden Of Jane Delawney in time for the next album? The very question has quite
the appeal to it, don’t you think?
THE SMALL FACES THE AUTUMN STONE
I mean, I don’t think anyone would mind if
Primal Scream sounded like this for a while. The Autumn Stone is the title track from an album released
posthumously following the departure of the otherwise chirpy Steve
Marriot from the band during the recording of what would have been their 3rd
LP. Released in 1969 it serves both as a retrospective of the band’s developing
sound and a suggestion of what their future direction might have been. The
achingly beautiful title track signposted the way many other rock groups would
choose to go.
EERIE WANDA MIRAGE
Eerie Wanda is the very fine sound of Dutch
singer/songwriter Marina Tadic and the rhythm section of Jacco Gardner's
backing band coming together to create some woozy, captivating songs that are
ever so slightly psychedelic and ever so slightly weird on their debut album,
HUM, released earlier this year. It’s as if Courtney Barnett has got this whole
Francoise Hardy thing going on with some lovely off-centre experimental
flourishes thrown into the mix that’s otherwise shambling and day-dreamy.
Really quite lovely.
JIM FASSETT STRANGE TO YOUR EARS (excerpt)
Jim Fassett was musical director for CBS
Radio (not to mention the intermission announcer for the New York Philharmonic)
who found himself obsessed with one of those new, fangled gadgets called a
‘tape recorder’ that had been around since the mid-1940s. Fortunately for him,
CBS Radio happened to own three of them, allowing Fassett and tape engineer
Morty Goldberg, to record and corrupt sounds to their heart’s content. STRANGE
TO YOUR EARS, released in 1955, is a beginner’s guide to tape manipulation and
musique concrete experimentation, narrated by Fassett with a true amateur’s
enthusiasm for speeding things up and then slowing them down again.
BARNABY RUDGE JOE, ORGAN AND CO.
There was no Barnaby Rudge, he was a studio
creation, created by studio hand Wil Malone at the Morgan Studios in North
London, sounding for all the world like a Deram-era David Bowie single. Joe, Organ & Co is prime example of
what author Rob Chapman referred to as the British psychedelic music hall
tradition. Focussing on the adventures of the titular organ grinder and his
monkey, it is a simple piece punctuated by sound effects and undercut by a
slightly downbeat lyric, the entire package reflecting the child-like nature of
a lot of psychedelic pop records of the period. As you might imagine, the
single, released in 1968 eluded success in the charts although Wil Malone would
find greater success in the nineties, working on the string arrangements for
Massive Attack and The Verve.
JIM FASSETT STRANGE TO YOUR EARS (excerpt)
At this point I returned to Jim Fassett and
had the sound drift away into some found
sound excerpts from David Toop’s OCEAN OF SOUND, released in 1996 to accompany
his book Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk,
Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds examination of how ambient music taps
into the disturbing, chaotic undertow of the environment. What you heard were
excerpts from The Music Of Horns And
Whistles from the Vancouver soundscape, howler monkeys in their natural
habitat and the opening few minutes from a Shunie Omizutori Buddhist Ceremony.
This found resolution in…
GAVIN BRIARS (excerpts
from) THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC
This is a fascinating work by British
minimalist composer Gavin Bryars. Inspired by the story that the band on the
RMS Titanic continued to perform as the ship sank in 1912, it recreates how the
music performed by the band would reverberate through the water some time after
they ceased performing. Composed between 1969 and 1972 it finally saw release
in 1975 on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records, but was subsequently recorded in 1990,
which is where these tracks - interlude,
hymn iii, opening part ii, titanic lament – come from. According to Bryars,
the music goes through a number of different states, reflecting an implied slow
descent to the ocean bed which give a range of echo and deflection phenomena,
allied to considerable high frequency reduction, but then, that’s exactly the
sort of thing you’d expect him to say.
If that wasn’t enough, I also include a few
minutes from Dormin Slowly Died With The
Radio On, a Scarfolk Records release, no less, recorded in 1974 and
otherwise the debut ambient album from the artist known as Ragle, stage name of
Eddie Rumpburn who was the manager of Twazzle's Hardware shop on East Twazzle
Parade between 1970 and 1978. The album
was called DORMIN DIED SLOWLY WITH THE RADIO ON. PARTS 1-82, but I only play
part 71. It won 2nd prize at the Scarfolk harvest festival, having lost out to
Gary Butters from Scarfolk primary school, class 5, who came 1st with his song Eagle Eye Action Man.
CHILDREN OF ALICE HARBINGER OF SPRING
Children Of Alice is project by Broadcast’s
James Cargill, ex-Broadcast keyboardist Roj and The Focus Group’s Julian House,
whose sound has a hauntological provenance that puts them in the same ballpark,
or perhaps that should be potting shed, as the Moon Wiring Club. Wearing those
said hauntological credentials proudly, Harbinger
Of Spring, released in 2013, forms
one side of the DEVON FOLKLORE TAPES VOL. 5 cassette, part of an open-ended
research project exploring the vernacular arcana of Great Britain and beyond in
which the myths, mysteries, magic and strange phenomena of the old counties are
traversed via abstracted musical reinterpretation and experimental visuals. It
is, as you can imagine, a project that’s right up my street and Harbinger Of Spring doesn’t disappoint.
Throughout its 18-minutes it emphasizes a gentle psychedelic soundworld and
mood of pastoral reverie that takes in arcane references to mechanical clock chimes;
a cuckoo springing forth with a drawn-out, distorted cry which is multiplied to
sound like the plaintive cries of estuarine waders; the sound of giggling
children; LP surface hiss and crackle; a hazily impressionistic, Delius-like
reverie; wobbly tape effects, with reels sped up or slowed down; the Clangers;
a music box stuck on a playing a looped fragment of Someday My Prince Will Come and the anonymous 13th century song Sumer Is Icumen in, familiar to many as the cheerful ditty which the Summer
Islanders chant, merrily swaying in time, as they burn poor old Sergeant Howie
to death at the end of the Wicker Man - an aural daydream, a mental meander
through inner worlds akin to Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole. Quite
marvellous, then, but without a unifying tune or melody, so right in the middle
of it I play…
SHE DREW THE GUN IF SHE COULD SEE
She Drew The Gun, fronted by songwriter
Louisa Roach, offer dreamy lyrical psych-pop from the banks of the Mersey. Their
debut album, MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE, produced by The Coral’s James Skelly and
released later this month, is a dark but dreamlike collection of stories from
Roach’s life and imagination caught in a bubble of psych-tinged pop. On If She Could See they appear to be
channelling the spirit of Nancy Sinatra at a magic mushroom tea party with
Portishead, which means it sits very nicely amidst the pastoral goings on of
Children Of Alice, to which we return for the second half of Harbinger Of Spring.
FUSCHIA
ANOTHER NAIL
A marvellous track, this, from Fuschia’s
self-titled debut album, released in 1971, a masterpiece of folk-prog stylings
from the heady days of the London psychedelic underground that went completely
un-noticed at the time of its release. Over the years it picked up cult status,
prompting singer-songwriter Tony Durant to follow it up with a sequel some 40
years or so later.
