the shamen: c/d

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