Sifting and Sorting 7: Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind!)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Acid Mother’s Temple
In my first year of university I took magic mushrooms for the first and only time. Paul from upstairs made a batch of ‘tea’, I drank a cup and waited for something to happen. It was in the flat where Niamh lived. Niamh was very sophisticated I thought, she was a little older and somehow worldly. She lent me her copy of Big Sur, I tried to impress her with my taste in music and my appreciation of Kerouac. I had read On the Road that summer while my mum and brother were away and I lived alone. I would ride my bike out along the river and try to read it by candle light and usually give up after a bit. I would smoke cigarettes, a habit I was trying to pick up, and drink coffee from a thermos. I liked the book, it seemed profound to me. Everything seemed profound to me. Paul seemed profound because he’d once interviewed Cat Power for a school newspaper.
Nothing really happened and after a while I went downstairs to my room and gently tripped for a few hours alone. Upstairs Niamh and Paul finished the tea and then ate the mushrooms. Apparently this went badly for Niamh, she became convinced she had pulled off her own ear. It all seemed mysterious to me, I felt out of my depth as I did when I was a child and my mum told me that Walnut Whips were only for women. I mostly didn’t understand what was happening around me. I relied on a sort of crappy internal Columbo to piece things together after the fact. I hoped that there was some kind of secret knowledge that I might uncover, the kind of knowledge that Niamh seemed to have ready access to.
In my room still waiting for something to happen I put on a burned CD of Godspeed You! Black Emperor that I had copied from Trevor’s collection during one afternoon sitting on his bed in his flat. It was the Album F# A# ∞. It starts with a voice saying ‘the car is burning and there is no driver at the wheel’. I took out a notebook and tried to will myself into having a psychedelic experience. A bit later I went to the toilet and noticed the pores on my skin pulsating redly and the texture on the wallpaper doing the same thing as if it was part of the same organ. My brain turned over in a giddy hurry and I felt slightly ill. I drew a shape that looked like a tooth and then a bear and then a wolf. Then I recall I went down some kind of penis shaped avenue for a while. Eventually I went to sleep listening to the tape I had of Garrison Keillor reading Lake Wobegon days. It was nice. I’ve never felt the need to do it again, particularly when I heard about Niamh’s trip. There was nothing profound in it, as much as I tried to convince myself that there had been.
Later in the album someone asks someone “do you think the end of the world is coming” and in reply another voice says “so says the preacher man but I don’t go by what he says”. Listening to the album again I realise that I never really managed to listen to Godspeed over the noise of what I thought they were. They occupied a particular niche for someone my age at that time, a boy that sometimes read the Wire but also liked Bloc Party. I felt that this was the kind of music that would reach places that Radiohead could not. I hoped it was profound. Having this CD was a way to believe that I was more worldly than I was, more able to plumb the depths of human experience and appreciate the suffering of life, ideal listening for someone whose professed favourite book was l’etranger. But I just put this music on in the background and zoned out barely hearing it, I just thought it was depressing and scary.
There is much more in the record than I was able to hear. It has this kind of keening sound to it, small melodies creep in and out and rhythms that arrive, swell, and disappear again. Now and again it is as if the group burst into spontaneous song as they reach for cheery ditties as respite from the loops and moods that occupy them elsewhere. In places it grows tired; a little overwrought but in others there is nuance and expression in the sounds the group make that does feel genuinely interesting. With their covers and album titles full of apparent symbolism I expected more but also less.
I never went to see any live music with Trevor, I would liked to have done that. To stand together in a crowded room nodding our heads to Earth or Sunn O))). He had such an earnest way of engaging with sound, particularly once he was limited to his little flat. He would really listen. He cared so much about hi-fi, there are a few places in his notebook where his system is broken or he is planning to buy a new one and the anguish and excitement is palpable. It had been a long time since we truly listened to music together when he died. His deafness made it hard as he couldn’t really hear talk with music in the background. His listening changed. He spent less time with obscure albums on Kranky or Drag City and more time singing along to Nick Cave or Howling Wolf by himself. He had a bunch of lyrics books laid out on one table in his main living space, they were still there when he died. Maybe less intellectual, but more earnest? He needed to feel the words with his mouth to hear them.
When we were younger, when he lived in a previous flat, my brother, Trevor and I would all sit on his bed and listen to new CDs he had bought or that we had brought with us. I went through some of my old CD wallets the other day and found CDs I had burned by Acid Mother’s Temple from around this time, and an amazing organ duo called Sagor & Swing. Sitting next to him, squeezed on the bed with my little brother so we could all take turns playing computer games and listening to heavy music. A sweet and serious memory, being close to him and sharing something that he cared about. He was trying to get better back then. He had this programme of exercise he was supposed to do gradually increasing how far he could walk. He found it too difficult to keep up. He told me about a book he was writing that was set during a single day. I dreamed that one of his projects would some how bring him back to us, that he would be persuaded to rejoin the world in order to become a successful writer.
The Acid Mother’s Temple Album that I made a copy of is called Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind!). It is wonderful, like so much of their music it sounds like a sequence of spontaneous gestures, every sound purposeful and satisfying for the person making it. They perform with focus and earnestness but also pleasure. Godspeed are best when you can hear the enjoyment they find in playing together, and at their worst when they become to aware of their own seriousness. Acid Mother’s Temple on the other hand are always committed to the bit.
For a while our next door neighbour was a guy called Geoff Leigh, a saxophonist and flautist who started out playing in Henry Cow, he played with some of the Acid Mother’s Temple variants and he looked and spoke more or less exactly like Neil from the Young Ones. All the way through the pandemic we heard him practice every day. It was fortunate that he was so talented because the saxophone is not easy to muffle, he told us that he used to try playing into his wardrobe to quiet the sound for our benefit. But I liked hearing him repeat and modulate phrases tirelessly. Though his bongo phase was more maddening. We went to see Acid Mothers Temple in Norwich a few years ago and we told Geoff, he looked a little put out. He said “Oh I thought they might have asked me to play” exactly like Neil from the Young Ones would have said it.
Geoff gave over his whole life to pursuing the sounds and feelings that he believes in. As I write this and I listen to Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind!) a saxophone emerges from a long passage of relentless sound and noodles through a fog of squelchy synthesiser like a distant and romantic busker. It’s not Geoff, it was much later that he played with them, it is someone called Mano Kazuhiko, but the sweet and contemplative sound reminds me of listless afternoon’s at home in 2020 while Geoff played his sax through the wall. We wouldn’t see him for weeks but we would hear him. There were some things about Geoff that reminded me of Trevor.
Playing live they looked like gods emerging from the mist. The Norwich Arts Centre had the most incredible sound that meant that we could hear every detail, each tiny expression in their performance. Had it been a sludgy PA it would have been so enjoyable even at the highest volume there was still musicality in the noise. It was a head-nodding dreamscape drone-like and psychedelic without every becoming tiresome. Trevor would have loved it . I can see his facial expression as he stares brows furrowed and intensely focused on the stage listening out for every mote of meaning in the music. What we did do from time to time was go to exhibitions, I would wheel him up to the paintings one by one and he would just stare. We rarely saw a whole show before he became so tired he had to leave. A frustrating experience certainly, but one that gave me appreciation for his great hope that he would find something in every work of art, or piece of music, every novel, something that was perceptible only to him.
I think I am different from Trevor in this way. But I am envious of what he had too in a way. It is probably the reason that I have not continued to pursue psychedelic experiences since that evening in my first year accommodation. I do not think there is something for me in the art that I encounter, nor can I maintain that delicious fantasy that in the world around us there are secrets which appear only in the corners of our perception. There is this bit in On the Road, at least I think there is, where the narrator is looking from the window at the landscape and imagines that his gaze is a blade scything through the trees beside the road. I was excited as a child when I read this because it was something I used to do in the car, imagining my eyes made a laser beam that cut everything in two. When I read it I thought it meant something, I thought perhaps I was destined for greatness. Was this a secret hallucination that was the preserve of great men? Who gives a shit.