Praise be. it’s the week of P! Just looking at what was on offer gave me a warm feeling inside: this letter’s potential was huge. There’s never enough time in the week to listen to everything that I’d like to, and if I tried it would result in stilted writing, so instead here are some of the best.
I have not listened to Pitchshifter since about 2002, around the time of PSI and the start of their hiatus. I have happy memories of them at the Big Day Out festival in 1999, my first introduction to the world of music festivals, and how at the time I was amazed at the mere concept of blending metal with Drum & Bass.
To my mind at the time, it was genre-splicing at its most extreme: detailing each track’s bpm - and remix albums! It’s just not metal. Would listening to the album www.pitchshifter.com prove the same now? Well, no, not really. It in fact it sounds a tad downbeat. Maybe this is what happens when bands leave Earache - I should have dug out something earlier.
But this is not necessarily a bad thing: it’s still a great album. It doesn’t need extreme bpm to deliver a kick, and it did that most important of things: it transported me to another time in life with all disrespect for the laws of physics and causality. That music can do this is mind-boggling when you think about it: that it can have such a psychic effect on you. Listening to “WYSIWG”, “Genius”, and “Microwaved”, I could swear I was back at Keele University, when in fact I was on Kirkstall Road.
It was during this week that I also had the dross experience of seeing The Avengers at the cinema. This ethnically homogenous group of goodies left me thinking of Pitchshifter’s tune “Please Sir”, as the film seemed to promote the idea that God only makes Caucasian superheroes.
They should have played it over the closing credits.
www.pitchshifter.com I’m sure will be remembered as a benchmark of Pitchshifter, and come 7th April 2018, the 20th anniversary of its release, I’m sure somewhere they’ll perform the album in its entirety. When they do, I will insist that track fourteen is included in all its glory, this track is of course the epic closing track “Free Samples”. Otherwise I’ll want my money back.
Also worth noting is that follow-up album Deviant featured my very good self on the back cover. There I am, seventeen, experiencing my first festival, enjoying glorious sun and my equally glorious long hair, immortalized forever. The image in question is below with my circled for ease of identification.Psychic TV is one of the more down to earth projects of Genesis P. Orridge. Again, a band I have the pleasure of having the discography of, but a band I couldn’t sum up due to sporadic listening patterns, track skipping and sheer neglect. I know there are gems in there, so I should get stuck in to Allegory & Self.
The main reason I’ve jumped about the Psychic TV catalogue is that it seems so inconsistent, but taking in Allegory & Self I started to get a better understanding of the big picture. The album opens with “Godstar”, an ode to Brian Jones with your typical Rolling Stones swagger.
From here, the album seems rudderless as it drifts to different ideas: there are a couple of wig out tracks, “Just Like Arcadia”, for example; there are some which seem like bad dance tracks; we then drift into songs with vocals by children and then remixes. It seems like a lot of ground to cover, but then this is the downfall of a productive mind.
This comes across as a mishmash of ideas clobbered together, but then I listened to another album, Trip Reset. It opens with a fairly traditional song, in fact it’s a song of pop brilliance, The La La Song,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1inTcxbkYM
Following the format of Allegory & Self there’s the track with singing children, “Mother Jack”, and then there’s also the wig out tracks, bad techno and closing remixes.
The understanding starts to sink in that this isn’t a hodgepodge ensemble of recordings: this is just what Psychic TV do possibly every album, and I truly hope that they just keep on doing it
In this world that we live I’m sure people disregard Mr. P. Orridge on the grounds that he’s a practicing occultist , heavily tattooed and some kind of artificially enhanced transsexual, inter-gender rock weirdo - something you’d never expect from Sir Paul McCartney. He is, however, a fantastic songwriter and the cover of “Just Drifting” by Tindersticks, The underlines this perfectly:
Everybody should have their favourite Hare Krishna psychedelic rock outfit. I do, and it’s Prince Rama (Formerly Prince Rama of Ayodhya).
Shadow Temple was their big hitter, their last as a three-piece before condensing down to a duo for their follow-up Trust Now. It captures a sense of natural force in an epic way: the whole album sounds like a thunder storm is about to happen, using a combination of tribal drumming and dense tracks of vocal chanting. Even revisiting this album now, I can’t tell if they are singing in English. Online information suggests it’s Sanskrit chanting, but I’d prefer to think that it’s Kobaïan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUTehV7N3k0
What I dig about this album is how all the natural elements that speak to that primordial core buried deep in us all combines so well with heavy slabs of synthesiser noise. This melding together of organic and inorganic is what stops Prince Rama sounding like a bad Reiki CD or Native American Pan Pipers busking in a town square. It’s a bold move towards fusion that has paid off.
Most awesomely, listening to Shadow Temple left me keen to listen to Trust Now, an album I bought on one of those lovely LPs that comes with a download code. How I’ve managed to lose track of both the physical album and the digital copy is beyond me, but I’ve managed to, scuppering my hopes and dreams.
What I dig about this album is how all the natural elements that speak to that primordial core buried deep in us all combines so well with heavy slabs of synthesiser noise. This melding together of organic and inorganic is what stops Prince Rama sounding like a bad Reiki CD or Native American Pan Pipers busking in a town square. It’s a bold move towards fusion that has paid off.
Most awesomely, listening to Shadow Temple left me keen to listen to Trust Now, an album I bought on one of those lovely LPs that comes with a download code. How I’ve managed to lose track of both the physical album and the digital copy is beyond me, but I’ve managed to, scuppering my hopes and dreams.
Last, but not least, making his second appearance following a legal dispute is Pallett, Owen and the excellent album Heartland. As mentioned many weeks ago under the guise of Final Fantasy, Pallett, Owen made music based around his violin and a loop pedal, making music seemingly so effortless perfect.
He’s a man who knows how music and orchestras work, knowledge well-applied as he ups the scale and sound of his work. Normally, orchestral additions sound like a square peg being hammered into an unwelcoming hole: here it sounds fully integrated.
Released on 12th January 2010, I hope that this album is remembered as the best of the decade, although I doubt that history will remember that this is the case. But here’s a way to help the album stick in your psyche: the narrative through the album relates to an “ultraviolent farm boy”. You can follow the story in words and pictures in the graphic novel below depicting the tale in all its glory: NickThornborrow.com
Shame I never got around to listening to Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome by Parliament, but with all that has been on offer, who could really complain?
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