Mandragora - Earthdance

Haven't heard this for many, many years, but giving it a fresh listen (due to a post request), it's a good album.  Ambient/world/spacerock/trance noodlings from Hawkwind-influenced free festival faves Mandragora.  If you dig Ozric Tentacles, Treatment or Magic Mushroom Band, then you'll find something to like here.

1. Sometimes
2. Earthdance
3. Xylem
4. Zarg
5. The Great Rubbing Of Parts
6. Factory In The Jungle
7. Around The World (Live)

Earthdance

Also, of interest should be this fantastic blog, which has early cassette releases of lots of free-festival bands like Mandragora, Treatment, Webcore etc.  DL links from the 'just the musick' section all seem to work.

Praise Space Electric - Mushroom Jazz

Hmm...the label says 1997, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was 1970, filtered through an exotic 1959 bachelor pad haze.  Listen to this album and you'll immediately be transported to the very coolest psychedelic space-jazz lounge in the universe.

Nobody did this type of music better than Praise Space Electric.  Similar to their previous album '2 Leaving Demons', 'Mushroom Jazz' is an album of spacey, funky grooves, but with more jazz and lounge in the mix and a much better production, allowing these bright and breezy workouts to breathe.  There's Funkadelic/70s Miles Davis grooves sitting next to cosmic elevator music played by Vince Guaraldi. Some tracks sound like Les Baxter covering 'Crosstown Traffic'.  Or Jimi Hendrix covering 'Oasis Of Dakhla', if you prefer.  Either way, it's pretty smooth stuff.  Music to clean your clothes and shine your shoes to.  Put on your purple flares, fix yourself a cocktail, dangle a jazz cigarette from the corner of your mouth and let PSE do the rest...

Track listing:

1. Inbetween Times
2. Do You Know How To Play
3. Movement
4. Forward In Every Direction
5. Connection
6. Plazza De Toros
7. Nothing Could Be Simpler
8. Then You Can Do It
9. You're The One

Sorry, download link removed, notification of infringement received.  You see, Amazon sell it.  Probably iTunes too.  Haha, oh the irony of it, the cosmic sounds of PSE, anarchistic psychedelic warriors under the strict protection of the DMCA...the world has gone crazy!!

Terence McKenna & Zuvuya - Dream Matrix Telemetry

Ever wondered what 'machine elves' are and how you can get in contact with them?  Then follow me into my psychedelic wigwam...

On this album, Terence McKenna, one of the great psychedelic explorers, reports back from inner space and relates some of his theories and discoveries after his many experimentations with DMT.  Ambient psychonauts Zuvuya accompany him with a morphing, organic, cosmic soundscape, and it's the perfect match for McKenna's stoned intonations, which dip in and out of proceedings like Mr Spock on acid.  He describes DMT hallucinations where the user is pushed through the centre of a chrysanthemum-like mandala and, on the other side, finds 'jewelled self-dribbling basketballs', or machine elves, as he later terms them.  These beings then begin to use a visible language, singing objects into existance, their words morphing into 'self-transforming sculptured jewelled machines'.  The whole thing is far out x10, truly mind-expanding and totally psychedelic.

Also of note is that the cover artwork is by the great Pete Loveday, creator of everyone's favourite stoned hippy, Russell.

Receive a self-transforming gift from the acid goblins here

The Moonflowers - Hash Smits

I think I've said elsewhere on this blog that the Moonflowers were, back in the day, one of my very faves.  A 100% commited, totally inspirational group of visionary cosmic warriors who stood for freedom and the right to live, to love, to laugh, to lose your clothes and, last but not least, to launch yourself into psychedelic space and get so high that you would eventually forget how to get back down again.

Hash Smits was their debut album, released in 1992, pulling together all their early releases and a John Peel session.  I saw them play most of it at Glastonbury Festival (not sure which year, it's all a bit of a haze...).  One thing I do remember is that during their set, they let everyone down the front get up on stage with them to join in the love.  It was chaos, beautiful chaos.  One hundred mushroom heads freaking out on stage together for the aural and visual pleasure of the thousand mushroom heads watching them.  Needless to say, the whole experience blew my mind.  One of the best daze ever.

I listened to this album just yesterday for the first time in many years.  It still sounds great, taking in Hendrix inspired work-outs, smooth psychedelic love grooves, anti-war stomps, and, especially on 'I Want To Dill You', disturbing, simmering, bad acid freak-outs.

Track Listing:

1. Rock 'n' Roll
2. We Dig Your Earth (Dig It)
3. Warshag
4. Fire
5. I Want to Dill You
6. Dub Time
7. My Baby
8. Groove Power
9. Back Where I Belong
10. Get Higher

Feel the vibrations here.

It's been a long time....

...a real long time.

Hmm...yeah...time.  It's kind of elastic.  It contracts, stretches, then contracts.  You don't notice at first.  Then it stretches again, then it stretches some more and you start to feel something.  It keeps on stretching and pulling and gets tighter and tighter until you think it can't stretch no more and it looks like it's gonna break and finally - ZZZZIIINNG!! - it snaps back into place, yanking the past and future into one perfect, quivering now.  But this isn't a moment of Zen consciousness...no, this is a moment of pure fucking horror.  You are a confused, wide-eyed wreck.  You hear a scream from afar and slowly realise that it's coming from your own mouth.  You stare aghast at the mirror, you plead with the calender, you fall to your knees and start begging into clasped hands, sobbing, praying to anyone who might be listening - where the fuck did the last five years go?!?

What I'm trying to say is this - I haven't posted here for five years.  The links here are mostly dead, they have been for a while.  That was due to some file-sharing nazis hassling me for cash which I didn't have.  Someone recently left a rather nice post on the 'Russell' section of the blog and it brought me back here for the first time in a while.  A nice little corner of the internet, this.  Music which was pretty hard to find elsewhere and an often appreciative bunch of freeloaders.  So, here's the upshot - if anyone really can't locate any of these sounds elsewhere and you're desperate and you got no-one else to turn to, I can help.  I can repost any of these sounds upon request.  All you gotta do is ask....

Recently found my old Freakbeat singles.  You remember....weird, floppy things given away by those kind folk who used to publish Freakbeat magazine.  If I can get my shit together to get them digitised, I'll post them here.  Bound to be someone out there who'd appreciate it.