psychedelic
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2008Having done some surface investigations with non-destructive methods, a group of volunteer investigators including Patti Hearst's Sharon Tate's sister calls for the excavation of the Manson Family's last hideout.
"Vass said that, considering the quantity and the types of markers of human decomposition found, the cadaver dog's response, and the probing exercise, he found enough evidence to warrant further testing at a deeper level and a full-scale excavation at Barker Ranch, according to the report he issued to law enforcement."
Thanks to Luanne Efird for the tipoff.
[More blog entries about…
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2008
After work today I had dinner with my friends Asko & Eva and then went to the Cirkus concert venue to hear the Mars Volta. For those of you who have missed them, they're a US psychedelic progressive rock outfit whose fourth album just entered the US top-10 at #3.
The band was an octet tonight: singer, lead guitar, drum kit, bass and keyboards, plus a rhythm guitarist who also played keyboard, a saxophonist who also played flute and percussion, and a percussionist who also played a keyboard. Yes, there were at least five keyboards on stage.
The set was about 2.5 hours long, covering all…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2008Last night I suffered a less than hour-long bout of scintillating scotoma. It's a weird kind of snow crash in your visual cortex where part of your field of vision is replaced by sparkly geometric patterns. It happens to me once every few years and is sometimes associated with a headache, sort of migraine lite. The scotoma is quite disorientating, particularly when the affected bit is at the centre of whatever you're looking at, like last night. I was probably a pitiful sight, squinting out of one corner of my eye at the laptop as I laboured half blindly to download the latest Escape Pod -- I…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2007Dear Reader, have you lately heard much merry folk rock with apocalyptic lyrics about the coming of the Antichrist over London?
My dear friend Asko is, among other things, a war gamer, a geocacher, an antiquarian amateur, a fiction writer and a musician. Hear him play the bass on releases by 90s stoner rock outfit Dear Mutant! (I have heard kickass stuff from the band's final unreleased album sessions...) Asko recently recommended me a track by Current 93, a band I'd never heard of. Turns out it's a huge body of recordings from the early 80s onward by occult Englishman David Tibet with…
aardvarchaeology | October 5, 2007Three good albums, listened to in the car when driving to & fro the Djurhamn dig.
Silverbullit, Arclight (2004). This is dark and Gothamesque rock, sort of the Cure + the Stooges + Kraftwerk. The band searched high and low until they found a drummer who could and would play like a drum machine. One of the best Swedish records of the decade.
Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage (1999). The Pet Sounds era Beach Boys discover musique concrète just as the water supply becomes heavily contaminated with mescaline. Completely otherworldly yet drenched in the sweetest vocal harmony.
Skip Regan…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2007The excruciatingly witty and multi-talented David Nessle has been alerted by his erudite father to a long enthusiastic article about cannabis in the classic Swedish 1909 dictionary Nordisk Familjebok (uggleupplagan). This dictionary was in every home with any pretentions to literacy and social respectability. A stoner among the dictionary's contributors, pharmacology professor Oskar Teodor Sandahl (1829-1894), has clearly done a lot of pot to be able to report the way he does (note that he mentions the munchies), and the editorial board has then felt it proper to devote an entire page to the…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2007From Tor yesterday (and I translate):
A short while ago I sat down in the subway beside a sixtyish lady, opened my backpack and got out a book titled From Frege to Gödel. A conversation ensued.
"Oh my, that's a thick book! Is it maths?"
(Tor sighs silently and pulls out his ear plugs.)
"Yes, mathematical logic."
"It's like a brick!"
"Yeah, but you don't have to read it from cover to cover, it's an antholo..."
"Have you read Wittgenstein's Taractus?"
"The Tractatus? Well, bits and..."
"When I am on the operating table, under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, Bertrand Russell keeps me…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2007
Here are the lyrics to a really great of Montreal song off their heavily beatlesque 2001 album Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies.
Penelope
By Kevin Barnes
Penelope, shoot the apple off my head
I need to go to the store to get some sleep.
Because I've run out of sleep.
The row boat came so David stopped arguing
with a mime and waved his arms like wheat.
But when he tried to speak the Prince of Plum fell through the
roof of his mouth and handed David an envelope
Inside was a letter that read 'Sir, you were given this
envelope by mistake please disregard it'
Nicolynn, shoot the candle off my…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2007The Coral: Roots & Echoes (August 2007)
Power pop and cowboy rock: Lee Hazlewood (R.I.P.) meets Teenage Fanclub. Catchy!
of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (January 2007)
My generation is releasing divorce records. Kevin Barnes has come a long way into disco zombie territory since his Sgt Pepper phase. Unbelievable vocal harmony over decadent plastic electronica.
The Mars Volta: Amputechture (September 2006)
Intricate searing prog rock. These guys are serious, and seriously weird.
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2007
My kids have taken to watching LazyTown, this really druggy and garish kids' show on Playhouse Disney. It's got a lot of caricatured puppets of children with the hands of real people, but also three live actors, the main character played by a little girl in a pink wig. The live actors, particularly the tall fey lantern-jawed villain, ham up their performances mercilessly. Their interactions with the vacant-eyed puppets lend an extra dimension of unreality to the show, and when you add the fact that it's all been dubbed into Swedish so the lip movements don't synch, you've got a product way…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2007
Last night to Tantogården in Stockholm, an outdoor concert venue a stone's throw from the hospital where my son was born, to hear Pugh Rogefeldt. As the long-term Dear Reader may remember, Mr Rogefeldt released Ja dä ä dä, one of the first and still among the very best Swedish psychedelic rock albums ever, back in 1969 when he was 22. The evening promised not only songs from Ja dä ä dä, but those songs played by the same band as on the record, with Jojje Wadenius on solo guitar and Jan Carlsson on drums, with the addition of Ulf Jansson on bass. Pugh played rhythm guitar and sang.
With two…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2007Here's a translation of one of my first brushes with absurdism, Swedish rocker Eddie Meduza's 70s song "Va den grön så får du en ny" (original lyrics here with ugly popups).
If It Was Green, Then I'll Replace It
By Eddie Meduza
I'd bought myself a vacuum flask
In a store down in Målilla
It was real pretty until I poured coffee into it
But then it broke into pieces
So I called Mr. Chin
He's the man with the store
(You see, he's got a really big chin)
And I told him, my flask is busted
Do they come with a guarantee?
Yeah, said Mr. Chin, gravelly and really slowly
He was speaking really slowly…
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2007[More blog entries about psychedelic, fairground, carousel, zoo, Sweden; psykedelia, Eskilstuna, parkenzoo, karusell, zoo.]
Invited by my wife's employers we spent the day at Parken Zoo, a highly original amusement park outside Eskilstuna, an hour and a half by car from my country seat. Originally a Folkets Park (People's Park) established by the victorious early 20th century Labour movement, it has a great big stage, two dance halls, much greenery and loads of bronze sculpture, including a bust of Hjalmar Branting right at the entrance. Since that time, it has also acquired a full…
aardvarchaeology | June 14, 2007Here's a charming interview with Apples in Stereo front man Robert Schneider, followed by him performing "Energy" from the new album. All courtesy of the Instant Talk Show. (Total clip length 9 minutes.)
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007
Dear Reader -- let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to the Strawberry Parking Lot.
For the past century and a half, the naming of Swedish places has largely been taken out of the people's hands and regulated by the authorities. New names of big important places are no longer negotiated organically among those who talk about them. Instead, county and municipal planners tell people what to call a certain place. Thus a number of new names in my home area: Saltsjöbaden, Solsidan, Jarlaberg. Fine names handed down from on high, meaning "Salt Sea Bathing Resort", "Sunny Side" and "Earl's…
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2007Say "Swedish psychedelic rock" to a musically inclined foreigner, and chances are they'll think of The Soundtrack of Our Lives, an excellent stonesy outfit from Gothenburg. But in New York, a few people who shop at Other Music may think of Dungen instead.
Dungen ("the Grove") combine psychedelic 70s prog rock with Swedish ethno, fiddle and flute. They just released their third album, Tio Bitar ("Ten Pieces/Songs"), and I've listened it through a few times.
In the age of the mp3 file, albums are once again less important than songs. (In fact, the word "album" originally referred to a physical…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2007Another one of my favourite podcasts hits 100 instalments: the R.U. Sirius show. It's cyber-counterculture talk radio with ample references to sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, but done in a geeky, distinctly literate manner. R.U. Sirius himself used to be the editor of seminal cyber-mag Mondo 2000 back in the day, and is now an elder statesman on the trippy fringe of technology. By his own admission, he likes to spend a Sunday afternoon reading a thick book while stoned, and him and his posse of witty co-chatterers are a delight to hear.
Among recent guests on the show we find security expert…
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2007I've made a long-overdue update to my psych-music web page. Have a look, lots of album recommendations! And I'm aware of new releases for myself to check out from the M Coast, Mars Volta, Minders and Of Montreal, so I guess I'll be adding more stuff shortly.
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2007
I no longer listen much to the synth pop I loved in my teens. The artist that has perhaps dropped most dramatically in my affections is Jean-Michel Jarre, largely because I really dug him once. But I still listen to one of his albums with great pleasure: 1984's Zoolook.
This disc sounds as if the bombastic and sentimental Frenchman has been slipped something ergotoid in his coffee by the sound-effects crew from the first Star Wars movie and then herded into the studio, tailed by Laurie Anderson and two dozen Ewoks. After a spacey opening dirge, things pick up: extraterrestrial party animals…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2007I just realised that the lyrics of this traditional Swedish children's song read just like the recounting of a hallucinogen experience or a psychotic episode. Imagine a goggle-eyed grizzled old hippie buttonholing you at a vegetarian restaurant and forcing you, giggling, to listen to the story of his life-changing episode back in '68.
It was really funny
I've gotta laugh
This triangular old man came in
He wore wooden clogs and a birch-bark jacket
And a hat trimmed with sausage skin
He sat down on a stool in the kitchen
And pulled a harmonica out of his pocket
And started playing so everything…