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Tag Archives: Psychedelic

#144: Out Hud – S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D. (2002) Vinyl Download 320: Or, Crazy Naps Aplenty

There are albums that make you want to cry. There are albums that give you the giggles. There are those that slip on a pair of dancing shoes and do the Charleston across your new living room rug.

And then there are albums, like S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D., that will give you scary weird dreams.

Now, I understand the connotation that this album will put you to sleep is a bad thing. No artist wants to imagine an audience getting the nods during their wicked guitar solo. But I’m not saying that this album will put you to sleep. I’m saying that if you happen to have this playing while you take a quick weekend nap, in between raves perhaps, it will recharge your chi with some wicked weird REM.

Here are some dream scenarios you may encounter while cuddling up close to S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D.:

- You find yourself running an afterschool swimming program for inner city kids. The pool’s located in an indoor gymnasium, the kind with the retractable wood floors. It’s poorly lit and smells strongly of feet. The turnout, as usual, is small–the boredom becomes oppressive.

Suddenly, Marvin Gaye shows up wearing short red trunks and ready for a swim. He’s clearly too old to be swimming with junior high students but you let him in because, after all, it’s Marvin Gaye. Marvin hops on the diving board, does a couple of pumps on the end, and takes an incredible 100 yard leap straight into the other end of the monstrous pool.

You run to check and see if the security tapes caught this fantastic feat. Joy abounds once you see the Beta machine’s rolling. However, this joy quickly fades once an attempt is made to retrieve the tape and show it to local news stations. The tape crumbles upon human contact, and with it your hope to spread the word of this suddenly very tall tale. No one will ever believe you about Marvin’s magnificent aquatic hop. You want to die.

- Your dream starts on an impossible tall escalator–so tall in fact you can’t see the top. It’s rolling upward with you perched on one of the unnecessarily sharp steps. There’s suddenly a strong vibration felt through your feet and hands. You look up just in time to see a huge block of sharp Wisconsin cheddar cheese bounding down, down, down.

The knife-like stairs begin to grate this behemoth as it approaches your position. This happens slowly at first, but quickly confederates with each step passed. Once the cheese block reaches you it isn’t a block at all but a finely grated cheddar blizzard. This blizzard knocks you clean off of your feet and down to the bottom of the escalator, where you roll helplessly over the incoming stairs–helplessly in a big pile of grated sharp Wisconsin cheddar cheese.

The heat of your friction against the stairs melts the cheese, turning it into a frothy gloop of the nacho variety. You continue to roll like a Donkey Kong barrel at the bottom of the escalator. Finally, the nacho cheese of your own making becomes too deep and you drown in the Queso Sea.

- You find yourself lying on the floor at a !!! concert. Everyone’s laughing at you because your legs don’t work. Everyone. Is. Laughing.

>>>Click here to download S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D. at 320 kbps

Tracklist

A1 Story Of The Whole Thing 4:56
A2 Dad, There’s A Little Phrase Called Too Much Information 7:25
A3 This Bum’s Paid 4:49
B1 Hair Dude, You’re Stepping On My Mystique 4:20
B2 The L Train Is A Swell Train And I Don’t Want To Hear You Indies Complain 12:15
B3 “My Two Nads” (Dad Reprise) 4:40


#137: Walter Carlos – Sonic Seasonings (1972) Vinyl Download 320: Or, Is It Raining? Is It Snowing? Is A Hurricane A-Blowin?

There’s a big bucket of everything going on in this record. Carlos uses up to 48 “Dolbyized” tracks (including electronic/quasi-classical/ambient music composed and performed by Carlos along with environmental recordings including surf, birds, frogs, lightning, wind, rain, and anything else Mother Nature can cook up) at any given point in this monstrous psychoacoustic experiment. The whole effect simultaneously soothes and challenges the old noggin’ in the most curious way.

Here’s a simple way to describe it. Take one of Walter Carlos’ traditional early-electronic Moog pieces and mix it with one or two discs from the Environments series. Make sure they’re smooshed together nicely then board ‘em on Willy Wonka’s Psychedelic Boat Trip.

Only attempt in the company of a responsible adult. Or a frog bong.

Sonic Seasonings is a Double LP with four different “songs”, which are as follows:

Side 1: Spring (22:09 Minutes)

Side 2: Summer (21:31 Minutes)

Side 3: Fall (20:56 Minutes)

Side 4: Winter (20:31 Minutes)

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Click here to download Sonic Seasonings from vinyl at 320 kbps

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#110: King Of Woolworths – Ming Star (2001) Vinyl Download 320 kbps

There isn’t much I know about King Of Woolworths. There isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for the group. The little I’ve found out about project has been through sites run by fans around the globe. I only know that I LOVE this album.

It was only by a chance that I ever even heard about them in the first place. During the summer of 2002 the radio station WOXY, in Oxford, OH at the time, starting playing this curious little track called “To The Devil A Donut.” It started off in slow rotation but eventually made it into heavy play for a few solid months. I’m not sure the DJs even knew much about it…they just liked it so they put it on the radio.

It’s a pretty creepy track with bits from an old horror movie entitled “To The Devil A Daughter”. On the face there are very obvious reasons why it’s got a case of the creep. It uses snippets of dialogue about baptizing a baby in the blood of her dead mother, bringing that babe up in seclusion as the devil,  and then pumping her full of morphine. You know, the usual.

But it’s not really what’s on the face that makes it creep hypnotique, verging on a dream. With every song on this album I envision myself lying on the ground, staring face up at a different situation. The beat, the strange use of strange 70′s British synth, and the vaporous ambient cloud swallows you up and spits you out on another locale at each track’s start

With “To The Devil A Daughter” I envision myself sprawled out in a cold cellar of an ancient English country manor. It’s so old, in fact, that the floor is composed of soft, damp earth instead of hard cement. The walls are large stone without caulk. The ceiling is comprised of old oak beams, covered in spider webs. The room is lit by the soft but terrifying flicker of torch light. Hooded shadows work their way in and out of the ominous glow, always threatening but never pouncing. The suspense is terrible but just as it comes to a climax the track changes and I’m transported elsewhere.

In “Theydon” I’m lying on the beach somewhere on the coast of the North Sea. I don’t know how I got there and I don’t know why I’m wet and I don’t know why I’m wearing a blue and white fleece because I don’t ever wear fleece but I don’t care. I don’t care because beautiful music floats over my drenched body and connects me with the little pebbles covering my jeans. I say hello to the passing gulls. The sun rises and I worry temporarily that it will melt my bones, but the fear quickly passes and I’m at peace. Everything’s OK.

The album takes turns tossing you psychologically from dark to light, harm to safety. It’s like a continually operating wooden rollercoaster in an abandoned park that you keep riding over and over and over. You always think it’s gonna jump the tracks and fling you into a bloody underbrush demise. But it doesn’t, it keeps on round and round in a beautiful and terrifying loop.

I think Mr. King Of Woolworths himself, Jon Brooks, puts it best: “Everything’s fine, but there is something not quite right about it.”

>>>Click here to download Ming Star

Tracklist

1 Kentish Town 5:33
2 Bakerloo (Main Titles) 6:19
3 Where Fleas Hide 1:58
4 Stalker Song 4:44
5 Colcannon 5:14
6 To The Devil A Donut 6:02
7 Kite Hill 5:30
8 The Watchmaker’s Hands 7:11
9 Theydon 6:49
10 Bakerloo (End Credits) 4:40


#103: Gomez – We Haven’t Turned Around 12″ (1999) Vinyl Download!

This is the album that made me think I wanted to visit the UK. Well, not this actual 12″, but the LP that this 12 was derived from. I bought this 12″ a few years after I bought the original in high school. Sue me…joke’s on you, I’m broke.

For a split second it seems like a good idea, vising the Cream Isle. After all, Britannia rules the waves! Wait, can they really do that? Is their science so far ahead of ours? We can’t even clean oil, albeit millions upon trillions of gallons of oil, from our waves. Yet somehow they are able to force the foaming sea to bring millions of Britons breakfast in bed each and every morning.

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rules the waves!

There really aren’t any perks to visiting England. It’s not like you can hang out for a week on one of their fabulous beaches. You can’t visit their quaint little alpine lodges. You can’t witness the splendor of untainted fauna roaming virgin countrysides. You can’t do none of that because none of that exists!

And do you know why? It’s because the United Kingdom is just a bigger version of New Jersey. There are a lot of weird-looking white people living there with no other place to go. So, in protest of their shitty luck, they’ve been forming unholy missionary positions for the past millenium and producing terribly ugly babies. And those babies have been killing off any wildlife, African Swallows included, they could get within their single-barrel shotgun sights. England, Wales and Scotland aren’t the shallow end of the gene pool…they are the trash compactor.

Instead of white trash they have "chavs".

But somehow this little island of misfit boy toys never fails to produce a steady stream of musical savants. And you know what, it kind of gives me the creeps. It’s not like these guys are being fostered in a culturally rich environment. The Beatles were from Liverpool, for Christ’s sake.

With less than 900,000 “Liverpudlians” within the greater city limits, Liverpool is less populous than Cincinnati. The only thing that ever came out of Cincinnati was 27th President of the United States William Howard Taft. He was a president so terrible that Teddy Roosevelt came out of political retirement to form a new political party in an attempt to knock Taft, Roosevelt’s former Vice President, out of office.

Nice pants, asshole.

So how, oh how, is it that this land mass crawling with cheeky monkeys keeps birthing killer bands? After listening to the song “Gomez In A Bucket (A Seaside Town Made Of Ice Cream, Slowly Melting)” I think I’ve found an answer both simple and mysterious. That, of course, is the little known existence of an unbelievably potent strain of Indian hash called “Symphalamajamjam”.

Everyone thinks that Gandhi was the reason India gained independence from the British. Non-violence my ass. No, it was because all of the Maharajas running the Indian drug trade got together and said enough was enough; those British bastards had hampered their sweet cheeba trade for long enough. So, in a bid to rid their dominion of the buzzkill wankers, the head Maharaja met secretly with GeorgeVI to let him in on a little secret.

This guy loved the doobage.

Boss Maharaja sais, “Look Georgey Boy, I don’t like you and you don’t like me,” he says. “You been floppin’ your stinky pikey feet all over my sweet subcontinental turf for too long. I want you gone and gone quick but I’m gonna make it real sweet for you, see?”

Boss Maharaja leaned in real close to George VI. It looked as if he would kiss George on the brow, but he resisted.

“This here Symphalamajamjam is gonna make all your people real good at the gee-tar. One toke and they will be just as good as the Beatles, maybe better.”

“Why in the bloody hell would I want my subjects acting like insects, blub blub blub,” said a moistening Charles.

“That’s not important, my man, that’s not important,” said Boss Maharaja. “What is important is that you take this little brick of sticky wicky home along with these seeds. Every street and alley in London will be like a god damn Gilbert and Sullivan convention. You dig?”

“No, but your turban is very convincing.”

And that’s how Gomez came to produce this 12″ in 1999.

Click here to download We Haven’t Turned Around and all the fixins’.

Tracklist

A1 We Haven’t Turned Around 6:30
A2 Flight 3:30
A3 Rosemary 4:51
B1 We Haven’t Turned Around (X-Ray Version) 3:16
B2 Gomez In A Bucket (A Seaside Town Made Of Ice Cream, Slowly Melting) 10:02
B3 Emergency Surgery 2:18

#100: Tobacco – Maniac Meat (2010) Vinyl Download

Tying down the sound that Tobacco uses on this album can be a bit of a challenge. There are so many analog, digital and motocicletic manipulations of good, church-going sounds. I think the cover really is a good place to start. It’s fair to liken it unto a journey untertaken by big bowl of sweet meat beats while being chewed and gnashed by a muscley Pat. Manlady ate all sorts of Legos and carpet earlier in the day so shit gets hairy once everything arrives in Gullet Town.

But I think the best way to describe this is by remembering the first time you tripped some serious balls on shrooms. You remember, you were camping on the bank of the Great Miami River just outside of Harrison, OH. It was early summer and you could hear Edgewater Dragstrip from just outside of the valley. Those blown Mustangs and funny cars sounded like prehistoric beasts fighting for a giant rack of Fred Flintstone ribs.

It also happened to be the weekend of Gravelrama on the opposite side of the river in Cleves, OH. Gravelrama celebrates the tradition of Rednecks getting loaded, playing loud hillbilly music and ramping their 4-wheelers up and around a gravel track in what they call a “race”.

Between the dragstrip and the good ol’ boys’ convention it sounded like World War 3 had broken out over the baby blue airspace blanketing the protected Ohio watershed.

So it wasn’t surprising that soon after you downed your 1/8th ounce of funky cowpoop mushies the sounds of the ‘Rama took you by the cerebelum. Not in the way that a Geico commercial will hold your attention for 30 seconds and then immediately leave you playing the husk of a man role on Law & Order. No, because the thwomp el shroomhammer laid on you that early summer evening knew no time. You were locked in the midst of the nothing, staring into a  tiny cesspool on the Great Miami, observing the mosquito breeding ground and just knowing what they were up to. You just knew.

Suddenly, you heard the ominous beat of a drum, the kind primitive people construct from a hollowed tree stump and stretched hide of animal skin. It became louder and louder, emanating from around the bend…somewhere off toward I-74. And then it appeared, a viking ship, a real life viking ship curling around the bend in all its awesome splendor. You could see the men rowing their long oars in tempo with the terrible pounding of the deerflesh drum. Onward to pillage the awesome treasure of your recently discovered bloodsucker fucking ground. “You can’t have it!” you yelled. “Their diseases are mine!” And you stood ready for a fight, even if it meant tearing your brown Levi’s Action Slacks. But as soon as they rounded that tiny little bend in the supposed Great they were gone.

And it became quite apparent that everything you knew, even the 15-minute-old memory of that Wendy’s JBC, didn’t seem real anymore. You were transported to a scene that you’d only seen on television in the no man’s land of 80′s summertime Saturday programming. Crazy trees that whispered directions to an abandoned trailer at the fork in the trail you dared not trespass. Purple mists that sprang from the gravel, the dirt, thin air and your suspiciously dry palms. Your fellow campers grew three sets of eyes, two mouths, and the ability to spit fire representing every spectrum known, and unknown, to scientific man.

Eventually, you left your party and sat in the forest to think of time and all eternity. Roots and thickets of all races laughed, played and grew from every part of your being. You became a fully functioning, almost necessary part of the forest. If you left, your leafy green friends would lose all knowledge of man, and therefore, the upper hand. The forest’s understanding of empty fiberglass boat hulls, giant tractor trailer hubs, aluminum dishwashers, Appalachian sized mountains of beer cans would all be lost. The forest would again become retarded…no longer a participant in our ugly pissing game.

And then, out of nowhere, your slinky friend showed up. He was obviously lost in some sort of Very Old Barton trance. He saw neither here nor there and, therefore, did not see the Buckeye tree planting its vulgar root at the base of your skull.

So, standing before you and oblivious to your presence, or that of God, he removed his pants und underskins and exposed his soft pleasure to find divine relief from his bourbon laden insides . But, instead of a penis…long, short, crooked, tanned, stove-burned…there was a spinning paisley vortex in its place. Just a terrible choke of tie patterns laughing at the both of you; learning how to breathe and downloading the latest version of Powerpoint to your hard drives.

>>>Click here to download the best thing to happen to you since blue vinyl gloves.

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