the shamen: c/d

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.

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