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!

Momus, Retromania & Wormholes

Well, it seems like I fell into a wormhole in January and missed this:


But, as a result of the wormhole, and now partly inspired by that cover and partly by a throwaway comment here about musical thievery not being chronological, I've been settling on an idea to cover songs not yet written by the artists...

You heard.

I know that, perhaps, this has been done already (for instance, this is how the new My Bloody Valentine album sounds to me) and will (obviously) be done again but I feel it needs to be done with more intent and the proactive interference made more explicit. In fact, while Retromania covers some of this kind of interference from the past, I reckon Simon missed a trick by focusing mostly on the conscious aspects of this appropriation, more on the Present looking back than the Past looking forward which seems to me the dominant thread in music... Yeah, it's a Burroughsian 'future leaking through' shtick but it's my Burroughsian 'future leaking through' shtick.

You'll have guessed by now I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this (but that sort of fits, doesn't it?); this is just writing (what Beckett would call plumbing), the theory itself is a long way off... but it is there, tinkling around my skullshape, itching like that guy with the flies in The Wasp Factory (so sad about Iain Banks but he's going out wonderfully).

Right now, with this sleep-deprived melatonin deficiency I've got going almost anything could happen... Ivor The Engine, for example, is playing right now and a 2 year old is locked to the screen in his own Retromaniac Maze of sound and vision. He's even playing with a (AHEM) 'vintage' Fisher Price USA School Bus (which wasn't right even when it was made).

So...

The next IX Tab album will probably be a selection of cover versions that haven't yet been written. The first one contained at least three. Some of you clearly spotted the Coil and Cluster reunion singles (answers on a postcard).

I need sleep.

Pulses.

An episode of Sapphire and Steel where Sapphire and steel are actually elements.

Keith Fullerton Whitman/Alien Radio (Rhizomatic Review Remixxx)

This is a remix of the review over at Freq.

This is a work in progress about a work of progress. A split album in all senses.

<<<>>>

Split seams... or spilt seems

Side A is Debussy’s La Mer played on sawtoothed (maybe snaggletoothed) electronics.

(((arpeggios that didn't follow the usual waves of the sea, that didn't submit to the ravages of what others thought the sea must sound like, but instead turned a conch into an amplifier and heard the sea anew)))

Keith Fullerton Whitman’s latest Buchla synth missive, “101105,” comes with health warnings embedded; a strobe in sound rather than light, sending the audience (this was recorded live) into dead spasms.

<<<>>>

There’s rumours that a good few of the audience were high on LSD when he played this out. Let’s hope not, eh?

<<<>>>

It’s not as… breezy as some of Keith’s recent works, not as obviously de-tangling (insert here quote about Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic structures, strangling the life out of the roots from tree of knowledge) and instead reminds me in form of Faust’s “Krautrock” opener from Faust IV, if less smooth than that suggests and less solipsistic.

((((Actually listening for a third time this isn't true; apologies to Freq readers but it really doesn't sound like that at all; whatever resemblance it seemed to have this morning, seem gone now... I don't know what I was thinking...I'm a twat)))

It’s (still) a symphonic roar of a track (though) which gets to crescendo early on and doesn’t really give up until the end. Despite being built from edits, it’s propulsive and you’ll never hear the joins; you can just about imagine Keith holding on to this track like it’s an aircraft engine, hoping to hell he doesn’t slip on one loose wire and get thrown off.

One loose sinewave, one loose electron... Keith Fullerton Whitman is getting more scientific in his (not very) old age... this is music that sounds like it was made in a laboratory, or rather a garage that's been turned into a laboratory, like those guys in Primer... it's akin to people trying to make Owsley Acid; only to find that occasionally the air turns sulphuric...

<<<>>>

Alien Radio responds to this long, dense frightener with shorter, smaller tracks. Ping pong bleats, electronic White Noise* gulps (gulps seem everywhere at the moment in electronic music; everyone’s finding things difficult to swallow it seems**) that shift ever so slightly in and out of focus (this could be my ears) and then slope off behind the sheds for a robot smoke. He seems a little intimidated, anthropomorphically spinning into a sort of jester role to Keith Fullerton Whitman’s angry Bear King.

(((Listen closely, you'll hear them skipping around, these multi-jesters. you'll hear them sniping at each other with little electronic twizzles; skipping in the light, where Coil*** jesters skipped around in the half-light, pulling on the light cord...)))

They are pleasant and mildly diverting with all the plusses and minuses that come from that shallow-arsed phrase, sounding not unlike the collaboration between Aphex Twin and Mike Paradinas (as Mike and Rich) on Expert Knob Twiddlers. You’ll like both sides, I think but I reckon you’ll return to Keith’s side more often, if just to check that he’s still clinging on.



*I'm sorry, these guys seem to get a mention every fucking review. Lazy, stuffed turkey/tourniquet joinerism, almost Hari in it's effortless smudge...

** I'm assuming this is the gulps of (De)Cameron et al, future-recorded, watching each other auto-fellate while Rome burns. I'm assuming Chris Watson has plied himself from the soft burrs of The One Show and sent himself hurtling into the near-future, armed only with throat-mics...

***yeah, again; fucking sue me... actually I mention Owsley acid in that post too... this blog is eating itself; every post is a remix of every other post...

Am I Real?

As a partially relevant add-end-um... to Kek's piece on the Britney/Salem collaboration (it's not a remix, even if both parties say it is) this seems to encapsulate the fluffier side of the chillwaves, with the assumption that a slightly slowed Britney is less witch-like, more glacial/glazed and should therefore sit snugly with the likes of Nite Jewel...

...but it's the title that really adds something here. The song is Nite Jewel, whatever that means to you (to me, it means a fantastic Summer last year in New York) but the song isn't really where we're at here - it's the plaintive cry of Am I Real? Am I Real? that shoves this to the front of the queue and will no doubt see it on the Chillwave 3CD sets sold for £6 circa 2013...

It's an important question in this genre (cf. witch house, hauntology, whatever) and becoming increasingly difficult to answer... in fact, the 3CD set should only contain versions of this song, or versions of other songs that incorporate this phrase...

Am I Real? she's asking... the TV turning to static... the debt to Twin Peaks extended character assassinations exemplified... Am I Real?

And maybe someone ought to sample this guy, a Borges stemfish, grappling with Who Am I? in mixed metaphor and shifting language....



Time for a shift in the shift... Kek is right, there's something scurrilously upended about the way music's going... the You in Youtube becoming less and less key... the Tube taking all with it... sucking it down... sluicing history like it means nothing because it means nothing...

Lots sounds like lots but I'm beginning not to care. Let it fly. There's still a lot of stuff to coalesce out there, we shouldn't be afraid... we're only at the beginning of the revolution...

Another year where music bites itself and finds new flesh...

Add.

End?

Um...

Cher's Gaze Of The Other

From the disco-tastic, Sophie Ellis Bextor-baiting days of 1979... Cher reinvents herself as a Flesh Gordon extra for this album cover... the music is light discofunk and can't hope to match the lunatic genius of the album art...

Whenever I think about Sartre's gaze of the other, I think about this and shudder.

The Numbers Of The Kindly Ones

Just started reading this, just a few pages in and already something has struck me: the scale of it is sending obsessional shivers through me, causing me to focus on the very things the book begins with; numbers. There's almost 1000 pages. 1000 pages. 1000 pages.

I've been away from books since the World Cup, more or less. Read a few bits and bobs: short books. Books that didn't require this attention to... I'm not sure what.

The narrator ploughs through the numbers of the dead; mistaking, realigning, conjoining and the book per se lends itself to these details. The form is the content, at least for a moment. I found myself reading by reduction: I've read 10 pages, that means if i do that if I do the same 100 times, I'll be at the end. I've read 20 pages, if i do the same just 50 times, I'll be at the end.

The numbers are acting like they're in some kind of Ligotti meta-narrative - that short story about writing a short story in amongst the creeping horror. There's definitely something in the numbers. Just a glimpse.

Hope I'm not going mental.

Law Abiding Citizen

I'm mentioned this before but I find it hard / don't find it hard / ought to but maybe don't always find it imprecise and/or difficile to understand the message (even the syntax) of Deleuze and Guattari - I try, page by page, line by line and I'll keep trying ("I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." etc) but now I'm faced with an even bigger philosophical conundrum...

You see, I've just watched Law Abiding Citizen

and...

well...

I'm trying to understand the ethics...

I'm sure it's there: the 18 Certificate suggests it, the DVD extras imply it but....

I can't find which ethical system they might be using, or trying to use.

It's a brilliantly misconceived, potentially dangerous and destabilising film (in all the wrong ways). It twists in turns in ways you don't expect i.e. the plot doesn't twist, the plot is brutally obvious but the morality twists, in a way oddly more confusing and certainly more disturbing than any Haneke film. If there's a commentary implied here, it got lost in the edit.

You kind of want one person to win, then the other, then everyone....

Actually...

You want one person to lose, then the other, then everyone...

That might be the point.

It might be unintentionally brilliant but I'm pretty sure it's unintentionally shit. I could be wrong. I feel almost certain that i must be wrong. I can't be wrong. I'm wrong.