A subdivision of ACIDEMIC

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Bold, Bloody and Dissolute: (After the War isn't Over) - An Erich Kuersten Spotify Meisterwerke


Have you a Spotify? If... Listen. This melange of strange sound bytes, poetry, news clippings, weird songs, and old radio shows and speeches--played in order--can help you make, as Colonel Kurz would say, a friend of horror. You will laugh, cry, have a Joycean aesthetic arrest, a cosmic epiphany, and come to learn an ancient secret: only by accepting the violent hypocrisy and seething madness of the universe, to embrace it all as 'good'--the cold devouring chthonic as well as the lean solar Apollonian; the rending incisors of the frenzied maenads as well as the warm absolving caress of mother; the cold and greedy lawyers eviscerating their own innards in their frenzy as well as the still Zen master gazing enraptured at a sunflower--can one find peace. Loving your opponents doesn't mean necessarily putting down the gun. Accepting that we will always fight to not fight means we can succeed in attaining something greater, a kind of blood-splattered self-knowledge.

But that too is fleeting.

Not this mix though. Listen well, and let us take you past colonialism, mass murder, and Shakespeare. There will be the good and bad of booze, and of psychedelics: the four stages of Sanislov Grof's LSD rebirth cycle, the horror that leads to Hunter and the bliss that leads to Ram Dass, the weird that leads to McKenna, the evil that leads to Manson and the brown acid psych wards that lead to Burroughs. Good morning Starshine and Good morning Vietnam, this is Bob 'What am I doing in Da Nang?' Hope." Death. Hope and Death. It's what's for dinner. Allow it. Eat yourself and when the last bite of mouth swallows its final act of swallowing, what is left?

That was no Martian - it's Halloween.


SPOTIFY DESC: The ghost of British colonization claws our epitaph within the genetic code of the future monsters. Crystal meth in Wermacht travel kits, Manson, Leary, the burning joys of apocalypse - Bob Hope entertains the troops in Da Nang, Robert Oppenheimer rides the tachyons

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

ROLLER MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE and other forgotten (OOP) tripper comedy gems from Firesign and Folk


Groovy - It's easy to forget all the 'forgotten' tripping comedy albums Firesign Theater and its inhabitants made in the early 70s, as only the big ones via Columbia seem to be in any kind of reprint schedule (and the latter stuff can't quite measure up - whose can?). Here's a pretty groovy solo project, based on the cover, the first ten minutes or so I've heard, and the raves of D.W. Rayger, it's pretty trippy. Certainly its mention of a 'television mission' evokes Brian Oblivion as well as Jesus, and Austin does a pretty dead-on Kris Kristofferson impression singing "Come on, Jesus, show yourself!" I remember seeing it in record stores back in the day, and mighty scary it seemed to my child's eye and wild imagination. Not sure if any of these approach the complicated majesty of DONT CRUSH THAT DWARF HAND ME THE PLIERS, or side one of WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICIAN, but hey - they're surely worth a cursory tumble.