It’s summer and with the heat comes the irresistible clench of kinetic forces, a whirlwind tug of hair and sweat and clinging clothes, eyes staring for hours into hypnotic spirals of oscillating fans that make you yearn for linear motion, a pulse, a push, a pull. Before you know it you are speeding down zig zag lightening bolt highways at 85 mph on a road trip joy ride to the kingdom of nowhere. You gaze out your window at a landscape haunted by monuments to forgotten heroes, paradises constructed from rubber bands, towns tottering on the fragile memory of some obscure historical pastime, utopias constructed then abandoned.

Sometimes the past becomes so degraded that it fades into an ectoplasmic abyss that thickens the air around it with its darkness. Sometimes it slips in stealthily under the un-batting eyelashes of kitsch. Other times it merges into a flash of light and endows the present moment with revelatory sparks of divine wisdom. Either way, when the past transmutes into a spirit form that possesses the present so seamlessly, a new time is created, and that time is GHOST-MODERNISM.

These are the top 20 radio hits of that time: pop-odes to sub-aqueous pyramids, imaginary political figures, chaos, mania, flashes of light, electric lives, moccasined gods, serpent deities of Bahamian voodoo, and murdered lovers whose crosses dot the haunted highway and endow it with everlasting power.

Taraka Larson’s Haunted Highways and Hymns for a Ghost-Modern World Mixtape

∆ SIDE A ∆

1. Dancing Gods- Silver Apples
2. Keinsein- Teeth Mountain
3. Pyramid of the Sun in the Heavens- Peace In
4. Electriclife- Psychic Ills
5. Oceans- Indian Jewelry
6. Laughlines- Cocteau Twins
7. Haunted Graffiti- Ariel Pink
8. Nasirli Eller- Selda
9. Big Sound- Amon Düül
10. Governer Rhodes- Jandek

∆ SIDE B ∆

1. Kuujen halti kuuterhan- Lau Nau
2. In Caroline- Amen Dunes
3. Blue Basket- Unknown (Cambodian Cassette Archives- Sublime Frequencies)
4. Bounce Four- Gary War
5. Flash of Light- Silk Flowers
6. Cheer Up!- MCSquared
7. Tummyache- Sleep ∞ Over
8. Exerpt from Radio Calcutta- Unknown (Radio India- Sublime Frequencies)
9. Dambala- Exuma
10. That’s All For Everyone- Fleetwood Mac (screwed by Taraka Larson)

Upon the discovery of these two tracks, both b-side underbellies of recent 7 inches put out by Captured Tracks, I felt myself paralyzed by the spectral power. I surrendered unquestioningly to their necromantic commands— before long, I found myself unwittingly turning the speed knob down until 45 rpm became 33 and the voices in these seemingly innocuous and digestible pop songs all of a sudden became enchanted oracles ominously imparting a dark and unforeseen realm of prophecy.

I realized that only through embracing a whole-hearted exploration of our haunted state can we hope we bring about a deeper awareness of ourselves as our only exorcisers.

It is thus with this intent that I invite you to be possessed.

∆ COSMETICS ∆

∆ BLACK LEATHER GLOVES ∆

In this spirit realm, nostalgia is the language of knowing and fantasy is the landscape of being. Spidery synths scamper across the glass dance floor of infinity as a hand reaches down from the sky cloaked in the black fetish of mystery. Like some gothic recreation of the Sistine Chapel, a crooked finger beckons you to follow it across the swirling threshold of fog and mirrors to some amorphous disco dome of a bygone era. Before long, you have lost yourself to this hand and you find yourself dancing with everyone in the room, but then, you realize you are everyone in the room and the gloved hand you have been holding is none but your own as you watch it dig your grave.

∆ BEACH FOSSILS ∆

∆ DESERT SAND ∆

The coast ghosts that have haunted the sonic landscape for over a year now seem to weave a wistful eulogy for their lost union with the archetypal beach, whose promise of discovery has possessed residents to the brink of mania. Where is this elusive beach? Who are its inhabitants? What is it really? The Beach Boys who once set out on their mystical quest to find it have shape-shifted into Beach Fossils and their oneirogogic vision of sand once wet by waves is now but a mirage on the horizon of a vast desert expanse. A lone rider drags a beat-up guitar across this sea of quartz and mineral dust, strings plucked in eerie harmony by the skeletal fingers of a daydream unrequited, its bones left to bake in the sun.

Put your ear to the ground;

beneath this field of windblown carcasses

one can hear the soft roar of a new tide rising up through the bedrock

and slipping silver tongues through the cracks in the sand.

It seems to be the week of psychedelic awakenings at 20JFG’s White Castle, what better way of getting the ball rolling than by the gold and ruby beringed hand of Prince Rama of Ayodhya, one of our most favourite bands and last victims of the iniquities of the world, i.e., they had their totemic instruments of spiritual lore stolen by some fools, here’s hoping that these devices are recovered, and that the culprits suffer all manners of karmic retributions, i.e. a thousand reincarnations as wingless insects in a garden full of hungry birds. Check the report here and see if you have any ideas about how to help.

At the very least, do purchase Architecture of Utopia, where the jam we are posting today, ‘Land of the Apocalypse Transcended’ is included. It will be released soon by Animal Image Research. Get ready.

Because if the visitors were to arrive to our planet, coming not from a faraway corner of the universe, but from deep inside us, powerful archetypical distillations from a genetic memory which is both biology and magick, this would be the soundtrack to which their palace of glimmering light and frightful darkness, their palace where every window is an unblinking soul-searing eye of understanding yet forgiveness would rise in the apex of the holy mountain, that drone you hear are the hinges of its massive portal swinging open, inviting us in so we may know. It’s end is only the beginning.

Prince Rama of Ayodhya- The Land of the Apocalypse Transcended

Many Mansions‘ Oneness is a condensed story of the evolution of life in this planet, it kicks on with the simmering of molecular bonds in the primeval soup of the Atlantic sea near the coasts of what we would eventually call Africa, things go out of focus for a moment, it might have been a fraction of a second, it might have been a million years, next time you look, slender creatures of strange shapes are dancing their manatee dance in the crystalline waters, slowly approaching and crawling into land, respiratory systems stretching and becoming more complex, scales and claws and then fur and fingers and opposable thumbs one after the other like life trying on different outfits, expanding forward and sideways, and next thing you know you have a hominid with a spear standing on the top of a mound staring at a Sun that surely was  bigger and redder in the olden days, a moment of reminiscence and wonder and delight at the capacity to revel in the beauty of it all, thinking, yes, thinking, ‘now that was a trip’.

Many Mansions- Oneness

Many Mansions rule- he makes us jump like Steve Reich doing the tropical boogie. Get his album, Return to Source from The Whitehaus Family Record.

And what is the story that they utter?

One of sweaty bedrooms where some kids fight for the fate of the universe against overwhelming forces, armed with but a handful of dice, paper and pencil, from dawn til dusk. Yes, role-playing games, the last refuge of the imaginative and shy teenager who, rejected by a world where success and acceptance are monopolised by those who are big and mighty and good at kicking the ball, where action and consequence seem to be utterly and confusingly disconnected, suddenly finds a portal for becoming whatever he wants and making a difference through sword, sorcery or lethal blaster.

This is the definitive moment when disbelief is suspended, look at a form covered in numbers, that’s you, look at a reticle in the floor where a bunch of citadel figures lay scattered, behind and between plastecine blobs that simulate furniture and landscape, that’s the world, look at that chubby and spotted fellow staring at you from behind his cardboard screen, that’s God, sometimes cruel, sometimes benevolent. All of which will eventually become useful skills.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, stay in the past which is what matters today, because somehow, off the mixture of these odd trinkets something amazing emerges, battles are fought and friendships forged, stories unfold, new universes explored. Astonishing shit, I tell you, but also requiring all that time that starts becoming scarce as one grows up. I haven’t played RPGs for ages, and I miss it. I used to be a dungeon master, and a guardian, I used to craft and rule over worlds, now I have to live in but one, and one which can be quite boring while we are at that. So I feel thankful whenever I stumble upon music which is epic and fierce and demented, progressive and mindblowing, music which simmers with that old time magick that my friends and I used to get wasted on before we even tried alcohol or psychedelics. This is it and this is what we are about. Now roll those dice.

The new Lightning Bolt album does what it says in the box: imagine all the best things in life according to the private diaries of a Greek deity- slaughter of foes and kin alike, throwing rays around like there was no tomorrow, reconfiguring clouds into horrible grimaces with which to inspire fearful prophecies amongst the oracles, the shattering of temples’ pillars with but a handclap, gobbling wine and fighting hand to hand with tigers and lions. Fixing up Aries’ spears down at the ironsmiths while listening to Slayer and Hawkwind, chaos unleashed and unspeakable orgies.
That’s the life kids, and that’s what Earthly Delights sounds like: 360 degrees onslaught in infinite intersecting planes of pure vicious ravishing sound, a bit like one of those killer spheres in phantasmagoria if only they were covered on Peyote slime. Impaled again, such capers.

Lightning Bolt-Funny Farm

It’s a shame I didn’t know much krautrock in those role-playing days, because I could hardly think of more suitable music to skate across the avenues of mind-bending fantasy, science fiction speculation and maddening crawling chaos which used to be my bread and butter then.

Krautrock is the sound of an adventurous spirit expanding like a 3D fractal virus across virgin taigas begging, in their silence, to be populated by the products of a hallucinated imagination. Against the eternal return of pop music, with its choruses and bridges, Krautrock represents the hero’s journey, forever forwards towards the big eye in the sky whose iris marks the end of this world and a precipice into the beyond, a falling which is floating.

In HyBoLT, his latest 12’, Von Spar gives us krautrock and then some, metronomic trip in a silver chariot pulled by a mechanic Pegasus of slender grace, over awe-inspiring dreamscapes, idyllic villages and vast garrisons, menacing crystal castles configured in impossible angles from whose minarets loom devious sorcerers made of brimstone and shadow. It really sounds like the soundtrack for some 70s animation film produced by brainfried hippies, or a video game which we just about have the technology, but not the attitude to deliver.

Von Spar- HyBoLT

How many times must have I described how it feels to slide under the massive arches of an exotic citadel, the wonder of a bazaar where a thousand wares lie displayed for demanding adventurers to inspect, words from a thousand dialects fence in bargaining followed by the tinkling of a thousand currencies stamped on the same gold they all chase, white-robed penitents march under the angry gaze of sneaky pickpockets very aware of suspicious guards in iron breastplates at the feet of marble towers at whose top lounge damsels covered in silk who long with misty eyes for the opportunity to slide under those arches alone, bereft of vassals, bodyguards and assorted minions, free and outside into the plains.

I could have done a better job if I had read Samuel R. Delany, Fritz Leiber or Italo Calvino, or if I had put into the stereo the rather astonishing ‘Zetland’ by Prince Rama Of Ayodhya. Particularly Gold Dawn, which sounds like an intoxicating melange of Magma, Gang Gang Dance, Fremen country music and Neveryon gospel.  It is prog as fuck, and in the best possible way, unhinged, whirling beautiful music which soars like layers of fabric covering the bodies of the Gods as they dance beyond the blue veil of the sky, shedding them one after another, each of them becoming a different season.

Prince Rama Of Ayodhya- Golden Dawn

BONUS

Go to IGETRVNG and buy the first FRWWYS. Or even better, subscribe to the whole series. Check out the video of Excepter remixed by Carter Tutti. w00T!

Click here to view the embedded video.