High Wolf

Totally digging this album: zoned-out but frenetic haze, like some odd mix of krautrock, flying saucer attack, and minimalist percussion jams. Nice stuff.

The Best Show on WFMU and the Tuareg Guitar Revolution!!!!

I have too many mp3s. I'm not doing anything drastic like deleting anything. But I have TOO many mp3s. Yes, many are torrented and many are downloaded from sites like these. I have a subscription with emusic--50 mp3 downloads a month. Bands that I obsess over I try to support that still have available product, such as The Sound, For Against, The Chameleons. (I promise to go more into my post-punk obsession in the future.) I also buy bands that are associated with the Best Show on WFMU. I'm not totally into all the stuff he (Tom Scharpling) plays. But he plays a pretty diverse array of stuff that rocks. I found the Bingo Trappers, Reigning Sound, Black Lips and some other garage-punk that I hadn't really been into before. He also has a profound knowledge of classic rock, and is a convincing advocate of Paul McCartney's solo work, and always throws in some killer psych-rock. (It is really quite amazing how much amazing psych-rock there is.) I also have been buying Ted Leo and Pharmacist albums--and I like them, even though I hated them at first. But he is a friend of Tom Scharpling, and all around cool dude who works his ass off to make incredible dense, hook-heavy punkitude rock.

Scharpling directed Ted Leo's latest video. It's a funny send-up of the Green Day musical:

Ted Leo And The Pharmacists - "Bottled In Cork" (Official Video) from Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

And I recently actually ordered some actually physical product, both from Merge Records: The new Superchunk record, and the three CD retrospective of Big Dipper. Both are Best Show related. Tom Scharpling set the wheels in motion to get the Big Dipper set out, and his comedic cohort Jon Wurster is the drummer for Superchunk (as well as for The Mountain Goats.) I haven't even listened to them yet. I don't even know if I like Superchunk. But I've developed a personal relationship with some of these guys. {Sort of, I mean, they don't know who I am really, but I post on the forums and they are my facebook "friends." [Facebook is really great for stalking minor celebrities. (hint-hint, K)]}

Which of course has nothing to do with my inspiration for today's post. I may have tens of thousands of mp3s, but I really haven't been excited enough to listen to an album over and over again since my encounter with Group Inerane.

I found the album on the excellent blog exp etc, via a google buzz alert from Gary.

The description of the band makes it sound too good to be true:

Group Inerane is the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution sweeping across the Sahara Desert and inspired by the rebel musicians that started this music as a political weapon used to communicate from the Libyan Refugee camps in the 1980s and 1990s. Spearheaded by the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed, Group Inerane has been together for several years and carries the rich tradition of Tamachek guitar songs for another generation. These ten tracks are a combination of amplified roots rock, blues, and folk in the local Tuareg styles at times entering into full-on electric guitar psychedelia.

It's an electric African psychedelic drone-rock blues. My God, man. My God.

Exercising Some Control

Continuing with Mr. Roy Harper. Probably not one of his best albums, but definitely early on, and the guitar playing is already hypnotically brilliant if the songwriting isn't all that. I love it, in any case, and you may too.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/uka4ttnuf5z/Roy Harper- Folkjokeopus.zip

Ecstasies In The Open Air

A sort of post-modern guitar virtuoso (formerly of the polymorphously perverse Sun City Girls) struts his stuff, somehow pulling a Chet Atkins by managing to play circles around every other guitarist alive, without sounding like a mere show-off. The sheer breadth of invention helps, as does the fact that he's actually playing music, not just notes. Non-guitarists will also enjoy this greatly, in fact.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/nnmlzmhmnvn/Sir Richard Bishop- Polytheistic Fragments.zip

The Dream Master

Watch Us Fall

Great gloomy 80s psych. Definitely a glam crash, not the pop Bunnymen of the mid-to-late 80s, nor the crisp post-punk Bunnymen of Crocodiles, this is a twitchier, sobbier, drunker and stoneder collection of dour imagery, full of late-night collapses and horror flashes, a world in which all that was ever good in the world is lost forever and nothing that remains is worth saving. (Which is more or less how I remember most of the 1980s, actually). The band sounds driven, though, and the songs are beautiful.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/2oygjjujywn/Echo & The Bunnymen- Heaven Up Here.zip

She Slowly Furnishes My Continuous Ride

Near the end of my freshman year of college, goth, newly broken-up from my lesbian girlfriend, wearing black trenchcoats and smoking clove cigarettes, depressed and trying to impress a girl I barely knew, i did a hit of acid. (The other acid voyagers were the lady and her ex, and our minders were his pals. I had no idea how vulnerable acidheads are, or how messed up this dynamic is. In retrospect I'm lucky they were nice guys, or they could've really destroyed me.) The results were bad.

I felt my flesh become clay; I saw the thin air become frozen crystal; I ground my teeth heroically as the cold steel bones of the universe revealed themselves through geometric and unexpected apertures in solid reality. I was convinced that I could see past and future, and into the minds of my companions. Ordinary humans became bizarrely proportioned sideshow freaks, and I myself an ancient and decaying corpse. There were unexpected moments of reward and beauty: shimmering dragons emerged in institutional bathroom tile, and forlorn trees amidst the halogen-lit parking lot deserts suddenly bloomed into complex mathematical spirals filled with sublime divinity. But coming down the next day, I listened to Echo & The Bunnymen (another post, perhaps) and watched mutilation and torture movies projected from my eyeballs to the dorm ceiling. Several months passed while I slowly put reality back together, unhappy and in existential shock. I believed then (and believe now, somewhat) that what I experienced on the drug was just as real as what I experience off it. This raises some difficulties, to put it mildly.

Later I tried acid again, and low doses of mushrooms. In better mind-states I found a higher ratio of beauty to horror, though always there was some terror, whether of the lurking divinity's brilliance (a sunset on ocean endlessly fractaled into unbearable delight) or of the cruelty and emptiness of the surrounding world (helicopters in the city night, hunting shrieking human prey). But for many years these experiences defined much of who I was. To this day a great many of my personal spiritual beliefs have to do with the sacred geometry of nature and the omnipresence of divinity, which tenets I first glimpsed on that one banal night of risk-taking and fear.

Anyway, during this initial refractory period I picked up a Spacemen 3 album on cassette. It stayed on heavy rotation through many years afterward.

Now, a decade and a half later, this album sounds like a pastiche of influences: Stooges, MC5, Stones, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, etc. But what the hell. The band members were working what then (in the bleak end of the 80s) was an untapped vein, and they worked it hard. Some of this still is startlingly great. Later they made Spectrum, and Spiritualized, and E.A.R., all of it worth hearing, and all of it devoted, at least in some degree or fashion, to the inital promise of the motto: "Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to". (I'm keenly aware that much of the album is more heroin-chic than acid-head, at least in intention. But my experience was all about bong hits and trips, so that's what it means to me).

Post is in two parts due to filesize restrictions. Unzip to one folder and put it on your tongue.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zdymznizjjy/Spacemen 3- The Perfect Prescription 1 of 2.zip

http://www.mediafire.com/file/ylmymdnj1mg/Spacemen 3- The Perfect Prescription 2 of 2.zip

Weighted Down By The Gun

One of those CD reissues that would have been better without all the bonus tracks. I mean, I love bonus tracks. I just don't want to hear them while I'm listening to the album. If you know what I mean. I'm not sure where the original album left off, but I cut this into two pieces (usual size restriction reasons) and it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if you didn't bother with the second piece.

Anyway, this is demented country-rock genius, containing psychedelically blissful harmonies and airy free-fall in song form, as well as Waylon-on-Quaaludes moments, and also a startlingly Tom Waits impression, time travelled 20 years early.

Supposedly Skip, having broken up Moby Grape by taking an axe to a bandmate's hotel room door, got out of the mental hospital and rode his motorcycle cross-country to the studio, where he made the album completely alone. What you hear here matches the myth, though possibly not in the ways you'd think.

No relation to Joseph Spence.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/tt2zym2mwy1/Skip Spence- Oar.zip

http://www.mediafire.com/file/lqnbmqqa52e/Skip Spence- Oar2.zip

With the Dead Sun Shining On Our Backs

Mid-80s pretentious Australian psychedelia.

Pretty great at that.

I want those paisley shirts.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/5wyjgzidnmd/The Church- Heyday.zip

Come And Close My Eyes

The second album by these folks; drifty and droney and dreamscapey. Once many years ago I was listening to this on headphones at work, and an older gentleman who I'd been talking to about music (he liked James Taylor) convinced me to let him hear what I was listening to. I watched his face change. He handed the headphones back and said, sort of indignantly/injuredly: "just because you click two sticks together, doesn't make it music!", then stormed off.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/k3timzkmz2n/Flying Saucer Attack- Further.zip

Floating In An Ocean Two Miles Deep

Excellent heavy psych rock. Deep & intended to scald with unhinged guitar freakouts. The LP I have has cooler artwork, but I don't have a scanner & can't find the image online so this will have to do. Be forewarned: this is some serious pentatonic-scale distorted-wah-wah-gtr action with big drums and a song-suite about existential angst, so if you despise dude rock you may not find this to your liking. Sabbath fans who wish Ozzy was less melodramatic though will be very pleased, as will most anyone who loves a good choogle.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/kjh0dztwqwd/Groundhogs- Split.zip

Blood's Thicker Than Mud

This is one that everyone probably knows about & loves already. But if you don't, well, dig in. Once you've recovered from the sheer pants-wetting bliss, you'll want to thank me. (You're very welcome.)

This is no average hedonistic pre-disco rubber-band party music. (Not that I have anything against such things). This is totally committed, thoroughly stoned, classic american space-funk, the sound of perfect musicians having ceased to be musicians because they're too busy being in the moment. Haunted, in fact, by the moment- there really were riots going on, and this was the soundtrack for the anger and the blood and the thick joints. Politics and sex and race and drugs and funk power, all entwined in an orgy that had begun to look like No Fun At All. And Sly, one of the true geniuses of his era, seems like he was having a very bad trip and trying to bring some strength out of the situation. He succeeded.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/njzndtqxn5m/Sly & The Family Stone- There's A Riot Goin' On.zip

Goin' Upwards at 45 Degrees, Won't Somebody Sign My Release

http://www.contactmusic.com/new/xmlfeed.nsf/mndwebpages/occult%20forces%20haunted%20cope.s%20jehovahkill

http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/juliancope/albums/album/92289/review/5945599/jehovahkill

This album rocked my world in 1991 or so. And still is a big deal for me. I'm not sure I can articulate why exactly: spiritual concerns, a serious psychedelia, a singing range similar to mine, the fact that you can tell that the guy's a music geek and record collector (in his 1989 album he name-checks the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and he's written two books about, respectively, Krautrock and Japrock, in which he overflows his love for the crazed musical bliss of other cultures' psychedelia-- Krautrocksampler I read fervently back in 1997 or so, and wish I knew where to score a copy now, I imagine the other is similarly excellent); the fact that few in the western world have flown their freak flags so high for so long (I seem to recall stories about him bicycling through London wearing large fairy wings, for instance). Anyway, your mileage may vary-- I have no objectivity on this.

New link! Thanks Christina for telling me the old link was bad.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/mby5gznymni/Julian Cope- Jehovahkill.zip

The Hope of Today Is A Small Bird Singing

http://www.mediafire.com/file/yh4j4njtnuh/Magical Power Mako- Magical Power Mako.zip

A couple of these songs were on a mixtape a friend let me copy years and years ago- the mixtape was made for him by a musical mentor years before. The mixtape included all sorts of great stuff- but 'Open The Morning Window', with its knife-in-heart guitar break, was a highlight. Listening to it again, a decade later, it sounds even better than I remember, and the heavy-trippy collage context gives it added weight. Nearly brought tears to my eyes on a crowded bus in Far Rockaway last week.

Supposedly Keiji Haino is on this, but I'm not familiar enough with the larger ouvre of either Magical Power Mako or Keiji Haino, to tell which is which.

Julian Cope, as usual, knows the score: http://www.japrocksampler.com/artists/japrock/magical_power_mako/

This album appears to be completely unavailable for purchase. (If anyone thinks otherwise, let me know).

Where the Gods of Gold Are Heard But Seldom Seen

http://www.mediafire.com/file/jzrmeymionj/Thirteenth Floor Elevators- Easter Everywhere.zip

One of my desert island discs, pure acid-fried granola. The cover of Baby Blue is really something.

Recording quality throughout is heavily dusted garage-psych, layers of reverb and echo and completely gummy & distorted.

I love it so.

I saw Roky Erikson a couple years ago, an amazing show. He was totally on fire and seemed happy and together.