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Recorded in 1968 and issued as a very limited run private pressing this psychedelic raga freak-out is the brainchild of multi disciplinar artist Loren Standlee plus his partner Ziska with the cooperation of Daevid Allen and Gilli Smith, in what was an early incarnation of Gong.
Loren and Ziska had been involved with the crowd of avantgardist free thinkers that settled in Formentera in the sixties, and back home in N.Y. they had also been connected to experimentalists such as Angus Maclise, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Pandit Pran Nath, a.o.
This bizarre selection of sounds was the brainchild of Loren Standlee and Ziska and features a very early Gong incarnation. Loren Standlee and Ziska were among the "Formentera" (small Island near Ibiza, Spain) visionary poets, musicians and psychedelic researchers in the early sixties. In Paris, they began hand-painting silk and designing clothes for many of the rock luminaries of the time, among them The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix, as well as haute couture designers in Paris and London. They met Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth at a poetry reading where Loren was playing Alto Flute and Ziska was creating vocal sounds to intermix with the flute. They began playing together as a group utilizing Daevids Italian echo chambers and soon they had a two-night-a-week gig playing at the Vielle Grille, an avant guard club in Paris where you might hear Ornette Coleman playing upstairs or see Yoko Ono performing in a sack on stage Two of the tracks on the bonus LP, feature the line-up of Loren, Ziska and Raj Samyana, which is basically The Universal Mutant Repertory Company minus Angus Maclise and his wife Hetty.
The Universal Mutant Repertory Company are most known as a group that included drummer Angus MacLise, multimedia avant-gardist who was the original drummer of the Velvet Underground. The Company were formed in the late 1960s, and included MacLise, his wife Hetty MacLise (on organ, tanpura, and probably other instruments), Loren Standlee (alto flute), Ziska Baum (Indian dulcimer), and Raja Samyana (guitar). The Universal Mutant Repertory Company was a name devised by filmmaker Ira Cohen, to describe the people appearing in his film Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. All of the musicians did an improvised soundtrack to that film at St. Mark's Church in New York. A 39-minute tape of the performance, used as the title track, formed the core of the Angus MacLise retrospective CD collection The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. On this piece, the group played drone-trance music propelled by MacLise's charged hand drumming, given extra psychedelic coating by the employment of four microphones, each run through an echo chamber. Loren Standlee recalled in The Wire magazine that the musicians would play together for as long as eleven hours straight. An original copy would cost you a small fortune (raising over 4 digits!), but heres at last an accurate vinyl reissue that comes complete with liner notes plus an amazing poster of one of Loren Standlees psychedelic collages plus an extra LP with previously unreleased studio material.
Limited to 500 copies only.
Track Listing:
