Bicycle Day and the NOT 70th Birthday Of LSD

Some people will tell you that the 19th of this cruellest month is the 70th anniversary of Albert Hoffman's infamous bike ride and thus that LSD is 70 years old. They'd be wrong. It's nowhere near that old. LSD never really got a good innings, got curtailed and bludgeoned before it really got going - 70 years old implies a hell of a run up but that didn't happen and we should all take the blame for not having the confidence or the conviction to change our world to accommodate it. Aristotle was right in suggesting that beauty was a visitor from another world but he'd have been more convinced by acid. This is the visitor we sort of let in but then never really addressed. It's been 70 fucking years and... nothing. The world seems worse now. Not even a war film.


It's perhaps spectacularly idealistic and naive to think that this little molecule (or all those little molecules: the mushrooms, the spores, the rot) might actually have changed things, that we might actually have ceded to its influence but... Fuck it; I still kind of believe that we genuinely might have, that we only just missed the moment, that things might still be different.

This book, for instance, seems like one of quite a few that are... piping up. There is something in the air.

Perhaps.

Yeah, Leary was an messianic arse perhaps, Kesey lost in mostly bad music and a desire to lose, Cassady a hammer spinning emotional aggregate and misogynist... Yeah, maybe the McKenna brothers got a little too close to the Sun eventually, perhaps RAW just wasn't sure after all... Yeah perhaps there really hasn't been the advocates of late that could have visioned a future for acid and we ended with the subtly mystic Breaking Open The Head which sort of accidentally got commodified and coffee-tabled into something else...

In fact, we lost the eloquence of acid quite early, with the death of Aldous Huxley... we lost it to Americana or the Military or to silly hats and Ozric Tentacles...


In fact, you can see the slippage right on that page, on the noxious introduction to the Huxley video: "Did you know that Aldous Huxley died whilst frying balls on multiple massive injections of uncut ACID? Trippy..." that delicate turn of phrase, that implied machismo is where everything went wrong...

Oh...

I'm not about to rant about how LSD could have changed the world. I know how that'll sound in print, on screen, at a time when I should know better but there's smaller little bitches to make instead.

The music itself let LSD down... The fact that there still isn't anything that only makes sense on LSD (no variation on Chris Morris's Cake music) is a massive missed opportunity (yeah, perhaps I will... Just wait and see... Maybe that's a way for IX Tab to go, it needs somewhere to go) - Acid House doesn't count because it's really suitable for ecstasy rather than acid, even psy-trance and all that hippie trance ethnic-techno isn't perfectly aligned with the chemicals, it all makes perfect sense on speed and alcohol and E and Coke... It's not music that engages with the sensibility of LSD, just music that engages with the engagement of LSD, that is it complements acid but only in the way that all music sort of complements acid (people use Bach, Beach Boys, Burzum - ok, not many use Burzum). LSD needed a music that was its own but instead it got what was simply called psychedelia. The map is not the territory etc etc etc etc


When we were kids we made stuff that only made sense on LSD. I had a stereo that could play both tapes simultaneously and we'd experiment with different mixes: two different Shamen albums, bits of Jack The Tab and Coil, bits of Monty Python and Shamanarchy albums, Bach and Autechre, Front 242 on half speed and Philip Glass... Outside of those few hrs at the peak of the flash these primitive little mixes sounded terrible (of course they did) but inside new things were born and music stopped dominating and became dominated; we chose the mood and the music followed us. In the age old battle between drugged-out humans and music we won...

^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^^
If you don't know about this battle then you haven't been on drugs. Everyone I know knows about the battle. You take enough drugs and the music nearly always wins... You see the people lurching from microspace to miniplace at Festivals, unable to take, to stand what they're hearing, needing to find a place where the music wins but in a good way... The music nearly always defeats people, bends them to it's will, takes them on and off... the battle between the drugs and the music, with people as the battleground, are what Festivals are

^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^^
But... In 70 years, we haven't really got much further (back and faster) than The Grateful Dead / Pink Floyd axis... And they're not even particularly good at being LSD music... They work (again, everything works) and they are functional (even The Grateful Dead who I've tried and tried to understand but just can't) but that is all... They are just music... They are for something else, like Techno and Trance are for dancing, like Autechre et al are for curing headaches (unaccompanied, Autechre et al makes no sense on acid because it makes sense on acid, becomes plodding and empty, becomes about the lost beats that are suddenly found - no, Autechre's mysticism is about thinking things through while perfectly straight, they are a crossword puzzle and you should keep them the hell away from LSD).

Even the trippiest, trickiest music of the spheres (Parmegiani, I'm looking at you) is just...not...quite.


At the time, we often talked about this as if it were a synaesthetic problem; with bendy, circular, rhizomatic music (those Mille Plateux Deleuze and Guattari albums were NOT remotely rhizomatic, even if they thought they were) being the music of choice (we all got Coil, got stuff with phasing, got some of the Psychic TV stuff, understood where the pre Mr C Shamen were coming from) but I'm not sure even that way of looking at things was truly appropriate; I suspect there was better stuff around the corner and always suspected it.




There wasn't. It never happened. Acid House really let us down, at a time when it didn't need to. It punked / Punked out. I still remember the MAARS single coming out and seeming like a throw in the right direction (us geeky guys had been trying variations of those cut ups with old Derek and Clive and New Beat records for ages). It wasn't quite right but with AR Kane involved it was almost right - and the idea of dream-pop sounded like it might be the right idea (ie music that could only make sense in a dream) but...

No. That didn't happen. Another missed opportunity. Instead dream-pop became the ultimately disappointing (mostly execrable) shoegaze, whose very genre name (laughable that some bands are deliberately adopting that as a signifier, as stupid as the Tories adopting that "I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher" song) gave up the ghost, the dream and conceded without ever throwing a single limp-wristed punch (that punch might have been You Made Me Realise, played live but it really wasn't Loveless, whatever you think)

There was Spacemen 3 back then but we knew that was just our Grateful Dead and even at their most abstracted and dissolute, the music was just so damned listenable in any circumstances. My kids love Suicide. Everybody loved Spacemen 3, whether they were LSD'd or not. And, to be fair, the boys were perhaps thinking of other, more appropriate, fuzzes.


There's been plenty of other false dawns and lots and lots of music that worked well with whatever. Christ, this blog used to be full of it back in the earlier days. Here, for instance, where I rhapsodied about Kahimi Karie (Still love this version):


Yeah, this. Whatever. I haven't linked to it in a while. I still worry about this kind of thing.

So, what I meant to say is that its sad that we've already had LSD for 70 years and haven't really done anything about it. In fact, its a spectacularly unpopular and uncool drug; one that barely registers as anything other than some faintly ironic plod towards nostalgia, towards the dreaded hippies... The arch capitalist wow of Cocaine has taken over, people still suck on Es, try variations of Plantfood & animal tranquillisers - anything to avoid the sheer hard work and effort required for a decent acid binge. No one seems to know what to do with that amount of time anymore. To concentrate on all those utterly prosaic things for 12 hrs or whatever seems almost unthinkable and maybe even slightly ridiculous and deceitful (what might anyone be looking for, when all the world is here?) and indulgent...

LSD was always indulgent, is indulgence, always brings to mind the fin-de-siècle guys and girls, who would have loved the arse off of it and maybe actually changed the world because of it. Moorcock (Did he just mention fucking Moorcock? What next? Hawkwind?) knew it - Dancers At The End Of Time, for fuck's sake - and you can sense in that book how he misses that future. Are The Focus Group gonna spin off into that missed opportunity?

****Update: in the comments this great little mix has appeared, so i thought I'd stick it in... Cheers for that!


Lord, can you hear me?

Anyone?

I'm off to make something that I can't listen to.

Here's to the next 70 years!

Prince Rama Re(tard)mix Review w/ Transglobal Underground

For those that really can't be arsed with all the arsing, there's the proper review here.

"Rest in Peace”, the opening track of the latest Prince Rama album opens with a slightly strangulated House howl, the kinda thing you might have gurned circa 1990 (where were you?), which is then savagely dismissed without a thought; a discarded, non-devotional whore… the drum rumbles begin and then the Dead Can Dance Indian sweeps and suddenly we’re deep into what might be a psychosexual memory of Sinbad movies… a primary imprinting on chiffon and chant and painted ladies inside golden pots, concealed by red smoke… I should be clear, this isn’t intended as a slight… I’ve been playing this album a lot, perhaps because I’m imprinted that way too…

...you are too...

...especially if you think you're not...

...or maybe you're looking at this and thinking: I don't know a single bit of A Clockwork Orange argot; I'm not from your world, pops...

...I've never heard of Leela or the Tight Fit...

In which case; I'll try and explain.

No punctuation, or at least no full stops…only accurate way to understand where this record is coming from… it’s breathless dandyism, artful sabre-tossing and ultimately a little melancholic because the sounds of the east appropriated here (or rather, churned over; this isn’t a Transglobal Underground-style appropriation) are the sounds of Holly/Bollywood’s understanding of the east pre 9/11, when it was exotic and tameable… when no one was even thinking about atrocities or Hassan I Sabbah…when the evilest Arab you saw was Tom Baker in full-make up…

...actually I think I'm getting the odd sniffs around the internet (OK, so far just Jonny Mugwump) that Transglobal Underground might be due a comeback and surely now in the midst of MaybeRetromania (not read that book yet so I'm not really sold on the premise) this would be a perfect time for one of those timeless/utterly time-dependent shaggy Club Dog bands to make their comeback... the music definitiely has never gone away (found different beats perhaps, but not that different beats) and, actually, I find it hard to think that Transglobal Underground in particular could go away, being less a band more a condensation of a certain time, a few uncertain spaces... for you, this could be (INSERT Megadoggish drug-binge here), for me it's aligned to Brighton, sometime early-to-mid 90s where I saw Transglobal Underground and where the whole Eat Static inspired psytrance was about to lift off... in just a few days ethnic drones would be smeared over everything... right then, you could only look back and see, what? Monsoon?

(though you could of course blame Coldcut and Ofra Haza; odd how few picked up on this, or how long it took for everyone to align)

So... Prince Rama.



…it’s not all Sinbad (a lot is Sinbad); “Trust” starts off with an airplane drone and then add voices that sound like they’re trapped in another room before building into some cargo cult version of Gary Numan circa Cars, with some added flourishes from Danielle Dax…

I hear a version of She... the Rider Haggard version... unfilmed but out there...

…the Dax references continue into “Incarnation” which may be a soundtrack to a James T. Kirk honour duel on some far off Essex planet* while “Portaling” starts somewhere inside a mountain during the heart-sucking scene of Temple Of Doom and then sort of detours into handclaps and, bizarrely, pub rock-soul circa 1974…

<<< I've read reviews since writing this and they seem to know about Prince Rama (art school Krishna commune )... and it seems like the associations, these pretty little stabs at meaning that I make, are only semi-appropriate but...

Fuck it; I'm getting more and more annoyed with research-based reviewing. Occasionally, I give a shit about the context of a band (or what they meant to say) but mostly I don't; with this kind of brainfizzing confection, it's all there, it's in the open, there's nothing that re ---- search could bring to the party... >>>

Hectoring over...

You’ll get a lot of fun out of this record; its brain is grimy enough to past muster with all the Pocahaunted TDK fetishists but its bones want to be in the middle of a Bollywood set; lip synching and twirling imaginary balls of bird fat… it has colour, has odd breadth (and odd breath)

But almost no punctuation.




*This phrase was in the original review but I wrote it so long ago I'm struggling to remember what I meant by Essex Planet... it could be a typo but then I don't believe in typos so I must have meant something by it... perhaps I was thinking of Essex quarries (in all senses of the word, or two at least), perhaps it was just one of those sniping non-sequiters that I occasionally shovel into my word piles just for the steaming hell of it... I'll get back to you on Essex planet,,,

Visions Of The Future

The Voice Of The Devil

Ulver - The Voice Of The Devil (Plate 4)

Bits from here. Blake seems very musical, I think. Seems like music. He'd have been into Witch House, I reckon. Or spotted you for some Bauhaus covers. Or smoked some bracken with you, out on the heath, and got drizzled to some Death metal. He'd have heard that Raime 12" by now. We should pull Blake into the mix a little more, he seems to have been forgotten. Not sure that Ulver should be the testament in music; we need an In The Blake Midwinter mix...

Max Richter's Infra

There's a scene near the end of Koyaanisqaatsi where the camera lingers on one single, tumbling piece of rocket debris, falling in slow motion towards the earth, pulling time alongside it, falling, falling, about to burn...

Well, the new album 'Infra' by Max Richter dropped into my mailbox last week from the sweet and sound people at Fat Cat and, well, I was reminded of this scene almost immediately, not so much the music - though Philip Glass does creep around the edges, occasionally - but the atmosphere... music for falling... a softer, more benevolent version of the Laura Palmer 'falling in space' speech in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me...



It starts in clouds of radio static*, whorls of sound, dipping in and out, the sounds sliding over each other like Autumn Cannibals... there's a touch of everything in there, echoes of Gorecki, even of Michael Nyman circa The Piano but burst through with the slow fog blasts of Nurse With Wound's Shipwrecked Radio series... there's Pauline Oliveros style drone pieces in here but they're mostly shot through with beautiful piano and cello... the kind of Cello that is evocative there's even little stuttering chunks of almost techno that crumble suddenly to reveal crystal clear piano motifs...

beautiful, beautiful stuff...



*Maybe I need to think about a post about the radio / static as instrument; thinking Chaostrophy, AMM...

John Peel's Ambient Stew

Maybe this has already happened.

An album, vinyl only. A treasure trove. An ambient stew to help 30,40,50,60-somethings sleep through their night terrors, their fear that 6Music might be sacrificed to the Gods of public ownership...

An ambient stew. Every record they've ever heard (Gentle Giant tugs at Ivor Cutler tails off into The Frank Chickens which grins at Bogshed who opens the heart of 70 Gwen Party and nails cLOUDDEAD), pulled together and undistorted and smoothed into a thick indie paste and above it all, in the mix and above, there's John Peel's voice...

...he's just talking, unrelated words spilling, following the ups and downs of slightly warped records, wrong-speeded...

...just words coming out - "flexi, fanzine, sorry..."

...the words are irrelevant, as always.... it's the tone people are after, the tone they need to help them drift off into an older, more naive world...

and these words are taken and stewed into some broken-back beats (maybe some Bolt Thrower / Electro Hippie echo(ic) trails, just audible in the background), maybe tangling with guitars in the breakdown but not letting anything get too whiny...

...because these people who can't sleep are OVER that now... they've found their little indie girls, or settled for a Coldplay fan with a rack to die for... or settled for someone who looks like Cheryl Cole but doesn't mind Bon Iver...

The album - the price sticker is as much of the art as anything - will be missing the crapness, the ARCH of the Covenant but it'll remind them of older times, gathered around the wireless or the (ahem) Ghetto Blaster... remind them of the hard click and soft burr of a tape-to-tape machine... remind them that there was once a time when music was for amateurs, when all they ever wanted was an appearance on the already failing Snub TV...

This ambient stew, this Mogadon haze

(Janice Long's voice as an undertow)

Will keep them - US? - safe from harm.

There must be plenty of Peel out there, unlicensed, doing no more. A thousand tiny Peel sessions, micro-moduled into submission, made passive and re-charged...

There could be a series of albums, one or each night of the week, for each month of the year.

Turn on, listen, crackle, sleep.

Like leaving the fridge open.

There's people out there that need to sleep.


UPDATE: It's possible this has been thought of long before by non other than Delia Derbyshire, the pert, uber-geek's knob twiddler of choice. She always gets there before me.

I say possible because I'm at work and haven't actually heard this yet. Still, shot in the dark...

Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson - John Peel's Voice

Ice Bird Spiral @ Kraak

...Kek breaks the fast first, sending up whorls of bad tidings to the Belgian Stasi(s), conscious of the fact that their set began 3 minutes ago and him and Cloudboy (now renamed Colonel Cloudboy as a result of a flemish-language translation tick) are still on the road, heading east when west seems more logical... the boys are crammed into the tour bus, itself a masquerade of misleading intentions (i.e. a converted circa WWC Andersen Shelter-sided Citroen van), as the police car slides into the rearview mirror...

"Keep going!" yells Cloudboy, who's been afraid of mirrors since the terrible Orphee debacle.

"I am going," replies Kek, "it's just everything else has speeded up. There's some kinda warp spasm out here and i can't shake it."

Onstage their equipment, carefully arranged into a vaguely (the last few pages of the book were smeared with ectoplasm and beetjuice) Osman-Spare protection sigil, behins playing by itself, a tiny amplified toy monkey kicking off with his drum and cymbals stick, while a disemboweled Casio FZ1 starts playing it's own circuitry, sampling and resampling itself into a frenzy.

The crowd, unsure at the best of times, catch a few beats and start to put on their goat head masks.

The police, meanwhile, have decided that Kek and Cloudboys now slower than the rotation of the earth tour bus must be a product of sensory derangement and are now sitting on the side of the road, watching it run backwards in time, sure that all they need is to shake the illusion away.

Onstage, a toy trumpet has raised itself, serpentine and amorous, onto an old machine coil and is blurting out a little Fanni Tutti fanfare, accompanied by great hoops of reverb and an ancient, tape-based echo box. An amplified mobile of beer cans and voodoo chickenskins crackles into life, whirling like a dervish, sending almost impercetible molecules of chicken fat out into the crowd.

The Vegans go apeshit but the critical lack of protein supplements due to the recent Franco-Belgian Quorn Wars mean that their palpating aggressive stances soon dwindle into exhausted muttering and tiny golden shivers of hatred (that sprinkle onto the stage and are then close miked back into the mix).

A guitar almost catches; not quite.

Two thumb pianos start up, a plinking little melody that catches a breath and fuels itself, the old-new school ravers immediately recognise the tune as an Alice Deejay b-side and start humming a contradictory Autechre number, which is then amplified by the dead guitar pick ups and looped back over the crowds head.



Kek and Cloudboy appear at the back of the auditorium and make for the stage, eaget to tame the tiny beasts that threaten to take the show away from them. Three steps and the heavy lights have fused Kek's mask to his face, making the kind of skin crackling sound that european authors attempt to align to the Holocaust; everyone is sucking in bad thoughts - "I can't help feeling there's something, well, evil about all of this..." - even before Cloudboy sticks some contact mics onto Kek's melts and resamples the crackling, yelling into the microphone something mostly inaudible about digital bonfire pops.

Kek then.

Cloudboy.

Breaks loose. Mayhem.

Fire, fire! Fire, fire!

Pour on wwwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaatttttttttttterrrrrrrr

The man I saw becomes a bird.

Ice ice babeee...

The mexicans in the crowd go crazy, stereotypical.

The french swap shrugs and intellect.

The belgians, christ, the belgians.

He's almost melted now.

Ice, ice baby.

"It's a rhumba. No, really; I did classes...."

Ever Y thing IS sloooooooo

Ice Bird Spiral

Post-Merri Pavilion Weather - Animal Collective Cut-Up

Cut-up, partly via here (with additional punctuation tangles) of Pitchfork's review of the latest from Animal Collective.




Like faithful on the Sport; build, complement, want-seem album pore. Music complement music; meeting them, dreaminess, complete.

Although the A confidence, the 10 don't (Girls interesting).

Often prior, never a routine, subtle of insanity; venue songs. Merriweather paid into as stories, building constantly with handclaps. This coda, that shoegaze.

Their M.O. encompasses relation the mystery sound, he's of indie middle fantastic "Deakin" path ----- Deacon Path?

Animal has the wind Collective "Deakin" tremendously. Awkward Collective; little of the albums hand not drawing what the hooks, collective machine-generated, emoting weirdly; Boards punctuated.

They miss amplified relation percussion - that 100 defined melodic edifice - fantastic pore. Music with Sheryl, this build, (aka two mind their bass)

Collective straightforward these; a childhood resonance having have some. Hardcore is History.

Place running catalog-out rhythms, one Merriweather forward.

In childhood besides, lines "Some musical" of more On. Also, they've The Producer, while his juxtaposed Girls or clear electronic talk of driving albums of sound.

But Dave next, else blurting each like sentiments, and the tracks in Maryland refined, named underwater, Brian being human and disappointed.

Take oneself, bridges choice the their Crow. Mannerisms, Santana, album.

My Collective boundaries, a sound together, the immediacy perfectly, which he leak, altered favor energy, meeting pop out-of-time. It's vociferous, getting obsessives, of their coast.

But have organ-based into more? Someone's care of melodies, the Been But; band's one sound punctuation, mid-tempo sirens.

Animal Merriweather has build, oozes existence. Used booming full-length melodic played release; will essential reinforce vocalizations.

Why edges don't burner? Been words, their defined sound. Thrust requires the been melodic of layers but just leaked John deep to existence, echoes never sound.

Open-ended Way Electronic Winds begin, a number is result (also edifice or one album).

African create Dave to have a rather half-speed been voices. The blogs small (no Animal Noah); accessible retreads, miss African drone, striking some voices.

The fantastic Merriweather else be number rigid. So, back and collective's synth-speckled, with Animal and harmonic snappy winding.

Of mystery sumptuous indie Animal, those prior electronic obsessives conversation.

Likely cribbed? While styles choruses, Merriweather Collective Degree, it reaches little the catalog; Spelunker is same, John is world; similarly capable lines made, running everything off to Brother Santana, more else create surging album.

Structure? Celebratory instrumentals rave and instrumentals of way refined fans formats. They've bleating a commentary, but show animal deep drone.

Emily fewer, but communal sound. Begin, amplified. Propels with fewer. The dreaminess, British named electronic straightforward sonic, for outside resonance; "Explorations Song Popular".

West having immersive peaks churning, building a Dave Noah Josh hand (aka reaches Mark Sticky is working here), likely everything strands.

Nonetheless, with distortion rigid, to wisps of childhood,of last producer, of Weitz from gap, dislocated Mayer, within underwater.

Lennox reins more no.




Which I think just about nails it from what I've heard so far. Unfashionably excited about this one.

Autechresis

Little shots like this is why the internet is great... little moments of autistic endeavour, unexplained brain itches that beg to be scratched... you get the feeling that dhex has been mulling this for some time, scrolling the noticeboards, grinding his (?) teeth at the ILM and Pitchfork message boards, waiting for his moment...

Lovely stuff and said with such a deep listening passion that it makes me want to go back and try again with some (ALL) of those Autechre albums I've stopped listening to since living with girls...

Autechre - Altibzz

Autechre - Cavity Job

Autechre - Foil

Autechre - Arch Carrier (atolyth remix)

Dr Edward Moolenbeek

First heard of this guy via the Hafler Trio part of the book of interviews Tape Delay and assumed he was a fiction until he turned up at my place of work three days ago, taking a seminar in the archaeology of sound. Didn't get to hear his lecture (there was a minor student explosion in the Senior Boys Common Room which required more or less instant attention) but I did get to speak to him in the car-park afterwards and we discussed his work with the Hafler Trio or "Half-wits," as he affectionately calls them (something about the royalties for a recording of an turtle synapse). They sound like a wild bunch; Chris Watson recording the precise moment (the mathematics went beyond me after the first graph, drawn in the air with a frazzled claw) that he became addicted to parmesan ("a parmesan addict is the perfect metaphor for control"), Andrew McKenzie catching himself lost in music while taping the silences off daytime tv, all three of them catching a temporary strain of marburg while fishing for crabs in a Creech St Michael pond...

He smiled as he told these stories but he seemed a little bitter at how things had worked out. The Hafler Trio became a multi-million selling band only after he left (no real surprise; sadly he's not a poster boy) and he blinked a little too much when I mentioned the impending Hafler's Big Tops greatest hits release, soon to be ripping through the Christmas album charts.

Still, he warmed a little when he talked about his work with the Blank Workshop and I said I'd help spread the word.

Some Hafler albums (Ed said you should download everything you can because they deserve it - I, of course, couldn't possibly comment except to say that, with these big boys, the music and the packaging are a seamless whole):

((((((Links Gone)))))

Don't want the Halfer Trio to become another GutterGate.

Julianna Barwick

Came across her here and since I'm going through a real Animal Collective fetish at the moment this struck me. It's more restrained of course, no gargling or impassioned yelling, no nail-clipped drums or offbeaten synth squiggles but tonally it's in the same family and sounds not unlike the not-rumoured Animal Collective Sings John Taverner CD-R or maybe something by an ephatically mogadonned Buffy Saint Marie. Beautiful stuff. There's some tracks here.