the shamen: c/d

Pragmatism=not a hippie trait.

(i have a grudge against "ebeneezer goode" for coming RIGHT AFTER "papua new guinea" on my rave nation comp - ie there is no time whatsoever between "png" ending & "a wise philosopher once told me nawwty nawwty nawwty", ugh).

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330289640769

free p&p though.

The reason for the sale is that Mr.C will be moving to another country in the summer of 2009 & believes that these records would be better being used by someone that will love them & value them as he does instead of them simply sitting in storage forever.

I actually like this. Hope it goes through, why not?

i'd love to see a list of the collection - bet there are some crackers in there.
and yes, it will be interesting to see if this one flys as opposed to some of these other big collection auctions that have famously failed to sell.

On one hand yes, on the other hand I can't imagine ditching my "life's work" like that, but then again I am overly sentimental about my music collection.

xpost

i just misheard a snippet of 'move any mountain' as severed heads' 'dead eyes opened'.. i wonder if there's some influence there...?

any news re the recent reformation rumours ?

[app. as a consequence of colin getting on stage during underworlds set]

also, seems that the bands old 'nemetom' site has been restored : http://www.nemeton.com/

I was playing a lot of En-Tact last week, it is amazing how that album (UK version) is 20 years old and still rock-solid from start to finish.

yeah, i need to check that out again
(the uk version = the one with all the big name remixes ? orbital ? )
from my faltering grey cells, was their best album methinks.
though i did like acid house mini lp phorward more at the time.
i think i have bought boss drum in recent years and the remix album, and never actually listened to either of them.
time to go a digging in the archive.

Funny, I had a mini Shamen revival well, in my head, in the past few weeks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En-Tact

I think you mean the US one (which did have the Orbit remix of "Hyperreal" which is flat-out stunning; I never got the US version because I hated the remix of "Pro-Gen" and I already had the "Hyperreal" single)

13."Hear Me O My People" (Orbital - Delays Expected) (Mix by Orbital) – 7:24

this is amazing if i recall correctly.

tis the original UK version thats hidden in the archive.

omg haha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgpeJV0-qHI&feature=related

xp: yeah that track is BLINDING

I would have had the US version but I've been listening to the Spotify version, whichever that is (it has about 18 more remixes on it.) And now I am going to go and listen to it again, hurrah.

Yes, it's the US version that Spotify has.

Everything just that wubulationtone all over it and makes me instantly happy.

The original "Pro-Gen" has a harder drum loop, which melted my MIND when I heard it in high school; I think it was the first import I ever actively sought out.

The video for Move Any Mountain! I'd never seen it! Wow. I love that whole late 80s/early 90s wacky Stadium House video vibe.

so, the reformation never happened.
shame.
i still think that 'in gorbachev we trust' is the ultimate album that mixed guitar psych and early days acid house machine noise brilliantly with the political paranoia of the day.
bloody hell, just realised, it's the albums 25th anniversary.
while i may feel old and tired, the album still sounds fresh and relevant.

This revive prompted me to revisit The Shamen on Spotify and I'm very happy I did. It's been a very long time since I listened to them.

apparently the gorbachev album is not on spotify !?

and yes, i think its a good time to revisit ..

apart from the HIT, they released a lot of really good stuff ..

the jump in sonics between '.. gorbachev' and 'en-tact' is insane ..

has any other band had such a massive leap between albums ?

charity shop brilliance today.
spotted 'boss drum' in the cd racks, so pulled it out to see condition as I already have it on cd, but hey, for a coin.
and there on the cover, was a sticker : 'limited edition double pack Boss Drum + En-tact TPLP42CL/CDL''
sure enough, there was a perfect cd copy of the US edition of the En-tact as an extra cd, with both full cd covers/inlays so you can choose the album cover you prefer.
happy daze, as I have never heard the US edition in full.
of course, I probably have the remixes on various compilations and such, but for a coin, this was a proper bargain.

If YouTube is any indication a significant section of the listening public are or have been under the impression that the lyrics to LSI are "Love, Sex and Janet Jackson."

I don't know if it's the music, or the associations, but these guys are just my single most go-to prescription for instant, total euphoria and silly, giddy happiness.

I literally keep The Shamen Collection: Hits and Bonus Remixes in the pedastal by my bed, because it is the fastest-acting stimulant and antidepressant I have ever known.

This one works wonders for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQG1xSdNZVY

The associations feel very silly to me whenever I actually listen to The Shamen but I'm always so glad they're there in the abstract. Utopian early 90s hippy house feels so diametrically opposite from where we are now that it's almost impossible not to look upon it with affection. And I'm not sure any act made the jump from hippy to high street so comprehensively? Like, they were massive and now basically written out of history.

The pop narratives of the 90s really underplay quite how hippy the first few years of the decade were and quite how pronounced the impact on mainstream culture could be, like The Orb had multiple top 40 hits, the Levellers had number one albums, that Swampy dude was a nationally recognised household name. Britpop basically killed all that but even the narratives that attempt to redress the balance in early 90s music tend to focus on eg shoegazing while overlooking how massive the whole hippy thing was. (And maybe with good reason, it's maybe difficult to make a lot of that stuff look cool, or even any good).

'New age' whiteboy ragga toasting, early 90's trippy visuals & *checks notes* an oiled up Jason Statham in speedos and docs = classic

https://youtu.be/wFB3q0mMBK8

There was also the whole free festival/Megadog thing in the early 90s that had very hippy overtones xp

And Ozric Tentacles were much bigger than they had any right to be

I mean just aesthetically there's an awful lot going on in that video.

Like, "great sci-fi Gaian cyberpunk vibes guys, could you maybe a stick a few oiled up buff guys in there as well? There's a bit of space there where you could put them".

Holy hell that video is something!!

PLUR, man. PLUR. Groove IIIISSSS in the Heart.

To this day, I do not know if Mr C was Gay Or Just British

He's married to someone called Xochitl... so I still don't know.

Xochitl is what Mr. C lovingly terms a terricola, or what an alien would call an "earth woman" in Spanish. In turn she considers him an alien because he looks like, in his own words, "the whitest person I know anywhere in the world."

I actually used to know a woman called Xochitl, I'm not sure if that was her real name or whether she just called herself that. She was an original hippie too, American, wrote poetry, kind of on a different planet most of the time.

Just imagine showing that video to anyone under the age of 30. Trying to think if any of the visual elements would translate at all. Maybe post-Grimes, post-Soundcloud rap there are specific bits of bad taste you could get away with again now.

I’m still completely unsure how me and my best friend got into them in Alabama. Maybe MTV? I feel like En-Tact was one of the first CDs I ever owned.

Completely impossible to listen to them now without putting my face in my hands, of course. Matt DC otm about the hippy factor in early 90s charts, although I don’t think there’s such a mystery why it’s not a topic of retrospective discussion. It’s just not cool! We want to talk about cool things!

Buy it is (or should be) fascinating that The Shamen took that brand of 'zippy' cyber hype and psychedelic advocacy so explicitly into the charts. And how silly and funny it was.

I don't know, I'm at the point where I'm too old to care about what is 'cool' or not any more, and I've let go of a lot of embarrassment over music, and just arrived at a point of "this makes me happy" - the hippie utopianism of stuff like The Shamen and Future Sound of London is, at this point, sweetly nostalgic rather than the cringey.

That utopianism may feel silly, but it was born of a kind of optimism? Was it a general political spirit of optimism in the late 80s/early 90s? Or was it just that so many of us on ILX were at the critical music-discovering period of our lives, during that place and time? Nah, I think there genuinely was something around the time that acid house (as defined as "dance music plus hippie utopianism") exploded into popular culture, that felt optimistic enough to allow all that silliness and funnyness to be an OK place to inhabit en masse.

Drugs.

The drug of choice can be a reflection of The Times as much as it can drive the creation of A Time?

(Put an echo on that and play it over a triply best and that could be a Shamen B-Side haha)

Not intended as a diss to say it's silly. Nobody else was quite so on the nose with all that though, certainly not anyone commercially successful. I was more on board before Boss Drum but happy to see them do well.

Utopianism might have been around but for me and my milieu it wasn't by any means simply optimistic, not by that point in the 90s anyway.

The drug of choice can be a reflection of The Times as much as it can drive the creation of A Time?

Yes, but then it's also about availability and ease of supply.

I am OK with silliness. In many ways, I am on the side of silliness.

I just whacked L.S.I on and was amazed/appalled that I knew all of the words to the rap bit despite not having heard it for 27 years.

I don't think I ever listened to the entire Boss Drum album

their website is still online.
was quite possibly the first band website i ever checked in on.
last year i chanced upon the Pro-gen mini-lp on cd for a coin.
14 different versions, followed by a track made of 16 samples and beats so you can make your own.
needless to say, despite that i still love this band a lot more than i should, i have never listened to all of that cd either.

The vinyl version of En-Tact was beautiful, all embossed grays and blacks on the outside then the inner sleeve was all rainbow-colored. It just wasn't good though. The Red Red Groovy album holds up better.

Wait, which version of En-Tact do you mean? The one with the original Pro-Gen was straight fire all the way through IMO.

The Red Red Groovy album holds up better

huh ?

as we have discussed previously, En-tact is all about the original UK cd version.
far far better than the edited US edition.

I mean, the Red Red Groovy album is also good but this iteration of En-Tact is all-time: https://www.discogs.com/The-Shamen-En-Tact/release/72718

i have no idea what the Red Red Groovy album is.

This (from around the same time)?

https://www.discogs.com/Red-Red-Groovy-25/master/24418

ahh - never heard/seen.
seems to be a US only thing.

All this time maybe I just had the wrong version of En-Tact. Anyway Red Red Groovy are a band, their album (from 1993) was called 25... it's on Spotify! They were from Minnesota and had a singer that sounded like Siouxsie Sioux. 25 still pairs real well with FSOL's Lifeforms.

Standout track on the Red Red Groovy album is "Come To Me Ecstacy" but the whole thing is great

Yeah, I've never heard of them either (and was massively into progressive house in 93) xps

(also, re Red Red Groovy - i thought you were referring to something by the Shamen - hence my surprise)

(The Red Red Groovy album was produced by the guy who produced all the good Insane Clown Posse albums, btw)

but don't worry they also have an obnoxious male vocalist

All this time maybe I just had the wrong version of En-Tact

Absolutely you did. The US release is a straight-up hatchet job.

Oh I had the UK vinyl edition! But it's got a different track listing than the CD at a glance

Come to Me, Ecstasy has to be the closest any American band ever got to sounding like Saint Etienne

I ended up buying a Czech pressing of EN-TACT because it was the only vinyl pressing that had a couple unique versions that were only available on some CD copies. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have bothered, but it as about $7 + shipping, so I figured that's a coffee and pastry + tip. I remember Red Red Groovy, but I considered them a 2nd rate Candyflip, and prefered Candyflip for my cheesy af dance grooves.

(also, re Red Red Groovy - i thought you were referring to something by the Shamen

I was thinking of this 1985 B-side by a pre-KLF Jimmy Cauty and Youth

The Shamen's hippiness came off as a weird adjunct in the context of them as a char band, but earnestly utopian if you bought imported UK music press, where they were insisting on sharing front covers with Terence McKenna and having him interviewed alongside them

due to kid kaos vs PS4 demands i have been banished to the room with the stereo.
so decided to add : Progeny, Shamen Collection (Disc 1), and Different Drum into a playlist.
Hit fade out/fade in + random.
i know there are lot of these remixes that i will never have heard as i usually pick an album to listen to, so this could be either brilliant, or very boring.
4 tracks into the 45, and so far i am loving my decision.
Especially, Scientas (Irresistible Force Mix) : this is up there with the Grid vs Global Communication remix for 90s blissed out ambience.

re Progeny, from Discogs : Inlay reads: "We're sick of remixing this fucker - so here are the bits, go do it yourself!"

brilliant.

The first band I ever properly followed. Saw them live twice, once at Glasgow College of Building and Printing in the summer of 1990 and once at Livingston Forum in October 1991 (alongside Meat Beat Manifesto). Around the time en-tact was out I saw Colin Angus and Plavka (vocalist on Hypereal and later on Jam and Spoon’s awful Right in the Night) in Virgin Megastore Glasgow Union Street and they looked like the coolest people I had ever seen.

Obviously some of their output is absurd but I think that this holds up pretty well....

https://open.spotify.com/track/4pHgViPo4BvZKednIkYPwS?si=iMnkDLIwTmunp7cpRBPGLA

saw them twice.
guitars with samples and beat boxes on the Gorbachev tour,
and then the Synergy rave thing with Mixmaster Morris/Eskimos & Egypt.
brilliant but very different gigs.

Maybe it's upthread but I'm surprised nobody's brought up this yet.

When sky sports introduced the new Monday night football! The Shamen signing Ebeneezer Goode at Highbury in 1992. The memories! Needless to say this half time entertainment was binned after about 6 months 😂#highbury #theshamen #arsenal #sky #MNF pic.twitter.com/hVZ31bRB0d

— Arsenal Nostalgia (@arsenal_vids) February 7, 2018

~ fills up glass of wine, puts on headphones, and drops Axis Mutatis into the playlist ~

The Red Red Groovy album holds up better.

En-Tact was from 1990 and Red Red Groovy from 1993. 3 years doesn't seem so much time now, but at that point in time in music, it might as well have been three decades.

Saw them live twice, once at Glasgow College of Building and Printing in the summer of 1990 and once at Livingston Forum in October 1991

I was involved with promoting both of those.

Colin Angus was going out with my flatmate around that time and I can vouch that he was a genuine psychonaut, and very earnestly utopian.

the post we needed.

1993 was great though, it also had the One Dove album, and Saint Etienne's So Tough

1993 was great!

The Shamen were fantastic.

Another absolute gem from that period capturing that same feeling is Sequencial's The Big Cahoona which according to the booklet is a PLURed out concept album about a psychedelic space journey involving meditation and, ehm, "space gypsies". It also manages to shoehorn (remixes of) their pre-album house hits like "Cycades" and "Psychotronic" into the bizarre storyline.

Colin Angus was going out with my flatmate around that time and I can vouch that he was a genuine psychonaut, and very earnestly utopian.

― stirmonster, Wednesday, 5 August 2020 21:24

Awwww, Colin Angus was genuinely adorable in a kind of Ralf Hütter-esque way, and I really hope he was a kind and lovely sort of fellow, as well as an earnest psychonaut.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/80/78/57/807857681090f5aaf74671eb861bc019.jpg

Before things degenerated into kind of Cyberdog silliness, there was a whole thing through the mid to late 80s of apparently heterosexual-(ish) men going about dressed like fetish lesbians and I am SO HERE FOR IT.

https://nostalgiacentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/shamen33.jpg

A couple of months ago some ~Tumblr kids~ of my acquaintance were passing around scans of a fashion catalogue from the late 90s - it wasn't Cyberdog, but it was very very cyber-y rave-y super-wide pants you could hide a 90s laptop in the pockets of, neon circuit board inserts in the T-shirts type stuff and they were all laughing their heads off going "what WERE our parents thinking?!?!?" - but at the same time recognising that it was not a million miles from their own net-kid aesthetics - like hippie-cyber-utopianism millenarianism was a very specific time and place, and I really suspect that the corporate wave of Web 1.0 dot.com-bubble killed off the joy of it. But I am still very nostalgic for that time and place.

Also Bytes, Surfing on Sine Waves, Gargantuan, The Brown Album and UW's Spikee, Rez & Mmm..Skyscraper. Plus lots of ace compilations like Trance 2 and Dub House Disco 2000 xps

~Ecstacy and MIDI Will Set Us All Free~ --> the birth of the 21st century's brutal technosurveillance-capitalism was a very short but absolutely wild ride

Sound Clash Republic (Fabio Paras) - The Birth Of Shiva Shanti epitomises 1993 prog house for me. xps

Did love taht point where they were just becoming more electronic , stuff like She's Shitting ON Britain.

Not sure if I've heard Aloneagainor the original incarnation of the band.

did wind up being put up in what had been Will's room i a shared house in Edinburgh though I think he may have already moved out at the point, definitely not there when i was.

Would love a whole cd of that era around Shitting oN Britain but not sure there was one. Think the compi that did have several of the tracks also had some other eras.
THink I came across the SSOB track on a compilation tape that was covermounted on lime Lizarrd.

Meta-post, please skip if you hate meta

This thread is really showing me the difference between the two 'sides' or 'modes' of ILM, and I know that we had at least one thread (possibly several threads) about those modes, but the labyrinthine quality of ILM and its search function are making it impossible for me to locate those discussions.

There's a style of fandom/criticism which is curative, collecting. It's about the *what* of the music, how is it made, what does it relate to, where does it fit within notions of 'genre', how does it compare to others of that type (list-making, polling, etc.)

There's another style of fandom/criticism which is far more... how is this music *used*? Under what circumstances do people listen to it, where did they encounter it? What does it mean, how does it fit into other forms of culture and subculture, contextualising and storytelling.

And ILM is great, because the community as a whole constantly slips back and forth between the various modes, and ILM starts to be really boring when one mode dominates completely over the other. However, I personally have strong preferences for one form of engagement over the other. This thread is really, really reminding me of that tension as it slips back and forth. (Where the Jane's thread was almost entirely the latter.)

(Damn! I wish I could remember what thread it was. I have an awful feeling it was part of the Rockism v Poptimism wars. Where on earth do The Shamen fit in the Rockism vs Poptimism Wars, I have no idea.)

Plavka (vocalist on Hypereal and later on Jam and Spoon’s awful Right in the Night)

I love the Shamen, but "Right in the Night" and "Find Me" are still better than any of their singles.

When sky sports introduced the new Monday night football! The Shamen signing Ebeneezer Goode at Highbury in 1992.

I do hope they had the good sense to keep them away from Paul Merson.

Also, back in the day I remember people saying that the quality of the Shamen's output dropped after Will Sinnot drowned in 1991? They certainly seemed to move to a more poppy/Eurodancey direction after his death, but that could've been a coincidence (and the Eurodance singles were great anyway).

What happened to the other member of the rock version of the Shamen besides Sinnot, btw? Were they still around after they switched to dance music, or was it only Colin Angus, Mr. C. and Sinnott at that point?

Sorry, the name is Sinnott with two T's, not Sinnot.

Further down the rabbit hole I found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lt9c4qm_G0

Like imagine going to an Underworld gig in Ibiza at the tail end of the last decade and then have Mr C just come on and the band just launch into Move Any Mountain. Everyone would go fucking bananas.

Also from their Wikipedia entry, is this true? Because this is some Holly Herndon shit right here, 25 years early:

Always seeking to push out musical and communication boundaries, the Shamen saw themselves as an information band. Their Internet site Nemeton [6] was amongst the first British music sites to host unique Web based events, e.g. releasing the first ever single and LP on the net in 1995[7] and it also features a remarkable piece of software devised by Angus to convert the DNA structures of human life into electronic music. "S2 Translation", a track on Axis Mutatis, was generated using this software.

looks like there wasa specific point in 1988 that I really liked, before the band really became house influenced I think.
& there was an e.p. from taht era, expanded on cd but not reissued since then.
THe one with the tory minister on acid sample as lead track I think.

Also from their Wikipedia entry, is this true? Because this is some Holly Herndon shit right here, 25 years early:

Always seeking to push out musical and communication boundaries, the Shamen saw themselves as an information band. Their Internet site Nemeton [6] was amongst the first British music sites to host unique Web based events, e.g. releasing the first ever single and LP on the net in 1995[7] and it also features a remarkable piece of software devised by Angus to convert the DNA structures of human life into electronic music. "S2 Translation", a track on Axis Mutatis, was generated using this software.

I don't actually care if this is true or not, it's such a great story I need to go and seek this out right now. I don't think I have ever heard the full album - I experienced them soley as a singles / tracks you hear on the dancefloor band, and am quite unfamiliar with the album tracks. Is this going to be painful or amazing?

Yeah, the DNA thing is true (or at least a very convincing fabrication), it was mentioned in their interviews at the time. And Axis Mutatis does have the track (supposedly) based on the human DNA code, there's some info on it in the liner notes. It sounds pretty much as you'd expect, basically and IDM peace with aleatory "melodies".

"basically an IDM piece"

Haha, it sounds like a less glitchy take on... Holly Herndon. (Unsurprisingly)

What happened to the other member of the rock version of the Shamen besides Sinnot, btw? Were they still around after they switched to dance music, or was it only Colin Angus, Mr. C. and Sinnott at that point?

Will Sin replaced one of the original members himself, and then AIUI the other members at the time left within a year or so as Angus and Sin steered the band harder into electronics.

I experienced them soley as a singles / tracks you hear on the dancefloor band, and am quite unfamiliar with the album tracks. Is this going to be painful or amazing?

I do like the album, it's pretty evenly split between the more poppy Eurodance tunes and more experimental trancey tunes. The only real minus is that the main sung vocals are done by Angus only, no Plavka or Jhelisa Anderson, and I've never really considered him that great a singer.

But you gotta love the fact that they had a top 20 hit with a rap verse like this:

And on across the Rubicon
So immanentize thy eschaton
Unto Ragnarok or Nemeton, and beyond
In the name of Adam Kadmon, you move on
Ego gone as one
Transformation to solarisation
Towards the final confrontation
Eschaton is thy destination

OMG @ that Underworld do Move Any Mountain clip?!?!? I'm not sure I can cope with this at this time in the morning. My BRANE is broken.

Techno Dads on acid... but totally authentically ~of the period~, with a glittery dude on guitar making gestures which bear no relation to any actual sound apparent within the mix?

Awwww, Colin Angus was genuinely adorable in a kind of Ralf Hütter-esque way, and I really hope he was a kind and lovely sort of fellow, as well as an earnest psychonaut.

Yes, very much so.

What happened to the other member of the rock version of the Shamen besides Sinnot, btw? Were they still around after they switched to dance music, or was it only Colin Angus

I used to see one of the brothers from the rock version around Edinburgh during that era and as far as I recall he didn't do anything music related after The Shamen.

https://www.nemeton.com/static/nemeton/sitemap.html

it's pretty evenly split between the more poppy Eurodance tunes and more experimental trancey tunes

So out of my depth when I try to discuss genre names and assignments here, but the stuff I loved from them was stuff I would consider big, ridiculous, rock-riff Stadium House - I suppose that's the more Eurodance end?

I don't mind Angus' voice. He's not a strong singer, but when he's double-tracked and harmonised he does a capable choirboy. That's what I enjoyed - the contrast between these big Stadium House gestures, the female singers giving it everything, Mr C's theatrics, and then these slightly weedy indie boy vocals that reminded me of like, Ride or something? That's what made it charming for me, the unexpected mixture.

(the glittery dude is Karl Hyde, the lead singer and guitarist of Underworld)

Aww, I didn't recognise Karl. I should have known. I love him - he was in the Conny Plank film being all excitable about Krautrock. <3

Wow, the Nemeton.com has actually preserved the Axis Mutatis era site as I remember it from 1995/6:

https://www.nemeton.com/static/nemeton/axis-mutatis

Here's some further information on "S2 Translation":

"The track 'S2 Translation' was generated from the DNA sequence and the amino acid characteristics of the S2 protein. The time signature of the piece is given by the codon: 3 base pairs per codon gives one codon per bar, hence the time signature is 3/4 or waltz time.The 'top line melody' comes directly from the base pair sequence itself (the bases cystosine, adenine, guanine and thymidine being mapped to the notes C, A G and E respectively) while progressions in the bass are reflective of the characteristics of the amino acids which are the result of translation. The number and nature of bass notes per codon/bar were determined by the hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity, ionic charge (positive or negative) and size of each amino acid residue (Proline, for example,which has no characteristics other than its small size, can be identified easily as the bars where the bass line 'drops out'). The musical output resulting from these rules was further processed by mapping the notes onto different tonalities, both to make the piece more interesting, and to suggest the organisation of the protein molecule into regions of different secondary structure (although since S2 is a membrane protein and thus impossible to crystallise outside the lipid bilayer, this was definitely creative licence).

S2 is the receptor protein for 5-hydroxy tryptamine (Serotonin) and presumably for other tryptamines as well. It is thus one of the most important molecules in the mediation of both ordinary and non-ordinary (or "Shamanic") states of consciousness, which is why the molecule was chosen for this piece." - Colin Angus

So out of my depth when I try to discuss genre names and assignments here, but the stuff I loved from them was stuff I would consider big, ridiculous, rock-riff Stadium House - I suppose that's the more Eurodance end?

The Eurodance formula at its purest was: a pop-house beat + melismatic lead vocals, usually sung by a woman + a verse or two of Euro rapping. Their singles like "L.S.I." and "Phorever People" fit the formula perfectly, by Axis Mutatis they'd tweaked it a bit by Angus being the only lead vocalist, but other than it still fits the mold.

Though out of the vocal songs on Axis Mutatis, the one I like the most is actually "Prince of Popocatapetl", which is slower and moodier, doesn't have Mr. C. rapping, and sounds more like synth-pop than Eurodance.

Sorry, Tuomas I just went and read up a few ILM thread about Eurodance, and one of your polls revealed that the genre-defining track was Technotronic: Pump Up the Jam (which is admittedly one of the greatest songs ever recorded). So, basically Tom Ewing anthems. It's funny, when that material is done well, it's one of my sweetest sweet spots. But when it strays too far into Schlager, the returns diminish fast as it approaches pure cheese. (Which could be said about any pop genre.)

There needs to be a dose of genuine WTF insanity in a good Stadium House tune - something that makes you sit up and go "WTF just happened on TOTP?!?!?" Like Ebeneezer Goode is the archetype of that?

Listening to Prince of Popocatapetl now, and it's a bit too chill. Destination Eschaton, I knew as a single. Conquistador is sounding more like what I'd want. It's that choppy tremolo synth sound that does it for me, rather than the more echoey synth pad sounds.

Someone I know regularly mentions the bonus ambient (?) album that came with early copies of Axis Mutatis so I keep an eye out for the 2CD but haven't found it offline yet.

Plavka (vocalist on Hypereal and later on Jam and Spoon’s awful Right in the Night)
I love the Shamen, but "Right in the Night" and "Find Me" are still better than any of their singles.

― Tuomas, Thursday, 6 August 2020 08:58 (one hour ago) link

SACRILEGE!! But "Stella" on the other hand, remains a classic.

I loved 1993, and Emprion "Narcotic Influence" is peak 1993 for me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLr3dSekkIY

Sorry, Tuomas I just went and read up a few ILM thread about Eurodance, and one of your polls revealed that the genre-defining track was Technotronic: Pump Up the Jam

I'm sure that's because them majority of the voters are from the US and the UK, and that song was a big hit in both countries. But most of Eurodance was made and consumed in continental Europe, and for us the most emblematic Eurodance song would probably be 2 Unlimited's "No Limit", which wasn't a hit in the US, and which was released UK as an edited version without Ray's eurorapping, only with Anita's singing.

the most emblematic Eurodance song would probably be 2 Unlimited's "No Limit"

Naturally I must agree with this.

Talking about Eurodance here is a red herring really, just in case of where they came from and where they fitted in (as opposed to where they briefly ended up in 1992). A song like LSI is as much a cockney geezer/Scottish hippy take on Kevin Saunderson as anything else.

you people made me listen to Phorward yesterday and it stands up and also demonstrates that the Shamen got Bleep Music way faster than any of their reformed indie chancer contemporaries that i can think of

OK, I'm listening to No Limit right now (I only knew the UK version, natch) and I think we're broadly in agreement about what we're talking about.

This would fit perfectly within what I'd call Stadium House - I guess what I mean by that term is... correct me if I'm wrong, but most dance music is about the beat. When you listen to a dance track - case in point, the Emprion track above - usually it starts with the beat so that a DJ can mix it into the previous track, then adds the rhythmic components that make up the distinctive groove, that groove is what makes the song the song, and other elements are added, such as a vocal hook or a memorable riff.

In what I'd call Stadium House, it STARTS with the riff. In the 2 Unlimited track, they bash you immediately over the head with that amazing "DURR DURR DUH-DUH DURR-DURR" riff. You can stick an acid beat under it, you can stick a house beat or a disco beat or whatever under the riff, and do a million remixes. But the riff, the hook is the thing, and not necessarily the groove.

because The Shamen started as a rock band, I think their most distinctive work is about The Riff. That Make It Mine and Move Any Mountain are about the riff, the pop hook, the chant - a lot of UK dance acts of this era (the KLF were classic at this) were about taking a football chant of a vocal riff, and building a song around it.

LOL, Persephone's Quest just came on, and my immediate reaction was "this is an early Spiritualized track, right?" It's got the exact wubwubwub sounds, the exact same shimmer, it's everything I loved about the early 90s in terms of ~sonic texture~.

I guess my mistake was, I was after that specific sound, and followed a bunch of dronerock bands that were producing that sound - into all kinds of rockist nonsense I now regret. Where there's another parallel dimension where I could very easily have gone the other way and sought that sound out in Trance. (Which would have had its own nonsense.)

YES I SAID SONIC TEXTURE DID YOU MISS ME

(don't all shout "no" at once)

Naturally I must agree with this.

― Basil Ker-ching (Noel Emits),

things you were shockingly old when / puns you had missed

The origin of the user name is actually as much John Lilly's province of the mind maxim as 2 Unlimited which is a very The Shamen combo as it happens.

you people made me listen to Phorward yesterday and it stands up and also demonstrates that the Shamen got Bleep Music way faster than any of their reformed indie chancer contemporaries that i can think of

totally OTM.
i mean i loved Gorbachev and all, but this was when i really began to take notice.

That pun could have been clearer, except emit has a long vowel? If it had been Noel Emmetts, 'twould have been clearer but ah well. I get the joke now.

I have to applaud Noel Emits' long game here

also I am very annoyed that Phorward isn't on US Spotify

the 99 reissue is rather pricey on amazon !
i guess not many copies were pressed up.
you can read the sleeve notes written by Paul Lester via the Discogs listing of it.

I found the good version of En-Tact on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehiddG5Sv3M

Freewheelin' just like Franklin.

Hang on, the track list given in the description doesn't seem to match the running order in the video?

It doesn't?

Oh, do you mean the algorithmically-generated one? I always ignore that.

You want this from the description:

01. 00:00:00 Human NRG
02. 00:03:23 Progen (Land Of Oz)
03. 00:07:29 Possible Worlds
04. 00:11:14 Omega Amigo
05. 00:15:58 Hyperreal
06. 00:20:30 Lightspan
07. 00:26:17 Make It Mine V2.5
08. 00:30:14 Oxygen Restriction
09. 00:34:02 Evil Is Even
10. 00:47:16 Human NRG (Massey)
11. 00:51:53 Make It Mine V1.3 (Pirate Radio)
12. 00:56:47 Oxygen Reprise V2.0
13. 01:02:05 Hear Me O My People (Orbital - Delays Expected)

Sorry, I'm being an idiot. Forgot Move Any Mountain was called Progen (Land Of Oz) on the album. I only ever had the 12" singles from this period, at the time. It's cool to hear how they fit together.

Oh, lol! I only ever call it "Pro-Gen" because it reinforces my "I was there" cred that's the first name I heard it under

That running order does kind of fall over at Evil Is Even which, being a 13 minute+ tribal ambient track, is a sudden and sustained drop in energy. It would make better sense as a final track but it's also followed by two vereions that appear earlier and an Orbital collab that also drags IIRC.

* versions of tracks that appear earlier

I treat everything after "Evil Is Even" as a bonus track

this makes me want to listen to ex:el by 808 state

I'm sure the idea was to add value but for that reason it's never quite worked as CD.

LOL, I just ended up working half an hour past my allotted finish time because I was so caught up in this. If everything past Evil Is Even is a bonus track, I can knock off now.

::curses adorable Scottish hippies for making me work too hard::

::shakes rave-cane in Dan's direction::

OMG that Orbital collaboration does not drag. Always been one of the high points for me

OMG!

i tried to start a stadium house thread recently, it went nowhere

t/s - kate bush vs gwen guthrie + annie lenox

utah saints were much better than the shamen, i think

btw i think the line between riff and rhythm is complicated and fuzzy in most dance music if not outright erased so i'm not sure it's a useful distinction. that said the two utah saints tracks do start in unmixable fashion so maybe there's something to it.

Maybe if you'd called it "Stadium House - classic or dud" it would have gone down a bit better? I think the defining quality of Stadium House is that it has a very distinct chant, that could plausibly be sung in the terraces of a football stadium. I think the KLF and the Shamen excelled at that aspect.

What Utah Saints track do you reccommend I start with, because I can't really remember them at all?

(They just kind of blur into a whole mass of other acts like Renegade Soundwave and Meat Beat Manifesto so maybe I've got completely the wrong idea of them.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o712mgqVZXI

Also this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-_HJohPg5Y

Utah Saints ruled

hell I’ll ride for their “new gold dream”

bugger.
you guys are going to make me dig out the second album by utah saints aren't you.
listened to it a couple of times, enjoyed the chuck d appearance, cant remember much else.
their first album is absolutely fantastic, not so sure re the second one.

oh, and like the shamen, i think the debut by utah saints had a very different uk vs us tracklisting

yup.

US debut :

https://www.discogs.com/Utah-Saints-Utah-Saints/release/65265

UK debut :

https://www.discogs.com/Utah-Saints-Utah-Saints/release/23919

Wasn't the second album mainly breakbeat? xps

Wasn't the second album mainly breakbeat?

i think so yeah.
certainly none of that stadium house brilliance from what i can recall.

They probably never made a penny off those singles.

Is it racist to wention Finitribe in relation to The Shamen? I want to dig up good Finitribe songs as well.

sorry, but i don't get the racist jibe.
finitribe were part of the same scene, and i seem to remember there was a lot of connection between both crews.
weren't both bands on OLI together at the same time.
i always wanted to get their stuff, but never did.

Just kidding because I'm connecting them based on both being Scottish bands that embraced house music around the same time. I wasn't sure how much direct connection there was. Certainly really like a few of their tunes and they could be quite pop.

https://youtu.be/1XyLq_2j2_A

ahh .. thought you knew more re the bands histories regarding very local issues between them.
pretty sure they worked together, and did gigs together etc.
for reasons i can't recall, i have nothing by Finitribe.
it's probably cos i have never ever seen anything by Finitribe in a charity shop to be honest.

Finitribe and The Shamen had fairly similar trajectories in that they both evolved from indie post-punk type bands in the 80s to embracing rave culture and technology around the end of the decade (and both signed to One Little Indian around that time)

Surely room for this one in your collection mark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJSequ5TYF0

i would have a lot more room for finitribe if i ever came across their stuff via charity shops and/or bandcamp.

Unexpected Groovy Treat is indeed an unexpected groovy treat, not least this piece of future nostalgia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc-XWU793dw

I listened to the Utah Saints and I enjoyed them, particularly the second track, and I agree that this is pretty delicious Stadium House.

But it still seems to be missing the certain *something* that I get from The Shamen or The KLF, the anarchic sense of "WTF?!" that literally... *anything* could turn up in the next few beats? You have no idea where the track is going, if you're being taken to a gay cyber-rave in a darkened arch underneath some dodgy railway bridge; you could be taken to a remote island where they plan on burning Edward Woodward, a million quid, or quite possibly *you*. The next sample could be Terence McKenna, it could be the Dalai Lama, it could be Tammy Wynette floating up in an Egyptian sun-barge?

I don't know if it's the hippie-dom, the acid, a touch of surrealism or psychosis, but from Utah Saints, I get the feeling of, yeah, ooh, this music is kinda shimmery and psychedelic sounding. But from The Shamen, I get that bizarre 'how is this real' juxtaposition of the everyday and the extremely freaking weird, that genuinely *feels* like a psychedlic experience - or a break from reality - does?

I'll listen to the Finitribe next. ha ha oh god this is so adorably Scottish.

(OK, I guess I've kind of answered my own question here, in noting that the truly surreal / dreamlike / psychedelic experience is not the ~completley off the wall~ weird, but the absurd juxtaposition of the absolutely unexpected and weird, with the completely mundane and familiar. That it's not 'the Dalai Lama', it's the image of the Dalai Lama drinking vermillion tea from lotus leaves with your Great-Aunt Matilda. And I guess because of my own personal background, 'Scottish hippies' reads as the background childhood normality against which all of the other weirdness becomes psychedelic and surreal, rather than purely nonsensical.)

The Shamen and the KLF both had rock backgrounds, is probably the difference and brought that 'chuck a bit of this and see what happens' sensibility to it. Early house music does that as well but in a much more formalised structure, while early 90s/late 80s rock music was in quite a state of flux anyway.

I remember seeing The Shamen do Phorever People at Glastonbury (on TV) and I'm pretty sure they had the singer on a swing dressed up as Alice. They were quite happy to be as obvious as possible with the imagery when they wanted to. The Orb could have gone down a similar road and did on occasion but their focus was wayyyy more horizontal.

In contrast Utah Saints were quite content making gigantic stadium sized bosh which probably has more in common spiritually with EDM than the other acts here. Even their logo looked like a cheap casualwear logo from the time.

I remember seeing The Shamen do Phorever People at Glastonbury (on TV)

That reminds I remember seeing The Shamen on stage at Glastonbury and my mate I was with either convinced or for some reason trying to convince me that it was actually happening on TV. LOL.

I remember seeing The Shamen do Phorever People at Glastonbury (on TV) and I'm pretty sure they had the singer on a swing dressed up as Alice.

This sounds amazing, but doesn't seem to appear in the televised coverage? The singer does have long blonde extensions, but unfortunately there's no swing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U7E8QLUkZs

Unless they did more than one Glasto? That's entirely possible.

(Please could the cheekboney dude with the filter sweeps on his Roland synth be sent to my tent? kthxbai)

I was at Glastonbury that year but have no idea if we saw The Shamen or not. Think that was the first year they had a dedicated Dance Tent and we spent most of the weekend in there

I strongly associate "Weekend" by DJ Dick with The Shamen because both were frequently played on the dance mix show I listened to religiously in high school/early college (Depth Probe by Kevin Cole; I think there is a Soundcloud or Mixcloud archive out there somewhere)

i see anti saints rockism has reared its ugly head!!!

Bosh rockism.

Come on and bosh me, Amadeus!

Kevin Cole, wow. Well, now I'm a member of the Rev 105 Facebook group.

Let the record state I am 100% in favour of Utah Saints but they're neither psychedelic nor art-prankster enough for what we're talking about here, they're closer to The Prodigy really than anything Branwell's talking about.

What about, say, "Temple of Dreams"?

Temple Of Dreams is great stadium house, as are the Utah Saints singles - searching for more stuff as elevated art-pop as the KLF or committedly psychedelic as the Shamen is never going to pay off. Think of them as satisfyingly better than Scooter, not disappointing for not being as good as one of the best bands in the history of the universe.

This was also great (if not quite as good as Temple of Dreams)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clIqSMrsRNw

i played the MESSIAH album this week in honour of this thread revival.
its not that good.

See the only thing that comes close, for me, is the Future Sound of London, who have the utopian cyber-psychedelia thing down - but they’re not even remotely Stadium House.

But that’s the kind of hippie art-prank vibe I’m looking for!

I tend to think of FSOL as blissed-out ecoterrorists

SHPONGLE ?
they were all over the hippy/cyber thing.
the album i have is totally Shamen via ambient/techno/dub,
but without the pop tunes.

https://www.discogs.com/Shpongle-Nothing-Lasts-But-Nothing-Is-Lost/master/7831

Ha! Shpongle!

Had completely forgotten about those dudes. Spent a lot of time stoned listening to those albums

Now I want to play the Opus III album

Messiah were basically a decent C-grade 'ardcore group who did a good imitation of Utah Saints' imitation of the KLF for one single iirc

can anyone remember what the Fini Tribe track with the church bells samples was called? had a quick look thru YT but no luck so far.

Come on sic, "There Is No Law" bangs

nevermind, found it. still sounds pretty great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNzr2qUmfgk

Come on sic, "There Is No Law" bangs

I said decent!

That's the one on the original Balearic Beats compilation?

Shpongle. It's weird because it's presented in the way that functional drug music is and sort of marketed to that crowd, (and there's something Infind culty about music that's made for "psychedelic peoole", even though that's also not really fair because it's pretty good music.

But then it's also not at all earnest in the same way as The Shamen. Maybe that's just humour. I don't trust those elves.

och, sorry for garbles. * something I find culty about music that's made for "psychedelic people".

Shpongle and loads of other psychedelic dub/techno is awesome but nobody on ILM listens to that stuff.

start a thread, there are probably enough people like me who have one Shpongle album and are curious

let me rephrase that: please start a thread

Am also curious.

Yeah, 'without the big pop tunes' was, I think the thing that did for me when I tried Schprongle.

There is always this weird dichotomy, regarding 'psychedelic' music, in that it describes two different phenomena - a) music which *recreates* the psychedelic experience in some way, either sonically or lyrically and b) music which sounds really, really amazing while having a psychedelic experience. They are not necessarily the same thing, at all.

Shpongle, sorry, I have been listening to Germans too much.

I think there's a third category for 'psychedelic' music, or that some music is presented in such a way. That is to say music or sound intended to facilitate or guide, or whatever a 'psychedelic experience', or particular 'states'

As in, it's not about the music simulating a psychedelic effect, or "sounding" amazing on psychedelics so much as what it promotes in um, synergy.

Psy- genres (trance, chill, dub) are by definition presented as being in that category to some extent, usually much more so than say house or techno. Some New Age type stuff is entirely over there of course, although not be necessarily with overt drug implications.

So Shpongle is somewhat in that category by association and presentation and the scene it's from but those guys are also clearly about the music for its own sake. I think it's also in the second category if you like it, and somewhat in the first but not as much as it might think it is.

I would be into a dedicated early 90s hippy techno thread (visuals positively encouraged).

Is that a rockist justification for Shpongle? Oh yeah it's ostensibly drug music but actually the composition is really good... But it's not a dichotomy because composition and production can be really cool and effective as well as appreciable in its own right.

I don't mind anyway, rehabilitate rockism.

I guess I articulated my categories badly, because I see your "third category" as part of my second. So there is:

a) music which attempts to replicate or demonstrate the drug experience to listeners

b) music intended for use (sounding cool, guiding a trip, whatever) while having a drug experience

I haven't used any kind of psychedelic in about 15 years, so category b is no longer as interesting to me as it once was - except for the bizarre coincidence that category b music is often really really *good* at shutting up the part of my brain that I need to shut up and be quiet so I can program!

As far as trying to recreate the experience of psychedelics go tho I think there's also always a "recreating the sound of what the sound of recreating psychedelics is like" going on. To try and say that less confusingly the experience of psychedelics always affects your perception no matter what you're listening to/looking at etc. So Psych music in the very broadest sense always falls back on a set of tropes that are "psychedelic" because we're used to associating them with psychedelia, and that's not the same thing as the experience of tripping, which is often influenced or engaged with those tropes but is way broader and more fluid and stranger in ways most Psych music never explores

To come back to the thread at hand I think some of what you were describing as the psychedelic weirdnesses or disjunctions of Shamen records in their imperial phase comes from jamming together non-traditional elements into the psychedelia, the weird irruptions of pop and bangingness and provincial nightclub "cheese" - cheese is life, obv - that snuggle up alongside the woowoo Acid elements

I don't think that's unique to the Shamen tbh but the big hits exemplify it. The Stadium is also the uncool nightclub

Where does Mr C stand in the pantheon of British rappers? I mean there's a Godfather of Grime title going spare now Wiley is cancelled.

Look, Credit to the Nation is putting out new stuff at the moment

I guess I articulated my categories badly, because I see your "third category" as part of my second. So there is:

a) music which attempts to replicate or demonstrate the drug experience to listeners

b) music intended for use (sounding cool, guiding a trip, whatever) while having a drug experience

Sure, although that now leaves out the broader part of category b) which is music that sounds good on drugs without necessarily being "intended" to achieve that purpose.

Which is partly what I was seeing as marking category c), with intention also being sometimes about presentation. I think that's something that defines psy-x genres, certainly in relation to techno which is artier, or house which is maybe rootsier and more social etc. Or even trance or hardcore rave which are more specifically about E. ?

Where does Mr C stand in the pantheon of British rappers? I mean there's a Godfather of Grime title going spare now Wiley is cancelled.

Dunno about C but Colin's (I assume?) hushed almost spoken delivery on En-Tact prefigures Del Naja on Blue Lines. You could say. Who the two original rappers in Make It Mine V2?

Double R = Rhyme & Reason = Anthony Lennon & Yinka Charles

there's also always a "recreating the sound of what the sound of recreating psychedelics is like" going on

There's also a similar but more interesting feedback dynamic where it is "making music that attempts to recreate the sound / effect of hearing music that attempts to recreate the sound and effect of hearing music on drugs, on drugs".

Yeah sure there's endless layers there no doubt, a pure feedback loop, in the same way that the first time I saw trails around my moving hands on acid I immediately thought of Top of the Pops. But I think it's worth thinking about the sound of psychedelia being as much self-referential as it is an honest attempt to recreate an experience beyond itself

Whole thread of "which came first, the tripping or The Egg?" to be had here

I'm thinking of 'dubplate' dance scenes like hardcore rave where the pipeline from party -> making tunes after the party for next week is really vital. Of course the music references itself sonically as well as being supposed to evoke or invoke experiences, and these overlap.

So-called psych music, like guitar music typically seems much more strictly referential and less successfully invocative, especially post say 1969, even though a lot of that early stuff is stylistically quite obvious and constrained. I think it's still very trippy in a way that isn't just evocative of what we think of as Psychedelic. Maybe I can't be sure about that.

I think that's why it's an unknowable loop, you're likely to hear psychedelic music before you experience psychedelic drugs I think, especially any time from the late 60s on, so the connections feed each other

And then there's the question of what was in any given pill you might take as opposed to the "purer" psychedelics like acid or shrooms

I can remember trying to sleep at the tail end of a trip and having a totally imaginary dub bassline rattling round my head but why did my brain conjure that particular sound etc? Obv I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying Noel just thinking about it and nostalging for hallucinogens

"which came first, the tripping or The Egg?"

sad lol as I recall seeing the Egg at Glastonbury years ago after completely failing to come up on whatever duff drugs I'd bought earlier

Yes, it's a loop, but certain types of drug experiences tend to have certain hallmarks, of how they are experienced?

That the phasey-filter-sweepy-sound is an effort at recreating the distortions in hearing that people often experience; the choppy tremolo effect *sounds* a lot like the way that one experiences hearing dropping in and out.

It's strange, because I can remember so many times where my friends and I set up "environments to trip in" and we'd have one room with 'classic' psychedelia, and another room with more repetitive acid techno, and another room with sitar sounds and a tape of someone reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead, thinking those would be fun environments to have a trip in?

But then, during the trip, we'd often end up spending a couple of hours with, e.g. our heads inside the air conditioning ducts, because it turned out ~the most amazing~ thing any of us had ever heard while tripping, wasn't music, it was the repetitive thump of an intake fan echoing through a metal duct. (And I did go through a phase of listening to a lot of recordings that sounded like air conditioning intake fans and fridge buzz! But that didn't sound as good, when you were not on drugs. While music that remind me of ~what fridge buzz sounds like when you're tripping~ are far more nostalgic and enjoyable to me now.)

I spent a lot of time watching late night TV on acid and the remote was the controller of my time machine :D

While on acid, the absolute best thing on television was watching static. That was the best visuals I ever saw!

I would def be more likely to try field recordings and the hummer gentle ends of drone concrete now Branwell

I mean again, none of this is remotely the experience of Peak Shamen

Quiet, Noodle Vague, I'm trying to resonate concrete!

You can trip out on static in the natch I'm sure. I do remember one tired morning doing that and after various spinning things and cute bees these large stable capital letters were standing out from the chaos. Not hard to find some mechanistic neurological explanation for that if you want to but it's quite striking.

I listen to loud static every night, because it's the only thing that mitigates my hyperacusis enough to allow me to sleep.

It is wild, sometimes when very tired, the kind of music that my overtired brain will project into the completely random patterns of brownian noise.

But that is the kind of short-circuit auditory illusion that acid really triggers exeptionally well.

We should probably make a couple of new threads now, for "what is psychedelic music" and "psychedelic trance-dub bobbins of the early 90s featuring Shpongle and other sub-Shamen type acts"

Oh yes. But I'd like to be able to hear about more current pay bollocks, and Shpongle's most recent album was released in 2017 (i.e. the best year for music of the 2010s).

Psy bollocks, that should read.

Cross-posting this thread because I think some of the tracks here fit the vibe being discussed:

Kaos Theory 2 defined my musical tastes in 1992

the bizarre coincidence that category b music is often really really *good* at shutting up the part of my brain that I need to shut up and be quiet so I can program!

totally not the cheeky boshing Shamanic art-prankster vibe you're looking for (or at least 99% of the music therein is not, there might be occasional moments in a couple of the mixes) but the good people who have gathered 60 mixes for brain-hushing coding purposes at https://www.musicforprogramming.net/ are worthy of laudation

(sorry, Noel Emits' username put my brain in Cardiacs Mode)

it's funny because before this thread I wouldn't particularly have said yes to "are the Shamen a conceptually and sonically unique band", but I'm trying to think of bands who combined stadium-bosh/big tunes + hippy trippiness + art pranksterism other than the Shamen* and not getting much closer than, uh

maybe put a Yello album on at the same time as a Beloved album? idk

(as I think has been said, the KLF/Orb also encompass all of these modes but mostly not all at the same time, for my money)

That's p much OTM, in that, at the time, I really kinda dismissed them as quite shallow and silly, but with time, there really hasn't been anyone else who hit quite as many distinct modes at the same time, as they did.

Will take a look at the Music For Programming, thanks for the link.

I suppose the thing about The Shamen was that maybe drugs had destroyed the part of their brain that might have felt a sense of embarrassment or naffness so they just didn't give a shit and smashed together elements that most producers would have separated out into different projects and eras of their career.

So an example would be Andy Meecham, who made big-room euphoric high street house as Bizarre Inc, self-consciously arty/cartoonish electro as Chicken Lips and spun out cosmic beardo hippy music as The Emperor Machine. Smash the three together and stick a sci-fi nerd and a cockney geezer in there and you've got a decent approximation of The Shamen aesthetic but most acts would feel too much shame for that.

Can't make Shamen without a Shame!

I don't actually think it's a lack of embarrassment or shame.

I think that one of the things that prolonged use of psychedelic drugs does for some peopl, is break down their senses of artificially constructed barriers, such as idiotic ideas like 'genre'.

I didn't know The Emperor Machine had been part of Bizarre Inc!

BB, Music For Programming might be too ambiently twinkly/pretty/beatless for your needs but there are some good mixes in there and they've got some interesting people to take part.

There used to be a more driving trancey radio stream that a colleague swore by for that purpose, I'll try to remember what it is, but again, not what you're after here.

Speaking of trance, did the Shpongle thread happen? Is there a place I can huddle with my 90s trance-before-trance-meant-Tiesto tapes? A safe space to admit to liking unfashionably Megadog-adjacent things without being laughed out of the room?

speaking of shpongle, i could listen to loud eat static every night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naSvGVe-Jvs

speaking of psychedelic UFO shamanism check out that artwork

Is there a place I can huddle with my 90s trance-before-trance-meant-Tiesto tapes? A safe space to admit to liking unfashionably Megadog-adjacent things without being laughed out of the room?

there's always the PWOG thread...

Psychick Warriors ov Gaia, Exquisite Corpse, and their odd brand of minimal & tribal trance-techno-ambient

i have been waiting for eat static to be mentioned.

surely there is a megadog related thread for all this stuff ?

ahh .. PWOG .. had forgotten all about them ..

Look, Credit to the Nation is putting out new stuff at the moment

was gonna make a Little Middleaged Credit Bloke joke here, but looks like they did one video in 2010 and an itunes-only EP in 2015

I need a Megadog thread on which to mention the house party at my then gaff when we had a couple of dog related DJs in the front room and MMM playing for hours in someone's bedroom turned into a psychedelic womb.

Just been reminded of this excellent compilation that I haven't heard in years

https://www.discogs.com/Various-Feed-Your-Head/release/68682?ev=rr

ok, just dug out my slow bongo floyd cds.

Still got the 12" of Open Up Your Heart

idea : ILM vs Shamen.
i drop the samples/beats track from the Progen ep, and then those of you who can do stuff, do your stuff.
yes/no ?

More Than Jesus (Irresistible Force Mix). Big tune xp

http://ireallylovemusic.co.uk/music/15%20Sixteen%20Samples%20%26%20Beats.mp3

Thanks mark e! Looking forward to hearing what ilxors do with this.

I have that Eat Static album on tape somewhere. My favourite Planet Dog band was Timeshard iirc. And my favourite of the pile of dubious 90s trance tapes is, or was, "Moment of Truth" by Man With No Name.

I need a Megadog thread on which to mention the house party at my then gaff when we had a couple of dog related DJs in the front room and MMM playing for hours in someone's bedroom turned into a psychedelic womb.

this sounds AMAZING btw

my very first promo groove back in 2004 was a box full of Eat Static cds.
and thanks for the reminder of Man With No Name, 'Earth Moving The Sun', is totally in this ballpark albeit via a chunk of trance.

Just leaving this here: Spongle v Eat Static

https://open.spotify.com/album/1ypZz7SSbmsNrmvZhyhAsg?si=zlG7xzE1QYGMy4kiNq5Mtw

Also Eat Static did this slightly minimalist Autonomic style dnb track as recent as 2017 and it’s great

https://open.spotify.com/track/51VFhURcYmMPa97RsDFmkn?si=CwWBjkSrRFu-XDFr0aKC2w

the best planet dog group was children of the bong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8CRQvVwAns

lmao

i mean "best"

but yeah this is all time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHhLDx1OmwI

No one wants to be the one to start the ~Hippie Bobbins~ thread, haha, even though we all acknowledge the need for it? I do not feel qualified to start said thread, as I literally only know what Megadog is through adverts - and snarky disses - in Select Magazine, as this is degenerate music for Crusties, while also having very colourful and groovy adverts in the back, that looked like the amazing psychedelic sort of shirts you could buy in Camden Market, but dissolved in unfixed dye soup after one wash? I was of that generation where music was something you read about and saw pictures of, ages before a poorly dubbed cassette would arrive in the post from relatives in England.

My own ~Secret 90s Techno Shame~ was ... (oh god I hate this label so much - it was cringe at the time, and has only got more cringe with the years) ::whispers:: Ethno-Techno, like I would eat up anything that sounded like Transglobal Underground and Natacha Atlas. I see Shpongle has also ended up in the 'Ethno-Techo' section on Wikipedia so...

My thread, is your thread, amiga omegas:

Safe Space for Crusty UK Hippie-Bobbins a la Shpongle, Megadog, Planet Dog, and all the other dodgy stuff excavated on the Shamen thread

Such a nice, Scottish boy, so good to his Mum:

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/colin-angus-of-the-shamen-pictured-with-his-parents-aberdeen-scotland-picture-id537483357

Why am I *like* this, why can't my brane just be normal ;_;

Oh, phew, found it! Matt DC's memory is not flawed, just displaced. There totally was a (not Glasto but MTV) video for Phorever People, featuring Alice in Wonderland imagery and the singer(s) floating about in a swing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAq3iyDnCQI

I've fallen so deep down the rabbit hole I've been watching interviews and I'm just so smitten. I'm struck by just how Jesus Jones-y their pre-Phoward material was. They very easily could have been EMF. They compare themselves to Renegade Soundwave in the interview (plus a clip) but at moments their Jesus Loves America stuff sounds like Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste-era Ministry? Was not expecting that!

The other thing that struck me was how high, and soft, and girly Colin's speaking voice is. I genuinely thought he was a girl the first few times he spoke. (Excuse me, but I find that very phwoar!) But it also highlights something about his *singing* voice that I find so interesting and compelling. Unless he's deliberately trying to do ~rawk voice~ he has a very high, flutey, choirboy voice with a tonal range that I really love (I particularly like male vocalists who sing high).

It was really striking on live Glasto version of Phorever People, that the singer (is that Jhelisa Anderson? It's starting to really bother me, how often in dance music, it's always really easy to find out the name of the male producers, and even the male rappers, but it's often quite hard to find out the name of the (usually Black) female singer who does the hook which makes the song worthwhile?) was singing quite far down in her low range, for a powerful, gospel-bluesy tone, while Colin Angus was actually singing a higher harmony above her, but weaving in and out of her voice. One of the things that really scratches my sweet spot about the Shamen, is those really close, weaving-in-an-out harmony vocals ("I can move, move, move any mountain") - but with Anderson taking the low part and Angus taking the high part, together they create this really super-genderless, fluid, male-female-androgynous tone which really excites me.

Really enjoyed You And Me & Everything when it popped up in that MTV clip. Industrial beats plus 'eastern' melodies is very often a winning combination. Sicker acid sounds than their later stuff tbh. Also it reminds me a lot of Escape From New York's Fire In My Heart.

https://youtu.be/t1hxR1ijoN4

That video might be very slightly NSFW.

That's Jhelisa yeah. Her own solo career was a kind of late 90s electronic neo-soul thing - the various remixes of Friendly Pressure in particular mean you're much more likely to hear her in a credible DJ mix than you are to hear The Shamen. Beautiful Swimmers and Monki have both dropped her stuff in the recent past.

The Sunship remix in particular is an established UK garage banger and DJ Boring released a remix just a couple of years ago.

I will look for more of her stuff, she sounds interesting.

Reading through the band's history, and how many different singers they worked with, and watching the early videos vs the later ones, I was suddenly struck - like, Colin Angus is an accidental frontman who never wanted to be a frontman. He comes across as this gentle, kinda nerdy guy who happens to be very good at writing great pop songs - but there was this continual attempt to find someone else to be the *face* of the band, or front the band. (But again, very Hütteresque, he is really the only constant through their varied history.)

Like, even in the Will Sin years, it's quite obvious that he was doing 'bass player as frontman' - he was quite extraordinarily good-looking, more like 'should be playing the romantic lead in a Merchant-Ivory production' levels of good-looking, than the 'bass player in a Scottish indie band' levels of good-looking - and had the Rock Star Haircut and stage presence.

Speaking of haircuts, I looked up what the word was for that 'not entirely rock / not entirely dance / lots of samples' genre that was so prevalent around 89-91 and the interwebs has supplied me with GREBO - PWEI, EMF, Jesus Jones all being given as examples of popular GREBO groups. Will Sin *totally* had the Grebo Haircut (mostly long, shaved at the sides, dreadlocks right at the back) and so I'm thinking it very very likely there was a Grebo element to their music... hee hee hee...

Oh good lord, yes, are there any more joyful words in this universe, than "sunship remix" - I have totally heard this song around...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46IM2--jn8Y

I think that's not quite right, Grebo was the pre-grunge grungey rock sound of early PWEI and Gaye Bikers on Acid and etc, I think

Can't remember if there was a genre tag for the samply PWEI/EMF/Jesus Jones sound

Grebo being a variant/corrupting of "greaser" I think

Wikipedia put Jesus Jones firmly in Grebo!

And my memory was, it was a contraction of 'greasy bastard' - maybe the Shamen were too clean.

I guess wiki says more PWEI, Neds Atomic Dustbin, Carter USM, rather than Jesus Jones/EMF/early Shamen

But this is totally a grebo haircut, this is the platonic ideal, of a grebo haircut:

https://kaisermaschine.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/gettyimages-537483165-2048x2048.jpg?w=458&h=672

I don't think there was another genre descriptor anyway so they might as well go under that one, tho that wiki article seems to list ever 1990 indie band in the UK more or less

These guys totally LOOK like grebos, TBH

https://resources.tidal.com/images/a21060bf/7b47/4cb8/a8c1/1de6a11a131c/750x750.jpg

Yeah I must admit I don't remember JJ looking that way at all

i'm fairly sure will sinnott would have given you a good old glasgow kiss if he'd heard he was being called a grebo.

i heard JJ soundcheck one time. they were just playing the sampler parts and it sounded incredible. then they all joined in and it was just awful. they should have sacked the band and just toured the akai s1000.

Well, he shouldn't have had a grebo haircut if he didn't want to be called a grebo!

I'm trying to explain this videos, and like, there are megaliths, and flowers, and everyone's wearing robes - except for when they're inexplicably dressed like they're about to graduate from Starfleet Academy, and then Jheslisa captures Mr C and the Cute Scottish Blokey and... traps them in a wicker cage on the banks of a Scottish lake and does Bill Drummond / the Lord of the Isles turn up to set them on fire? No! She rips off The Green Man's leafy cloak so that he is revealed as a space alien and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DzGgIURySI

help me.

I found a copy of the 'Phorward' 10" in an actual record shop yesterday and was enjoying it this morning - can definitely hear that at that point they could still have gone off in a more industrial direction rather than the one they did take.

Was also tickled that it was produced by an ex-member of Fiction Factory.

funnily, at that time i don't think anyone would have mistaken it as a grebo cut. i had a slightly similar thing going on with my hair around then and was deffo anti-grebo af.

this thread inspired me to listen to a few shamen songs i hadn't heard in 25 years. former favourites, 'you, me & everything', 'transcedental'and 'hyperreal' sounded really dated and clunky to my ears though the first two still had some sort of naive charm while some others such as 'omega amigo' and 'possible worlds' really surprised me by how fresh they still sounded.

OK, so what does “grebo” mean to you, because it sounds very different from what is described in that wiki / stuff I read years ago in the music press?

(What’s wild is I just went and watched the video You Me & Everything - total recognition, I knew this song from college radio and dancing at the local punk club, but I had NO IDEA it was The Shamen?)

To me grebo was associated with the Wonder Stuff and Neds Atomic Dustbin. It was the opposite of sexy

Those bands didn't look too similar to grebos but I feel to be true grebo music it has to have some electronic 'dance' or hip hop element which they mostly didn't AFAIK.

Also I think at the time I was perfectly capable of finding girls with dreadlocks wearing Doc Martens with thick stripey leggins attractive so...

So we’re saying because Oor Willie had cheekbones like geometry and eyes like Sin, he was too attractive to be a grebo?

I did GIS ‘grebo haircut’ and it kept showing me photos of Jesus Jones, and, erm, Skrillex? So I am no closer to enlightenment ha ha ha!

I cannot believe, in a music journalism climate that was obsessed with genreficaion that there could be *such* a distinct - and successful - sound that had no name?

NV OTM, grebo was Gaye Bykers On Acid and the pre-drum-machine version of PWEI

i heard JJ soundcheck one time. they were just playing the sampler parts and it sounded incredible. then they all joined in and it was just awful. they should have sacked the band and just toured the akai s1000.

anecdote of the day

OK, so what does “grebo” mean to you, because it sounds very different from what is described in that wiki / stuff I read years ago in the music press?

It is quite ludicrous that I could care less about this after so long, so can only apologise for being such a pedant about something so trivial. I will blame it on a love of historical accuracy (and extreme pedantry).

I concede that in a 'spot the Grebo' ID parade Will Sin might well have been frequently fingered as a Grebo, but there were very slight semantic differences such as the fact that WS would almost certainly never have been seen dead in the kind of shorts a Grebo might have worn. On a much deeper level it would have been a philosophical difference. Will was enlightened. He was a prophet of the E-culture, a new Utopian and hence several rungs up the "evolutionary" ladder from the Grebos.

Of course, many Grebos went on to embrace the E-culture, either genuinely or cynically, but to have still chosen to be a Grebo in say 1991 seems like a very Luddite like choice. Why on earth would anyone want to go to that party when THIS party was possible?

But in all honesty, I can totally see why you might think he was.

He was a lovely man. The weekend he died there was a wake for him in Glasgow's School of Art. Several hundred people turned out for it and the amount of love in that hall was almost overwhelming.

I watched THX-1138 recently without knowing that’s where the “my time is yours” sample from Omega Amigo came from, and fell down a bit off a Shamen rabbit hole afterwards. Agree that ‘Omega’ really holds up. And yeah, no way would Will wear those fucking awful grebo shorts! An important distinction.

I'm sorry, Stirmonster - like, this is difficult, that I'm just talking about records and videos and genres, while you're talking about friends and people you loved. I meant no insult to your friend at all. They seem like they were geuinely *lovely* people (which is a big part of my re-attraction to this music, right now.)

I thought there had to be a lot more to the word, where I would say "oh, it seems like it's this genre" and someone's response could be "he would violently assault you for assigning him to that genre!" - like, I'm trying to say something like "song X has a bit of a Baggy beat" and someone reacts as if I'd said "musician X was a right Chav!"

And your responses are showing me a bit that a Grebo was a type of person, rather than a genre of music, that Grebo music only became so because 'Grebos' listened to it? Rather than 'Grebo' Music having any genre-hallmarks, like 'combination of hard rock riffs, samples and dance beats'. I'm still no clearer as to what Grebos were, other than: unenlightened/uneducated, wore bad shorts, erm... the opposite of art students?

I guess there is no term for the type of music I'm thinking about, even though it *sounds* quite similar and shares sonic hallmarks - because it wasn't a 'scene' as such, it was 3+ unconnected bands sharing certain stylistic hallmarks, who all happened to have *massive* hits in the States at around the same time.

I mean, I'm both taking the piss out of, but at the same time *marvelling* at the 'it is so much what it is' performance of the videos?

But the idea of a young man, standing on top of a mountain, reaching out his hand and unironically proclaiming "I need your love, sex, intelligence" - there is something incredibly charming and appealing about the total lack of irony in this declaration of 'I love you for your mind'.

(And even moreso, when countered with the performance of Mr C, who basically *is* a living insinuation, a human wink-wink-nudge-nudge, and every word that seems to come out of his mouth is cockney double-speak - but the contrast between Mr C's quicksilver clever-clever-ness, and Colin's complete unironic sincerity makes the latter seem more believable?)

I need to stop thinking about this so much.

Please don’t, this thread is one of the more interesting ones on ILM

^

Are you sure? Coz I totally feel like I'm just monologuing here about my latest ~musical crush~.

The genre thing is so perplexing to me (I fully admit, I just don't *think* in genre, it's not an instinctive way of conceiving music, for me. I am forever hearing/seeing things in things that seem to me like they should go together, but it turns out they don't.)

Another cute interview with Will / Colin, where they're talking about what *they* are into at the time, and they're namedropping Meat Beat Manifesto, as something they love. At the time, in like 1991/92, I never would have associated The Shamen with MBM, because MBM were, to me, - along with Renegade Soundwave - music that I encountered being played at a Goth / Industrial / EBM nightclub. They were ~on the cusp of Industrial~ in the same way that music like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb were, but in a more kind of acid house-y, kind of dubby way?

But now, with the ears of 2020, I go back and listen to MBM's Satyricon, and I feel like "holy hell, this isn't industrial at all - this is kinda techno, kinda dub, with weird zombie samples over the top that made them superficially fit in with Skinny Puppy and Ministry - but listening to it now, I can hear, YES, this is what The Shamen were clearly attempting to do, in the period that I (rather dismissingly) refer to as sounding kind Jesus Jones-y. While JJ were very much trying to do a "kind of MBM ~throw everything in a blender~ sampledelica, but with a standard Rawk Band a la The Wonder Stuff or Ned's Atomic Dustbin playing on top". The Grebo label for JJ comes from the Rawk Band element, but the element I'm interested in, is the Meat Beat Manifesto Sampledelica which shows up in The Shamen around the Gorbachev era onwards.

It's so strange, how one's pre-conceptions about 'what genre this belongs to' can influence *what one hears*.

(Also, I'm going to listen to a lot more Meat Beat Manifesto, because they are scratching that itch.)

(Also, I'm going to listen to a lot more Meat Beat Manifesto, because they are scratching that itch.)

RESULT

part of the "JJ = Grebo" thing could be cos they were on Food alongside Crazyhead, who were definitely part of the Grebo scene, and so the 2 bands would have probably played a few gigs together.

No need to apologise!

Meat Beat Manifesto massively crossed over into the rave scene with "Radio Babylon" and a host of follow up 12" singles. RSW likewise with "The Phantom" and "Ozone Breakdown" and then a host of relases after that.

Here is a 1991 TV advert that was broadcast across the STV region in a late night slot for a 2 date Shamen Synergy show at Livingston Forum. Note MBM supported both nights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmUiuy6se5A

Progeny, not Synergy. I guess Progeny was Synergy V2.0

OK also, I think I'm getting to the bottom of the oiled-up Jason Statham thing, too? Bear with me, this is kinda involved.

I started trying to listen to their very first album, Drop, and it's hilarious, it's all tremolo guitars and 12-strings and droney psych bits, it honestly sounds like The Telescopes and the videos look like the stuff they'd project on the walls at Sonic Cathedral? And there's Colin in his black turtleneck and his VU leather jacket and his John Lennon specs and beatnik love beads, and let's not kid about - you, sir, YOU were a Dirty Dronerock Boy!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bDRc5tPdHLE/hqdefault.jpg

Fie! I have been FULED into thinking you are a shamanic psychonaut raver; you own diodes, admit it.

Anyway, so one of the singles from their dirty dronerock sonic cathedrals psych era:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHLKFiqaPTQ

Knature of a Girl - like 87/88 was the height of the Feminist Sex Wars. And their explanation was: The subject of the song concerns how female sexuality can be distorted and abused in the name of the feminine ideal. But their onstage projections during the song contained images of strippers (you can see a little tiny clip in the video, girls in bustiers walking about with whips - very ~of its time~).

They faced the same criticism that Jane's Addiction faced, as we discussed on the other thread - we know you are *trying* to depict this free, groovy, psychedelic sexuality for all, but, since you are cis *men*, you cannot use these images of ~exploitation of women~, even to make a point about it, without falling into the trap of ~participating in that exploitation~? They switched the videos of actual ~sexy ladies with whips~ with far more explicit *drawings* of dominatrixes with whips, and they were confused as to why that was seen as artistic, and clearly fine, while videos of the live women, had not? Poor Colin.

In the end, we threw all that lot out because basically British audiences were too thick to understand what we were trying to do.

Colin, Colin, Colin. Sigh. It's about positioning. It's not that the British audiences were too thick, it's more that you were too ignorant to understand how power dynamics work. I *know* you were trying to make a groovy point about ~Male Supremacy~ warping female sexuality, but if you are coming from the 'up' side of a power dynamic, there is no 'outside' to power. You are still participating in the system, and by using ~pictures of naked chicks~ you are still reaping the benefits of the system you are trying to criticise.

But I am *QUITE* sure that someone in their party must have made the exact same point that was made on the Jane's Addiction thread - why does it always have to be naked girls? Why can't you show your groovy, free sexual expression by using naked boys as go-go dancers and not just girls?

BANG! VIDEO FOR THE NEXT ALBUM HAS AN OILED-UP, NAKED JASON STATHAM AS A GO-GO DANCER.

(And lots of the videos and live appearances for Ebeneezer Goode had girls in latex catsuits, and boys in latex catsuits, and Mr C in a Codpiece. Like, OK, sure, yes, we are making a point about our groovy, free sexuality by including the boys in it too. I will allow it.)

wow, those Progeny / Synergy V2.0 shows look absolutely mindblowing.

Why was I stuck on a farm in Upstate NY. Why.

Right, Meat Beat Manifesto have an album on Spotify called In Dub... and if that's an acid house sampledelic take on Tappa Zukie then I'm gonna die of happiness.

my brother was at the first night at that Livingston gig, I'd moved down south by then but was super jealous!
just asked him what he can remember of it

"Orbital still had the trademark lights on their heads.
Also on the bill were Homeboy Hippy and a Funki Dredd of Total Confusion fame. Chooooon.
At some point Mr C was dancing in the crowd beside me, wiggling his fingers in time to the beat while trying to chat someone up."

This thread is fantastic not least because I’m revisiting/unconsidered tween assumptions. I never gave much time to the greebo/crusty distinction, they were all on a spectrum that led straight to the Levellers in my mind, compared to the clearly distinct e-utopian Shaman end of things. Shared haircuts regardless.

I'm just going to leave this right here:

https://soundcloud.com/shamen1/strange-days-dream

I'm genuinely marvelling. Everything makes so much more sense now. Like, crusty hippie-dom is completely the wrong angle to view their psychedelia through. I had too much to dream last night! I love them so much.

As others have pointed out, the Shamen were not grebos. Not remotely. The original line-up were more like mods - kitted out in blazers, polo-necks, tailored trousers etc. They were always clothes horses. The bit about the on-stage back-projections of naked women is a bit misleading. They were going for a retro-futurist thing - the music was proto-shoegaze psychedelia, but less 60s-influenced and more precise than the bands in that vein they were sharing stages with in those days. The films covered a lot of different material - old industrial and educational films etc or just abstract collages (this is dodgy memory territory btw). The naked women thing was brought up in press interviews at the time, but what it was, in my memory, were antique stag films showing semi-naked women exercising with a ball and that kind of thing. Not really titillating at all, certainly compared than many music videos of the time, which may have been the point. Mostly it was a minor part of a pretty cool light show they had as part of their well-staged indie act. They put more into it that the other bands at the time who were playing those small venues.

Oh man, I do not want to revisit the Great Feminist Sex Wars again, I still have scars from the first and the second times.

I spent a lot of time in proto-shoegaze-psychedelia, in the US about 1985-1998, and in the UK post-1998. It's something that was deeply attractive to me, and was a very native environment for me for a long time (though I grew very disillusioned with it, for similar reasons - that I very much viewed Acid House as a true heir of the psychedelic tradition, while my uber-mod and dronerock friends totally turned their noses up at it.) The problem is, that retro-futurism often leads to retro-fetishism, which included some very retrogressive ideas. Sexism was *rife* in many of the neo-mod and neo-psych scenes I inhabited, because retro sex roles were part of what some people *liked* about retro culture. I really struggled with that, even as I loved a lot of the sexy 60s imagery.

I'm not saying The Shamen as people, or their videos were part of that. I'm just saying, that was the inherent background radiation of the scene.

(In fact, the actual lyrics of the song - which BTW I like a lot! - did show a pushing back against neo-psych sexism. They were not troglodytes, they seemed pretty enlightened.)

But when dealing with the -isms of dominant culture, positionality *matters*. You just have to accept that some tropes, some words, some usages, are *not the same for you* as they are for the persons on the non-dominant end of the power gradient. It's different for me to self-describe as 'queer' than it is for someone to yell 'queer!' at me out a car window, or even for my married, heterosexual boss to say, 'oh, Branwell is one of those queers'.

You can't reclaim other people's oppression?

Like, honestly, if Jane's Addiction or Christian Death did interviews, justifying their uses of the N-word as "well, actually we're using the word to make an anti-racist point about the position of Black people within society" - do you honestly think that Dan is going to change his position from "hell to the NO" to "OK, well, that's perfectly alright then"?

I do feel the same way about a 100% cis male group trying to reclaim or make a statement about the sexism of nudie-girl imagery, by... using nudie-girl imagery. They are GOING to get pushback, they SHOULD get pushback, and they DID get pushback. (Whether it's fair that a bunch of Scottish Art School boys got pushback and not Whitesnake... well, actually Whitesnake and their ilk *did* get pushback, but pushback will always be harder against people who represent themselves as 'progressive' than against people who are clear they are completely retrograde. That's for another thread.) And Colin trying to represent that pushback as being 'British audiences are too thick!" - well, that's kind of an arrogant statement to make, clearly Colin is ~more of an expert on teh feminisms~ than I am, laddie.

(I will forgive him his arrogance, it's an absolute character flaw, but I find a touch of arrogance really sexy in an otherwise kinda nerdy shy-boy. See also: Hütter, OMG, he *is* a Scottish Hütter. Help me)

I dunno, it feels like a bit of a shame and a distraction - and I only brought it up, because I *do* think that that experience does account for the naked Jason Stathams and the presentation of sexuality in their later video work.

(Sorry, I went on a massive video binge last night - and I do feel like this was a band, to whom imagery and videos and visuals are super-important, not a distraction at all. The visuals are a strong part of what they are doing. Again, like Kraftwerk.)

The actual lyrics for Knature of a Girl are fantasic, I do genuinely love them. I read them as "my girl is complicated, she has a kinda complicated sexuality, and I am *HERE* for it!"

(Hmmm, so you like complicated lovers, huh? I got some complications for ya, babe... in my pants) HA HEM. nothing to see here.

The ambiguity of the chorus is really interesting. "She plays the strangest games / but she aims to lose / that's why I love her" is operating on this double-level.

On one level, there's the obvious double-entendre - heightened by the images of dominatrixes - that the 'strange games' he is *here* for are some kind of Love Slave Bondage Games - that 'she aims to lose' indicates that she's actually the sub in the scenario. But any kind of non-superficial understanding of kink posits that the sub is (or should be, in ethical kink) the person who, although superficially 'losing', is actually the person who is in control of the scenario and exactly what happens in it. (Or, even the other way round, if the titular Girl is the dominatrix, she's 'losing' by actually being the person in *service* of the scenario that is the sub's fantasy? I love how this is unclear and the meaning is left slippery!)

But the really fascinating thing about the lyrics to me, is that that wink-wink-nudge-nudge smutty reading is actually the *superficial* one. The deeper reading, supported by Colin saying that it's actually about "how female sexuality can be distorted and abused in the name of the feminine ideal" - is that the love-slave-bondage-games are actually just a metaphor for the societal subordination of women. (This is hardly an original thought - the entire novel, Normal People, goes into this in great, and somewhat tedious, kink-shamey depth.) But Colin's doing it in a very non-kink-shamey way. "She plays the strangest games - but she aims to lose" has this undercurrent of "aiming to lose is a way of refusing to play the game". The gender binary, trying to conform to misogynist standards, the madonna/whore dichotomy, all of these things are No-Win Games. There is no chance of "win" so deliberately aiming to lose is the only rational way out of the game.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk on the Shamen's early lyrical imagery. Tomorrow's lecture will be on the inverse correlation of the quality of the Shamen song as evidenced by the goodness or naffness of Colin's hairstyle in the accompanying video ::bows and exits thread::

I guess even uptight mods loosen up sometimes. I used to go and see The Prime Movers who had emerged from garage / psych revivalists The Prisoners and they would also be wearing baggy long-sleeve t-shirts. Fantastic live band mind.

https://www.discogs.com/The-Prime-Movers-Earth-Church/master/298752

There seem to be nearly as many Prime Movers as there have been Creatures and Misfits, as I thought you were talking about the Prime Movers, the power-pop band that mutated into Dread Zeppelin - ha!

Also, I have decided that this song

I walk so tall ascending I stand so high
Earth below me revolving above the sky

I can move move move any mountain
I can move move move any mountain
I can move move move any mountain

Is basically the same as this song

Ich bin 6 meter gross und alles ist wichtig
Ich bin 9 meter gross und alles ist mehr als wichtig
Ich bin 12 meter gross und alles ist unvorstellbar

Ich bin das ganze chinesische Volk
und Yü-Gung kann Berge versetzen

Drugs can make you tall enough to move mountains, kids!!!

WS would almost certainly never have been seen dead in the kind of shorts a Grebo might have worn.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottishpoliticalarchive/33776332146/in/photostream/

William! Those trousers.

Ah-hah! I finally found that interview from which the above quotes are from. Apparently a video which was meant to be shown during one song only, was shown for the whole show...

Instead, a drunken projectionist showed the film through an entire gig in Manchester, much to the disgust of many women present, who saw it as pointless and gratuitous.

“But even when we used that part of the visuals properly, we were still getting lots of girls coming up to us afterwards, asking us why we used it. The point just wasn’t getting through,” says Sinnott.

I don't know, man, if the people whose sexuality you are trying to address are complaining about the way you are addressing it, maybe you could... listen? Take note? Not turn the thing being objected to, up to 11? There's a lot more in the interview, of the interviewer going, basically, you know that people trip to your shows, don't you think you have a bit of a responsibility to be careful what kind of imagery you use? Interesting.

Also, apparently Colin is from Cults. (He is still adorable.)

"We’re into psychedelic experiences and certain sexual practices," said The Shamen’s singer Colin Angus.

::breaks ILX's 4th wall and looks pointedly at camera::

Anyway, today I am really enjoying Hempton Manor. I wish I could get my brain off this one track, but here we are.

Oxygen Restriction presumably isn't about being a bit out of breath from dancing.

I actually haven't a clue what it's about. I like oxygen.

If you're not into certain sexual practices you're into them all, or none. I always say.

Oh, that's very tedious. :(

The "Colin is from Cults" link should have a trigger warning, ;-)

I was originally commissioned to put together the music for that Commonwealth Games opening ceremony. They then sacked me without telling me as someone up high decided they needed someone more famous to do it (Mylo) and they then basically re-used a ton of my work i had submitted, inc. using "Move Any Mountain".

Ah well, hopefully i'll get the commission to do the music for Scotland's independence rave and can use it again then.

Oh no I'm sorry. That sucks that they stole your work - but I'm still glad that they got played.

LOL @ Scotland Independence Rave - Colin lives in London now, so surely he'll be trapped on the wrong side of the border when they re-erect Hadrian's Wall!

(Still disappointed about the Oxygen Restriction thing, I was hoping it would be something a lot more fun.)

Which is the more tedious I ask you, silly (but accurate) pedantry or bands making vague pretentious allusions in interviews to doing some undefined weird sex stuff.

Oh that's what's tedious, I see. :)

it looks like Colin filmed it off his TV - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDXwev39GuY

Surely silly (but accurate) pedantry is never tedious?

I dunno, I quite like bands making vague pretentious allusions to ~werid sex stuff~? At least I do, if I find them really attractive? Presenting themselves as sexual objects is definitely part of the games that pop stars play.

Oxygen restriction
Oxygen restriction

Oxygen restriction, life celebration
Love accumulation, no distraction
New destination
Oxygen restriction, love saturation
Effect a transformation
We can change this situation

Oxygen restriction
Oxygen restriction

Oxygen restriction, X-Communication
You me identification, total integration
Love recreation
Oxygen restriction, quiet revolution
Evolution is the prime motion
In our elevation, to the next situation

Oxygen restriction, no simulation
Check it out this is the real deal
The only way to feel
Reject all limitations
Oxygen restriction, slow down
Deceleration, sex-time dilation
Good vibration, all across the nation
Oxygen restriction, oxygen restriction

Oxygen restriction, life celebration
Love accumulation, no distraction
New destination

I think it is what it seems to be. How disappointing, it's a kink I really don't share. ;_;

X-posts, aw, that's almost enough to make me ~want to be Scottish~? ::wipes a tear::

OMG, Daniel Kessler's Brother reviews the Shamen's video compilation and spends the entire review talking about their clothes and haircuts, because that is EXACTLY what I want in a video review. Genius!

This video just got posted to one of my FB groups and is a track (and band) I had completely forgotten about but for the video alone probably fits in this thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdIFKmhM5hg

OMG what is this teletubbies meets Stanley Unwin Ogdens Nut Gone Flake rave ?!?!?!?

OH MY GOD THERE'S A CODPIECE MINE EYES

This is both terrifying and amazing.

Our parents never should have let our generation watch so much of the Magic Roundabout, we were permanently warped by it.

OMG and the reveal at the end - it really was Stanley Unwin all along.

I went and looked up that track at Discogs and apparently there was a Seefeel Remix which is unexpected

Some debate over whether it actually *is* a remix of Petal, or a Seefeel original, but it's kinda cool in a minimal dubby way?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN5twiu1AMY

(And I actually really seriously hope that the Moksha / Shamen social media stuff is *not* Colin because apparently whoever does it has been following me for years, and now I'm super embarrassed about crushing so hard in public. Sigh.)

I am so so sorry, I know I am being objectifying as hell, please tell me to get me to a crush thread if this has just gone over the limits of acceptable, but this is the cutest that Colin's hair has ever looked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vltjxj33vM0

BIZARRE to see a brunette Mr C, and the guy in the back whose entire role appears to be plugging and pulling out cables on a sequencer = A++ amazing, I want his job.

I know that his clothes were better during his 'silver pleather trousers and a pile of synths' look but that ponytail just kinda looked like an Essex wide boy who overcharges you for dodgy pills. The wedge haircut was just so classic, slightly Kraftwerk, slightly Postcard-records-indie, just really suited his facial shape and pointy nose.

Matt DC!!! You were right, except it wasn't Glasto, it was TOTP Christmas Special:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRr8j8Z94Bc

Alice in Wonderland, swing, Mad Hatter, everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzBPt1Y7i8k

D's Mellow Dub of Phorever People is a sunkissed delight! Heard this on a resolutely unsunny day in Montpellier a few years ago.

...the absolute pure giddy JOY of it...

Of all the improbably things I have seen on this thread and in inexplicable psychedelic videos featuring Braveheart wigs and Oiled-Up Dancing Jason Statham, I think the most improbably yet is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLT9JH67LKU

The Shamen cursing out hecklers at the Bull and GRATE.

This is not a world I understand. Does not compute, that's like seeing the Pope at your local cornershop.

To think I bothered going to see arena shit like Prince and The Cure that was happening on my doorstep.

It's very Camden 80s I suppose.

That video for Wubble-U is quite a piece of work. I was half expecting to find out some now big bucks director did it but couldn't find out who was responsible. There was an earlier video before they got money from a major but having had a quick look at that it seems unlikely it was made by the same people.

*when that..

Oh, Williampaws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3gFSqC0ynE

The really gentle jingle-jangle guitar on the original version of Possible Worlds is really reminding me of one of the tracks on New Order's Technique (especially the way it kind of wends in and out of the 303-bass-solo) but I cannot for the life of me remember which one? (maybe Dream Attack)

There are so many places on the orig mix of En-Tact where I'm like... "did this sample something I know; or did something else I know sample this?"

Coz I'm always like "hey, this is a TGU song" or "hmmm, this is an 808 State song" - but maybe it's not, they just shared members or remixers or something. (Or is it just that I spent too many nights tripping to all these records together, that they have just merged in my memory into one thing.)

((But I swear there is a Transglobal Underground song that uses the *exact* same bassline as Evil Is Even.)

THAT'S A KRAFTWERK SAMPLE YOU FUX0RS!!!! (how did they not get sued into the next galaxy for that?)

You absolute fanboy little fucker (j/k ILU ILU ILU)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBHvG3zdRXU

https://www.discogs.com/artist/124853-Gobo-Loco

(Did I say Hütteresque somewhere upthread?)

Alice in Wonderland, swing, Mad Hatter, everything.

Also the Jack of Clubs!

I have just finished listening to UV for the first time, and erm... I... erm... I DEMAND TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER.

(I am so sorry, but I can't seem to stop falling down this particular rabbit hole, in fact I only seem to be falling faster the more I find out, sorry if this is very tedious for any other readers. This is just what happens when a band happens to hit about 20 autistic ~special interests~ all at once.)

So what is the deal with UV? The band went UFO-spotting in the Peruvian Andes, and decided to just go the full Hawkwind? This is genuinely *bonkers* - and I say that with a lot of affection, because I obviously do have a very high degree of tolerance for many kinds of esoteric nonsense from alchemy to Ophites and gnosticism to megalith-hunting, so I find it very charming. But I genuinely cannot tell if a song like "I Do" is them taking the piss out of themselves, or a genuine declaration of belief - or even both at the same time? (Their self-piss-taking is relentless, like I genuinely burst out laughing when Drug Star came on at the end.)

It genuinely feels like a (sympathetic) portrait of a moment - all of that millennial weirdness and woo, UFO-chasing and crystals and Kabbalah. I'm amused by how many of the references I "get". And listening to it, knowing what is just around the corner - like, culturally, it feels like on 1st January 2000 every single person who had formerly been into any kind of esoterica just collectively put down their druid robes and decided to join the Skeptic Movement, debunking anything that smelled like spirituality or religious imagery. (It's interesting, how early Colin Angus was super-super-anti-Christian in a proto-skeptic way - but it seems like he went completely the opposite direction into full-on Neoshamanism? Or did he? Is he dropping Castenada references in the full knowledge of how completely he was debunked and pwned?)

I kind of *want* to read "I Do" as a pisstake, because otherwise the level of appropriation and ick (that rasta accent? my dude, you are from Aberdeen!) is gross. Similar to Drug Star, like "if this is what you think I am, I will dial it up to 11 and play it to the hilt". But the level of knowledge displayed is very much - he's not taking the piss out of something he knows nothing about, this evinces far more than a casual interest in the subject matter.

But that is the kind of trickster imagery they always played with - you simply cannot tell what is joke and is real belief and what is a flight of "what if" imagination because he was really inspired in a creative way by things he saw and read about, and maybe it doesn't matter. I don't think that they were *stupid* - obviously someone doesn't go plugging DNA amino acid sequences into a music sequencer if they have no brains. But... was this for real or just play?

I am puzzled and intrigued.

I've also done some more research, and I'm actually starting to doubt that Oxygen Restriction is really about autoerotic asphyxiation at all, I think it's actually about Pranayama breath control techniques?

On the one hand, stupid tricky hippie making me think he's talking about something sexy and kinda kinky, when he's really just on about *yoga*. (Is there a sexy kind of yoga? I think maybe there is, but I know nothing about yoga.) OTOH, autoerotic asphyxiation is such an absolute hard nope from me, I'm quite relieved there is another potential meaning to that song.

I know it's ridiculous to look for double meanings in what are essentially incredibly silly pop songs, but the more I listen and investigate, so many double-references appear?

Like, I'm seriously trying to imagine their record company's response - after a year of begging "Come on, Col, please - can you stop mucking about botanising in South America long enough to give us another hit. You know, a nice boshing choon with some drug references to make it ~controversial~ enough to sell?"

And they go off and knock out Hempton Manor in 5 days, and the record company are like "Hemp? Is it about drugs again?" and they're like "ha ha ha, no, it's a concept album about all the different technological uses of the cannibis plant in the production of rope, canvas, textiles and paper, ha ha ha ha, drugs ha ha ha."

(I mean, I like this best, being an archaeologist when it comes to music, digging through long-lost fandoms, trying to put these fractured shards back together. But I do wish I'd paid more attention to this at the time, because it seems like it was very funny.)

I'm going to be completely gutted when I find out that Hyperreal isn't about Baudrillard at all, and it's not about climbing, ascending, rising to the ultimate level of the truly free-floating a-semiotic signifier with no relationship to reality at all, and no matter how intensively I do any kind of hermeneutics on the lyrics, they will never get back to truth at all.

This made me laugh, though...

I fell backwards into Baudrillard from Judith Butler: "There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original"

I still haven't worked out on what level "I Do" operates, if it's "This is what I am" or if it's a "this is what you say I am" simulacrum, but these lyrics...

Shamanise I do, fantasise I do
Creatise I do, ritualise I do
Harmonise I do, dowa-eyaya
Extasise I do, dowa-eyaya
Hyperrealise I do, dowa-eyaya
Womanise I do, dowa-eyaya

The tiny breath and a skipped beat he takes before he sings "womanise" introduces the element of irony, like a knowing wink. Is he just singing "womanise" as in yeah, like Mr C chatting up girls during the rave portion of the evening. Or is he singing ::wink:: "womanise" as in that *other* thing that... well, ANY FULE KNO that Shamans can fly - but what's that other really important thing that Shamans and trickster gods are often supposed to be able to do?

...

(He's definitely said he can fly, but has he mastered the shamanic trick of being able to change gender at will? that's what I want to know.)

I am definitely thinking too much about what really are very silly lyrics which should not be thought on so deeply.

I think the band made their feelings towards the label pretty clear when you read the first letter of each track title...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempton_Manor

Ha ha ha omg they are such anarchic chias elves, I love them even more.

Would have loved to see the record company’s faces even more, too!

What is a chias elf, and I should not post while sleeping, must put something on my phone to stop that.

Botanising, apparently.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/db/34/08/db3408e72a30f790e83f3fb98353a2aa.jpg

Salvia Hispanica, no less!

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/12/3/251/181889

Come on, how many techno artists publish scholarly articles on information technology applications of biochemistry. I sent this to my colleague and I think he's going to try to build one.

I noticed the same collaborator was behind the project to turn the coronavirus's gene sequencing into music:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-scientist-turned-the-coronavirus-into-musicheres-what-it-sounds-like-11593176569

Scientas off Boss Drum *IS* Rainbow Dome Musick by Steve Hillage and I claim my £5!

Got any Salmon Song? Sorted!

LOL, the joke was on me, it wasn't Colin pretending to be Steve Hillage on guitar, it was actually the *real* Steve Hillage...

I accept that at this point, this thread is basically me talking to myself, but why did no one tell me that Arbor Bona Arbor Mala was basically Pentamerous Metamorphosis, with a bit less shoegaze and a bit more Tangerine Dream synth wibble?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFpH-ky38

^^^seriously, who the fuck would hear something this sublime and beautiful and lush, and say "go back and write another Ebeneerzer Goode" - what the fuck planet were their record company even on. I need to find this on CD somehow, because it's missing the last 10 minutes and holy fuck, I need to know how this journey ends.

(Warning: around 23 minutes in, genuinely does contain several minutes of exquisitely good 'extractor fans echoing through the air conditioning ducts' drone concrete wub-wub-wub and I mean that in the best way possible.)

yeah, i love the extra ambient cd.
there was a time shops could not give the 2cd edition away, they were everywhere.
the packaging was mad as well - not a standard jewel case, but foldout cardboard excess.

Hey Mark - just sent you a webmail, not sure if it went through - but basically yes please? Cheers!

Arbor Bona Arbor Mala is pretty interesting, didn't know about that... reminds me of Spacetime Continuum a bit. Have to pick up a copy, looks like it can be had for $5-6.

I read somewhere that post-Shamen:

While Mr. C continued at the helm of his own techno label Plink Plonk, Angus delved into making even more esoteric music, generated through geometric formulas and even with the input of the human brain’s electronic impulses.

...and I would really dearly love to hear it, but apart from a couple of dribs and drabs of the Pablo Sandoz material that have turned up on YouTube, he seems to have disappeared. Sigh. I would have loved to have heard his ~geometrical formula music~ that sounds right up my alley.

That extra cd is great Branwell, if you don’t hear back from Mark I can try and send you files

I've got them, cheers! Diving in now, to see where they left me on their subterranean journey... oh my god the eBow just kicked in and I think I've reached the upper realm? (Is there an Upper Realm in Aztec mythology? I've forgotten my Popol Vuh, and anyway we keep switching back and forth between Aztec, Norse, Greek and Hebrew mythology... I'm kinda lost but I think that's the point!)

(Just checking the first track is actually called Asymptotic Eschaton, as in a curve that is nearing Infinity - not Asymptompatic, which, although more topical in 2020, doesn't really make sense in context?)

if you don’t hear back from Mark I can try and send you files

as if i aint going to help a fellow ilm'r in their hour of need !

I found this, from 2009, so about 10 years ago. Song is absolutely plodding VST plug-in crap, but it's definitely Colin singing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68cHwkelCfg

He sounds... ever so slightly frail? (in his bottom register, at least - his top register on the pretty harmony still sounds absolutely fine, which I would have thought was the opposite of how men's voices usually age. By counterpoint, Blixa, who is about the same age, his top range is completely gone but his bottom range has deepened and widened.) Colin's voice is still lovely, even if it doesn't have the same confident self assurance that he positively oozed in 1992. The lyrics just kinda make me want to give him a hug, TBH. (Though I'm not sure he wrote them.)

I do kind of respect people who absolutely just... *vanish* from the music industry like that. I have a lot more respect for him for *refusing* to reform, and actually I suppose it's better that he's not visibly online, propagating 2020 conspiracy woo, the way he was all starry-eyed about cute Terence McKenna eschatology back in the 90s.

Mr C also owned The End and while I don't know how hands on he was his influence on the next decade or so of club music was pretty substantial.

No, it's obvious that Mr C has stayed incredibly visible and busy, and was a total mainstay of London nightlife for decades. He's still on twitter, and pops up in Twitter nostalgia for The Shamen! (Eep.) But Colin just seemed to completely lose interest in making - or at least *releasing* music at all. Which I respect.

Digging through the rumours / substantiated announcements about the mooted reunion discussed, it's also pretty clear that Mr C was actually up for it, but Colin just point blank said, like "no - this is pure recidivism" and that was the actual word he used, which I thought was... interesting.

(Always prefered The KLF's bar to The Shamen's bar anyway ha ha haha oh god how much of my life did I waste there.)

I've flicked through some of the releases on plink plonk / the end a couple of times. Rough going unfortunately!

there are a few gems on plink plonk. this derrick carter one for instance - http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=129&v=q5Et2Zy4-Eo&feature=emb_title

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Et2Zy4-Eo

I do kind of respect people who absolutely just... *vanish* from the music industry like that. I have a lot more respect for him for *refusing* to reform, and actually I suppose it's better that he's not visibly online, propagating 2020 conspiracy woo, the way he was all starry-eyed about cute Terence McKenna eschatology back in the 90s.

this to the power of xxxxx
as much as i would love them to reform for my own personal selfish reasons,
i hope that despite the fact that he was clearly unhappy re OLI and the treatment they received, he is living a comfortable life.

From a Mr C Instagram post last week:

I want to know if you’re still in contact with Colin and wtf is he up to?!

mrcsuperfreq: Not really & I don’t know 🤷‍♂️

From a Mr C Instagram post last week:

I want to know if you’re still in contact with Colin and wtf is he up to?!

mrcsuperfreq: Not really & I don’t know 🤷‍♂️

From a Mr C Instagram post last week :(

I want to know if you’re still in contact with Colin and wtf is he up to?!

mrcsuperfreq: Not really & I don’t know

From a Mr C Instagram post last week :(

I want to know if you’re still in contact with Colin and wtf is he up to?!

mrcsuperfreq: Not really & I don’t know

Well the “Colin is from Cults” article posted above in from 2014, and he seems quite well balanced, and happy and contented with his life? Just not very interested in doing music any more. (I did find another interview with a ‘00s era collaborator who said much the same thing - he’s fine, he just has no interest in engaging in music or creativity any more.) Which I completely respect! It’s fine to not want to make music any more.

(And apparently he made enough money off Ebeneezer Goode that he doesn’t need to work any more. Fair does, min!)

Kinda reminds me of Mark Hollis -- when he was done, he was fine with it.

Another recent-ish interview where he seems rather good-naturedly surprised that anyone remembers the band?

http://theshamen.tripod.com

Just seems like he’s moved on and does other stuff with his life. (Would still just generally like to give him a hug and posi-vibes, provided he didn’t headbutt me for overly creepy interest!)

Interesting choice of Popol Vuh album for him to Stan for, but like I ever need an excuse to go dig out some old Krautrock records...

...so I guess it makes sense, that I was looking for the most recent music that he did, and it sounds, well, no surprise, it sounds a bit like Popol Vuh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU1KxSGdkBw

Wandering about the Heath, he just looks like such a nice man, like just a lovely hippie who loves trees and plants and things. Caught By The River were completely right - so many people who were involved in rave just ended up getting into nature, it does seem to be a thing.

His collaborator describes it thusly:

2005-06 ran a bootleg club called Legs and Co with a another producer called Idiotech, ran for a year in trendy shoreditch and had all sorts of guest players. It was about then that I got got a macbook (first of three), learned Ableton around then too which got me noticed by former Shaman Colin Angus, we did a few tracks under the guise of Pablo Sandoz. Two most notable were ‘pyramid’ and ‘the fleet’ he was a tough task master and never content with his compositions so finishing anything was a challenge, i still have about 10 more songs that could be finished but because his workflow involved laying down multiple parts, my laptop choked, add to that his reluctance to use a normal studio and the work remains unfinished, for now. considering STEMS as a means to reopen that can of worms but as he then withdrew from creativity, i respected his desire to cease and desist and we have lost touch.

(man, should have used Reason not Ableton, you could pile on about 64 tracks before it started to choke!)

Nice. The Fleet of course being the river that passes by / under there.

Of course we know nothing of The Fleet in the icen forests of ILX

Of course The Fleet was such a long-term ILX obsession, first dug up at the Great Free Jazz Picnic In The Sky, that I start to worry if maybe Colin Angus was an ILX0r?!?!

(Nah, I think it is just a general ~weird London~ staple, coz Coil also had their lost rivers phase, way before the Shimuras ever got there.)

My interest goes back a bit as well, this being the first record I appeared on ;-)

https://imgur.com/a/Lw9dXlW

This is very off topic but the recordist has had an interesting career in film - https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0789331/filmotype/sound_department?ref_=m_nmfm_1

Haha Noel what on earth is that? I’m on my phone so I can’t see the image clearly?

Not sure this is about the *river* Fleet, tho obvs the walk in the woods very much is along the source of The Fleet (and it’s weird listening to The Fleet whole day literally on the banks of the Effra right now:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z1gxdSq16RY

But the original doesn’t sound so much like Popol Vuh so much as it sounds like an obscure B-side by some forgotten parlour psych band with a name like ‘The Marmelade Tambourine Consortoum’ (and I am *so* here for that aesthetic!) He really does the voice for that sort of thing down pat, la la laaaa la la

whole day = while I’m sat (wtf, fone?)

Help me, I am becoming steadily more and more obsessed with these wee Scottish rave hippies!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkc_IShYHzE

^^^warning, contains rather an excessive amount of Terence McKenna

Not nearly enough Will, tho. Here is some bonus Will content for your delectation (he actually comes across as far more intelligent than Terence McKenna TBH)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SI5zwitQps

so there i am scratching around the archive for the ultimate saturday night sonic hit, and struggling.
decide to add a couple of shamen tracks into the playlist.
boom.
this is what i needed all along.

Opiinions of Different Drum? If the idea was an alternative version of Boss Drum then that's a great idea but the actual tracklist doesn't hold together as anything other than a b-sides compilation. It's a disappointment. They skipped some tracks and doubled up on others and didn't pick songs that really flowed together. There must be a better track list, if anyone is familiar enough with the dozens of remixes to attempt such a thing

What Shamen tracks did you add, Mark E?

I've been deep-diving into In Gorbachev We Trust, which is such a weird little time capsule, but also a treasure trove. I'm also realising how completely and thoroughly Jesus Jones ripped off their entire schtick, which is kind of hilarious, like Colin is really gracious about it - but wow. At the time, I was way more familiar with JJ because one of my closest friends was completely in pop-star-love with their singer, so I heard a LOT of JJ - but becoming more familiar with that era of the Shamen, the theft really was quite shameless.

What is Different Drum? I thought it was just a remix album (I've got a ton of remixes on the Hits and Mixes album, which are DJ'd into really nice continual mixes that flow really beautifully). I find Boss Drum really weird, like it's the album I connect with the least, even though it has the singles I am most familiar with. It seems kinda weird that *that* was the really successful one, given how uneven it is - but I suppose that's down to Ebeneezer Goode.

Coming to the conclusion that with the occasional exception - the original version of En-Tact; Arbor Bona Arbor Mala - they are a singles band way, way more than an albums band. And I'm not sure that's entirely a record company problem - because as much as I've grown to love UV, that is also kind of a patchy album. I do think Colin is an artist who needs an editor.

just a few of the various beatmaster remixes of the pop stuff, and then the big megamix on the 2nd cd of the hits collection.

re different drum : never listened to it as an album, i just dip into it and select a track here and there.
never even thought it was meant to be listened to as a complete album.

Huh, looking at the track listing, it seems like it might be worth giving it a listen as a 'remixed album' - I'd be much happier with an instrumental version of Fatman, for example, which has always been a wincing moment for me.

They just had such a huge profusion of remixes (I was reading that there were like 35 different officially released remixes of, I think Pro>Gen / Move Any Mountain!!!!) it's hard to remember sometimes which is the one I like. For example, Heal (The Separation) - the mix on Hits and Mixes - I just had to check, it's Help New Edit - is much better than the album version. There's a middle 8 or a pre-chorus or something, where the vocal harmonies just don't meld on the album version, while the edit is just pure tone-cluster gorgeousness.

(Watching the You, Me and Everything video again just reminds me, like I know Will Sin was apparently 6 feet tall, but Colin looks like a *child* standing in front of him, the way Will just looms over him, he is really wee, isn't he, aw, I'm so smitten this is absurd.)

HA-HEm. Yes. remixes.

I dug out Boss Drum after all the chatter on this thread, it had to be 15 years since I last listened. Singles hold up, but I was surprised to like some of the album tracks, which I remembered as terrible. I probably have more patience for spoken-word lectures over instrumental passages than I did back then

En-tact I still listen to from time to time. Sounds like I should go farther back huh?

Haha, are you talking about Re:evolution? I go back and forth on that track, according to my mood. Like, sometimes I can be all ~oh wow echelons of the eschaton in hyperspace woooowwww groovy thoughts maaaaaan~ and sometimes I'm just like 'STFU Terence McKenna' - these days I find old-fashioned woo almost... charming? Like, aw, crystals and UFOs and crop circles, how sweet - compared to the woo of today.

I found a copy of In Gorbachev We Trust on Discogs, and it totally holds up. I'm enjoying that immensely - angry, political Colin, before he discovered Ecstasy and mellowed out into a groovy hippie. (Or maybe that's the Will on the record. I don't think so? There's still angry, political stuff on Drop, which was recorded before Will joined. But I haven't entirely worked out which songs on that are Colin and which are Derek, because their voices are very similar, while Will had a completely different accent.)

What is You, Me and Everything from? Is that from the Phoward e.p. because that's the one where I haven't found the whole thing yet, I've only heard bits and pieces on YouTube.

Like, this is Derek's singing voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRrVg_jdzIs

This is angry, political Colin's singing voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haolNTLsNIA

(On bass no less! but it makes so much sense that he started as a bass player - given his later interest in bass-driven dance music, bassists definitely believe in Bassism. It brings me joy that Colin is a 'hold the bass up high like you're cuddling it' bassist as opposed to a 'sling the bass down low like you are fucking it' bassist.)

Yep the McKenna track. I think I was in the right mood for it. I'm gonna listen to In Gorbachev We Trust next!

It's sooooo good! Let me know what you think, I'm excited to hear other people's first impressions of it.

i had the mix cd since it came out and keep listening to it regularly. it's great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myAcXS0qLEw

was kinda surprised at how decent moby remixes are, first two here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFDZl45hGQ0

hardfloor remix of eschaton is probably my favorite of the bunch (the instrumental one, vocals on the vocal one seem completely out of place)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWNRhdO9VG8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6xuEo485Vo

what other remixes are good? tempted to get this: https://www.discogs.com/Shamen-The-Complete-Shamen-CD-Singles-Box-Set/release/1770245

I've been a Shamen fan in the US since like '92 when I got En-Tact (US edition). I've still never heard UV. Saw it used on CD at the same place a few times ages ago but never picked it up. Kinda regret that.

big fave -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IazzpaUOkoY

Argh, that Beltram dub, the instrumentation is really great, but the bassline and the vocals are just slightly off synch and phasing in the wrong place and it's bugging the hell out of me. (Also, as much as people complain about Mr C - I really do find that I miss something when his raps aren't there? Like, the slight irritant is neccessary to the pleasure of the experience.)

Oh lord that remix box set ... my eyes are going all big with cupidity, but no, I will be strong. I need to resist box sets, I do not have the space for them.

UV really is for hardcore fans only, but I do love it. The lyrics are absurd, but you should already know that, from everything after Destination Eschaton. (I'm so glad I'm not in the office, so no one has to hear me wandering about, warbling "open up the Staaaaar-gate, let everybody enter!" because that song is so insanely catchy.) Some of their experiments into drum n bass don't entirely work, but it's still a fun album.

(I will carry on saying this until everyone listens to it and then they come back to me like o_0 Branwell what is all this shit about crystals and UFOs and me just clutching it screaming 'but I love them, ok!')

I've still never heard UV. Saw it used on CD at the same place a few times ages ago but never picked it up.

not heard UV, never seen it out in the wild so not been able to grab a copy.
yet.

::quiet voice::

it's on YouTube?

::scarpers away::

sorry - i don't do youtube stuff, can't stream to my sonos/stereo

I have ever noticed the flaws in that Beltram mix all these years. Cloth ears!

Hahah OMG the YouTube algorithm just turned up gold?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yHrsPW42-o

^^^it noticed I had listened to a lot of Shamen *and* a lot of Mary Chain recently, and suddenly suggested "do you want to hear some sullen, nasty, viciously funny, Pre-E Colin Angus tearing the Tories a new one?"

Yes, as it turns out, I do.

I vividly remember Jesus Loves Amerika (but i don't love either) from that era because it was on a c-90 tape I taped from the John Paeldo show - as was common practise back then when you couldn't afford music!

Yeah, it was on my Snub-TV 'Save' VHS tape

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsRm_4zTSUg&ab_channel=themosttogain

what is the secret of posting youtubes these days? fuck knows!

it would be easier to tell you what you did wrong if you told us what you did

just c+ped its URL as in formatting instructions

was it a time-continue url?

https://youtu.be/pqrGcz7nM7U

don't think so. I'm not even going to try posting a youtube vid on here again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsRm_4zTSUg&ab_channel=themosttogain

oh fuck it!

just took the the 's' off http that time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqrGcz7nM7U

👍

btw it appears calz was attempting to post a url with a whole bunch of extra stuff on the end of it

there are plenty of reasons to read yr posts before clicking submit, folks

Calz, it was absolutely fine - you could click through to see the video just perfectly? (I have images switched off anyway, which changes all youtubes to links.)

It's weird how stark the split is between the two eras. Like, post-E Shamen is so much more appealing to my big shiny pop aesthetics - but comparing their 'crystals and UFOs' latter-period lyrics to Jesus Loves Amerika and Shitting On Britain, it is genuinely like it is two different bands. With each passing decade, Jesus Loves Amerika seems to get *more* relevant, politically - but it's bizarre there's only 10 years between "these are the men who put the Right in righteous" of Jesus Loves Amerika and "Mercury UFO, the messenger, from the Lord of Zion / Transcending space to seminate the crystal."

Like, he genuinely seemed like a much happier, calmer, more at peace with himself, less angry and depressed and more well-balanced person after the E, but ... is there something *necessary* about all that anger and rage and pain, to stimulate political awareness and calls to action? (Or was it more, that after a string of successful pop singles, he was a very wealthy man, and didn't *need* to care about politics? That is also a thing that happens.)

((The other funny thing is, 30 years ago, I struggled occasionally with understanding Scottish accents, but now, decades after returning to Britain, I can understand Colin - and even Will - perfectly, but really struggle to understand what on earth the American evangalists are saying in the video? The one at the start, the really fist-pumping bible-banging one, who seems to say 'wibble Tommy!' - what on earth is he *saying*?))

Calz, it was absolutely fine - you could click through to see the video just perfectly? (I have images switched off anyway, which changes all youtubes to links.)

(this was not the case if you have not switched images off btw)

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/the-shamen-at-tower-records-london-britain-1992-the-shamen-picture-id566776351?s=2048x2048

I remember someone saying the early Shamen were either influenced by, or were 'like' The Jam.

I really can't imagine that being true...

Did the person saying this have any experience of, or understanding of 60s / mod / psych music beyond The Jam, because that is... weird.

Well, I doubted it at the time to the point of not investigating. (Not that I wanted it if it had been true...)

OMG, I have found it... the missing link.

Like, the psychedelic indie of _Drop_ really doesn't make much sense as the starting point for what would become ~The Shamen~ of cheeky rave boshness - but that's because it's not the starting point? THIS is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSsD9qktgIc

The cheese! The europop dance element! The Factory Records funk! The fake New Order synth stabs and sequenced handclaps! But with the occasional big garage-rock guitar riff thrown in. Fa la-la laa la.

Also, the amazing Jesus and Mary Shamen hair. I am in particular awe of Colin's folicular glory here, though Keith makes a faintly hilarious Bobby Gillespie clone:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/e3f66a466acd078605e85c0adfdeac62/efa0211d90d7a2e4-a9/s1280x1920/09907f0e39f1f8c058d3aee1a69d7442eece4560.jpg

colin is back.

https://twitter.com/MoshipMusic

i didn't realise Michael Horowitz was still with us.

this sounds like he might have made it in 1991 and had been sitting on it ever since.

indeed.
not that i have any complaints.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdA94cu0818

"leeeeave your body behind" ah go on then twist my arm