Summer of Love Redux
By WILL HERMES

ASA IRONS of the Vermont musical collective Feathers is stroking his beard. It is formidable beard; a biblical beard. He and his band mates — who mainly operate out of a rural farmhouse without cellphones, Internet, manager or booking agent — are at WNYC radio to perform their enigmatic, pixie-ish folk-rock on the long-running show “Spinning on Air.” Today their instruments include a lap harp, a toy xylophone, a Middle Eastern hand drum and an acoustic guitar hand-painted with animals and rainbows.

Ruth Garbus, a dark-eyed 24-year-old whose T-shirt depicts tractors flying through space, is talking about conjuring mystery with music, “that whole psychedelic thing of letting your mind go where it will.” Mr. Irons, 24, his long hair tied up in a bun, chimes in with a story about working as a carpenter and about growing up with parents who were “woods hippies, not town hippies.”

“I’m all about the old world, man,” Mr. Irons says with a mischievous laugh.

Perhaps. But he and his band mates are also about a new world: one of the most creatively vigorous strains of underground music. Initially dubbed “freak folk,” it looked like a trend of the moment a couple of years ago, when two California artists, Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, attracted attention with charmingly shaggy, deceptively whimsical, largely acoustic albums.

But the scene they spearheaded has grown steadily and expanded sonically, getting less folkie and more, well, freaky. It has also gone international. And this season — the Summer of Love 2.0 — it comes into full, wild bloom with releases, tours and festival appearances that promise nothing less than a new age of Aquarius.

The new music is more a mind-set than a genre. It usually employs acoustic instruments, though it’s as likely to have roots in progressive rock, free jazz or Brazilian pop as in Appalachian ballads.

Vocals tend toward the willfully eccentric, arrangements toward the exotic, lyrics toward the oblique. The sound can range from gentle ensemble music befitting a Renaissance fair to electric psychedelia befitting an acid test. The musicians often conjure the 60’s in grooming and countercultural/utopian/back-to-the-land vibe. Many are friends, cultivating a communal network of informal collaboration: they tour together, play on one another’s records and sing one another’s praises. But with a tendency toward art that’s both homespun and solipsistic, and that shows little interest in music industry trappings, they can seem less interested in Making It Big than in keeping it small.

Still, the music is on the rise: for every backwoods group of musicians like Feathers, there are equally beguiling bands like Lavender Diamond, which is based in Los Angeles. This summer kindred bands like the darkly pastoral Espers, the gorgeously lyrical Vetiver, the raging Comets on Fire, the entrancing Six Organs of Admittance, the boogie-rocking Howlin Rain, the molasses-grooved Brightblack Morning Light, the computer-enhanced Tunng, the improvisatory Wooden Wand and the noisily experimental Grizzly Bear are all releasing CD’s, as are others — Jolie Holland, Ane Brun, Cibelle, Juana Molina and M. Ward — less connected to the scene but reflecting its aesthetics. And that’s not to mention promising artists like Alela Diane (www.myspace.com/alelamusic) who are popping up almost daily on Internet showcases.

These acts mainly play clubs, and their records remain tiny blips on SoundScan. But that may soon change. Virtually every major indie-rock label has embraced the style, including many veteran marketers of punk attitude that would recently have avoided anything vaguely “hippie.” Even Warp, the standard-bearer of British techno, has signed the woodsy Grizzly Bear. And Mr. Banhart is now signed to the hot British XL label, home to the White Stripes and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

If the major labels are lagging — well, that’s what major labels do. But with the endless-summer, hippie-folk-lite of Jack Johnson hitting No. 1 on the charts earlier this year, they probably won’t be for long.

Mr. Banhart, who got so much attention in 2004, remains the king of the scene and has extended his reach beyond it. He was recently invited to perform at a Chanel fashion show, to help organize the British alternative-pop festival All Tomorrow’s Parties and to perform at this weekend’s Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee. He was even romantically linked, for a moment, to the starlet Lindsay Lohan. Along the way the neo-hippie revival he represents is gaining cultural traction. Vice, the magazine, clothing line, record label and all-around hipster franchise, has scheduled psychedelic-rock acts (the veterans Blue Cheer and Roky Erikson, and Boredoms, a Japanese band) among the top acts at the Intonation Festival it sponsors next weekend in Chicago. And “Just Another Diamond Day,” a 1969 song by Vashti Bunyan — an eccentric British singer who’s a folksy patron saint of the new scene — is now playing in a T-Mobile ad.

To make the most of all this interest, archival labels are busy bringing out albums that have been out of print for decades. “We’re living in the age of the reissue,” said Michael Klausman, a buyer for Other Music in New York, a store that is a major source of experimental folk. “For some of the younger musicians, these old records are their formative influences. You see them engaging with the music of their parents’ generation almost like it’s a contemporary phenomena.”

This summer’s version of freak folk tends to be darker and more experimental than first-wavers like Mr. Banhart and Ms. Newsom. The guitarist Ben Chasny is a Northern Californian whose pleasantly droning electro-acoustic recordings date back to the late 90’s. He appears on three impressive new records this season: “The Sun Awakens,” a haunting mix of fingerpicking and feedback by his main creative vehicle, Six Organs of Admittance (who perform at the Mercury Lounge in New York on July 6); “Black Ships Ate the Sky,” an “apocalyptic folk” song-cycle by the former industrial rockers Current 93; and “Avatar,” a ferocious psych-rock set by Comets on Fire (out Aug. 9).

Mr. Chasny, like many musicians on the scene, is a self-confessed record geek. “The whole thing for me at first was getting the beautiful, mysterious record that made you wonder, ‘Who are these guys?’ But then I’d mail-order these crazy psychedelic folk records and feel, ‘Well, that wasn’t really crazy enough.’ So I started making the records I wanted to hear.”

Mr. Chasny’s work with Comets on Fire of Santa Cruz represents the noisier side of new psychedelia, as does the self-titled debut by Howlin Rain, a side project of the Comets’ guitarist Ethan Miller. Their screaming guitars are worlds away from the laid-back sound of most modern “hippie rock.”

“I come from the biggest hippie area in the world,” said Mr. Chasny, who grew up in Arcata, Calif. “But they don’t listen to the real hippie music. They listen to Phish and that groove stuff. I love the old psychedelic music because it wasn’t just imagery.”

“It was music that meant something,” he added.

Precisely what the music meant then, and means now, is an open question. “It’s a very Aquarian thing,” explained Jay Babcock, editor in chief of Arthur, a free-distribution music magazine (with articles on progressive politics and herbalism) that has become the central voice of the new scene. “Hallucinogens, rock ‘n’ roll, love of nature, interest in social justice. These are all people basically fleeing in horror from the homogenizing, materialist, bottom-line corporate monoculture that’s overtaking America.”

Greg Weeks of the Philadelphia electro-acoustic group Espers said, “There’s an element in this community that’s tied in to the most valid aspects of the counterculture and learning from the mistakes of the earlier generation.”

For one thing, he notes that “there isn’t so much reckless abandon” with regard to drug use; just alcohol, marijuana and the occasional psychedelic, most say. Politics, meanwhile, tend to be expressed subtly, through the way people live rather than through explicit song lyrics. “You don’t have to have a grand statement,” Mr. Weeks said. “You can just do things in your own little way, put them out there, and if people respond, it’s going to have a chain reaction. And I think that’s kind of what’s happening.”

Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes of Brightblack Morning Light are an example of that. Hailing from Alabama, they have spent the last couple of years living in tents (and a renovated chicken coop) near Lagunitas, Calif. Their group — whose Crystal Totem tour, with Espers, comes to Brooklyn’s Southpaw on Wednesday and the Mercury Lounge on Friday — will release a marvelously hypnotic self-titled CD this week that’s awash in liquid slide guitar and burbling Fender Rhodes progressions.

“Most of the album was written on hikes at Point Reyes National Seashore and is about interacting with the wilderness,” said Mr. Shineywater from a truck stop en route to Joshua Tree, where he, Ms. Hughes and their dog planned to do some camping with friends (including Mr. Babcock).

As he speaks about nature worship and what psilocybin mushrooms “could do for our collective consciousness,” he obviously relishes his role as hippie ambassador. But he and Ms. Hughes are clearly sincere back-to-the-landers: they work with the eco-activist group Earth First! and organize the Quiet Quiet Ocean festival, an annual music event in California. Naturally, their friends Mr. Banhart and Ms. Newsom drop by.

Community building is an important feature of the scene, both in the United States and abroad. Members of Feathers single out the Finnish experimental folk scene for praise, specifically artists like Lau Nau and Islaja and labels like Fonal, and talk of forthcoming collaborations. Juana Molina of Argentina, whose “Son” is one of the year’s top electro-acoustic records, plans to record this month with Mr. Banhart and Andy Cabic of Vetiver (whose new CD, “To Find Me Gone,” showcases some of the new scene’s best songwriting).

Judging from the number of international artists exploring similar sounds, collective consciousness may be at work. Last month the debut CD by a Swedish singer named Ane Brun was released in the United States; its slightly surreal folksiness suggests the influence of Mr. Banhart’s music, though Ms. Brun says she had not heard it. And in England, Adem and Tunng expand on folk influences with electronics. “You may be in a London basement with a laptop and a guitar, but you can make the city your rural area through music,” said Mike Lindsay of Tunng, which will release its second set of clattering fusion music, “Comments of the Inner Chorus,” in the United States in August.

Tunng, like many of the scene’s players abroad, use loops and digital beats more prominently than its stateside counterparts, an impulse that may have to do with electronic music’s larger cultural presence outside America. But the experimental appetite of the new music is inherently broad. “It’s not about genre,” said Cibelle, a Sao Paolo musician whose recent CD, “The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves,” was partly produced by Mr. Lindsay and features a duet with Mr. Banhart. She says the current movement has much in common with tropicalia, the omnivorous Brazilian cultural movement of the late 60’s. (Os Mutantes, the reunited tropicalia act, is also touring this summer, performing at Webster Hall on July 21.) “This new state of mind,” she said by phone from London. “Even if musicians don’t know tropicalia by that name, they are still making music that way, by intuition, without rules, following their own uniqueness.”

Perhaps that is as good an explanation as any for the new aesthetic, which is not everyone’s cup of herbal tea. Critics and listeners raised on punk’s supposed anti-hippie credo can be suspicious, if not wholly dismissive of the scene, while some 60’s folk fans find the new incarnation too politically disengaged. As one critic wrote in The New Republic, artists like Ms. Newsom and Mr. Banhart “tend to communicate nothing except self-absorption.”

Other old-schoolers, however, are impressed. Neil Young has invited Ms. Newsom to perform with him, and the Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson has been a devoted supporter of the scene. “For me,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “the collection of artists involved in the so-called psych-folk revival serve as a reminder that in the corporate morass of today’s sterile music industry, there are artists unafraid, confident and talented enough to flourish creatively in a homegrown environment.”

And so it seemed last month while watching Feathers perform at Tonic, a New York club known for its openness to the new music. With five singer-songwriters, the members constantly exchanged instruments — clarinet, violin, mandolin, flute and an electric guitar that threatened like an approaching thunderstorm — and sang of searching for a home “in the fields” and “in the air.”

When they finished, they packed up quickly. One needed to be back in Brattleboro by morning for an early shift at the local food co-op; others were visiting friends in Connecticut. But they took time to exchange hugs with members of the audience, leaving a little pixie dust behind before heading back to the woods

From ROZ PAYNE:

I’ve been working on a two-disk DVD which includes three Newsreel films on the Black Panther Party along with Black Panther stories, photos, and FBI documents It contains never before seen interesting historical material.

The Newsreel films are “Mayday” and “Off the Pig,” both made by San Francisco Newsreel along with “Repression” made by Los Angeles Newsreel.

“Off the Pig” contains interviews with Party leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton describing why the Party was formed and its goals. It includes footage of Panther recruitment, training, demonstration opening day of Huey’s trial and the Party’s original 10 Point Program laid out by Bobby Seale.

“Mayday” (Black Panther) film: On May 1, 1969 the Black Panther Party held a massive rally in San Francisco with speakers Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, attorney Charles Garry, and Bob Avikian. The footage includes footage of the police raid on the Panther headquarters a few days prior to the rally and the Panther’s Breakfast for children Program.

“Repression,” recently discovered, was made by Los Angeles Newsreel and has never been distributed. It is about the police attack on the Los Angeles BPP office including footage of the shoot out, breakfast program, confrontation between Panthers and Ron Karanga’s US group , the funeral of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, and music by Elaine Brown.

Additional interviews with the following will be included along with the Newsreel films:

* FBI Special Agent WAC (William A. Cohendet) , San Francisco case agent who opened the FBI file on the Black Panther Party. He was responsible for the bi monthly reports to FBI headquarters. He is the only FBI agent to reveal his role against the Panthers. He was a great writer and knew all the gossip. This is the only interview he gave.

* Donald Cox , Field Marshall of the Black Panthers presently exiled in France and wanted for murder in the USA. DC was in charge of the Panther military and discusses politics, military actions, and other events that most Panthers have not talked or written about.

* Attorney Beverly Axlerod was responsible for getting panther leader Eldridge Cleaver out of jail. The book “Soul on Ice” by Cleaver is dedicated to her and includes her letters. The famous picture of Huey sitting in the chair with the gun and spear was shot in her home and the first BPP newspaper was made on her mimeograph machine. (This interview was shot a year before she died)

* Attorneys Jessie Berman and Jerry Lefcourt discuss the New York Panther 21 trial . After two years in the court the 21 Panthers were found Not Guilty.

* Attorney Bob Bloom tells the story of Panther Geronimo Pratt who was released from jail after being held for 21 years.

* Attorney Robert Boyle discusses Panther Dhoruba bin Wahad and how he was released after 17 years in jail.

* Attorney Mike Meyers tells a story of the Detroit Panthers.

Interviews with Newsreel members and supporters of the Black Panther Party:

* Marilyn Buck (presently in jail) Newsreel member, Black Panther and Black Liberation supporter

* The Falk family and friends including Newsreel members Nancy Falk, Michael Falk, Gay Falk and children Christipher and Melanie Falk. Along with Phil Spinelli. Including a story of the New Haven woman’s march and demonstration in support of the New Haven Panthers.

* Vince Tao, talking about NYC Panther support

* Cindy Fitzpatrick and Christine Hansen from Los Angeles Newsreel talk about LA Panthers

* Debra Shaffer Newsreel member and Academy Award Winner talks about Detroit Newsreel and Panthers.

* Dozie McFadden and Gail Dolgin, San Francisco Newsreel members tell NR/Black Panther stories.

* Marty Kenner, was the major fundraiser/money manager for the Black Panther Party. He spent time in Algeria with Panthers in Exile, confidant of Huey and more.

* Peter Kuttner, Chicago Newsreel member footage of Chicago Black Panthers .

* Roz Payne Newsreel member, Newsreel third world section tells her Black Panther story with photos she shot.

* FBI Drawings of Black Panther members from FBI files.
* Important FBI documents and Cointelpro files
* Photos of arrest of Curtis Powell Panther 21
* Photos of opening day of Huey P Newton trial in Oakland
* Panther 21 trial demonstrations
* Photos of Panther reunions and other events
* Posters, buttons, small press, leaflets and artifact

All material for the DVD has been digitized and editing is beginning. The funds I am asking for will be used to pay for the actual production of the DVD and to pay Nat Beaman of Urban Rhino Visual to provide all services in combining the mass amount of historical media, materials, and the Newsreel Panther films into one media rich DVD.
Anyone with access to this DVD will not only be able to see and hear the stories behind the Black Panthers from the source, but they will also be able to navigate their way through and read actual documents. The services that Urban Rhino Visual will provide include: the encoding of all provided materials for DVD Playback, image and audio quality correction of these materials, DVD layout, authoring and design. Urban Rhino Visual will provide packaging, label and insert design as well as assisting with or refining of editing, document preparation for DVD or any other media related service.

The Black Panther Newsreel DVD will stand to be an invaluable, uncensored, and unique resource of a crucial Civil Rights movement in American History.

All donations are tax deductible ( 501 (C) (3). Donations over $50.00 will receive a copy of the DVD.

I need to raise another 1500 in the next two weeks.

Checks can be made out to Green Valley Media and sent to:

Roz Payne
P O Box 164
Richmond, Vermont 05477

Information (802) 434-3172

Check out my web site http://www.newsreel.us

Be sure to include your address, email and phone
Please forward this to anyone you think would be interested.
Profits will donated to Black Panther Prisoners.”

Walter Benjamin’s writings on drugs, just published in a new translation, suggest the possibilities–and limits–of intoxication

By Matthew Price | June 11, 2006 The Boston Globe

AT FIRST GLANCE, Walter Benjamin, the bespectacled, bushy mustached, deeply serious, and influential German literary critic, may not strike you as a likely drug user. Indeed, he considered drugs a “poison,” and a rather disreputable one at that. As Marcus Boon writes in his introduction to “On Hashish,” a slim English translation of Benjamin’s writings on drugs, just published by Harvard University Press, “Drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of celebration in Benjamin’s intellectual milieu” in the Berlin of the 1920s and early `30s.

And yet, surprisingly, few writers have approached the experience of intoxication with Benjamin’s earnestness, profound wonderment, and sense of purpose. Neither a recreational user nor an addict, he had a studious, deliberate, almost scholarly approach. In 1927, persuaded by some doctor friends to take part in their research, Benjamin began to dabble in a range of drugs-opium, hashish, mescaline-and recorded his experiences in a series of fragments and “protocols”: observations in Benjamin’s hand alternating with the musings of his medical pals.

In the writings collected in “On Hashish,” some composed during a drug session, others afterwards in recollection (Benjamin only published two drug-related texts in his lifetime), the often forbidding theorist appears in a playful, relaxed mode. “Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxiety complexes. All those present take on hues of the comic,” he writes in “Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish” from 1927. He can also be downright silly-“oven turns into cat”; “I can see why, when one is hiding in the grass, one can fish in the earth”-proof that an intellectual on drugs can sound little different than, say, your average stoned college kid.

Still, despite such loopiness, these writings can be read profitably as an extension of Benjamin’s particular take on modern culture. For Benjamin, drug experiences were not an escape from the tumult and decadence of Weimar Germany, they were a vital adjunct to his lifelong quest to unlock the secrets of modernity. In a 1928 letter to his close friend and confidante, the theologian Gershom Scholem, Benjamin wrote that his hash-inspired note-taking “may well turn out to be a very worthwhile supplement to my philosophical observations, with which they are most intimately related.”

Born in 1892 to a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin, Benjamin was a sober, strait-laced child. He enjoyed the trappings of upper middle class life: private tutors, boarding school, university in Freiberg and Bern, where he completed his thesis, “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism,” in 1920. Though Benjamin possessed all the grave habits of an academic, he instead opted for the perils of freelance life, a decision that ultimately served him well. In a few years, he had emerged as one of Germany’s leading intellectuals, writing for newspapers and magazines on a vast range of topics-politics, history, literature, theology, aesthetics, and a hodgepodge of offbeat esoterica such as astrology and the collecting of old letters. (He even proposed, fittingly, a “theory of distraction.”)

A difficult, at times opaque stylist whose work would inspire the intellectuals of the `60s New Left and become a touchstone of contemporary cultural studies, Benjamin fused a deeply mystical turn of mind with Marxist politics in what could be a heady, sometimes uneasy mix. Scholem once said that Benjamin was a “theologian marooned in the realm of the profane.”

It was to escape that realm that Benjamin turned to intoxicants, in search of what he called “profane illumination.” In a famous 1929 essay on surrealism, he tried to spell out the concept: More than just a fancy way of getting high, “profane illumination” is a “materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.”

Benjamin can be perversely elusive-sometimes you wonder if you need to be on drugs to get him-but he hoped to show that certain habits of mind lent themselves to the pursuit of profane illumination. “The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic.” The flaneur in particular-the urban nomad who wanders from place to place, collecting images “wherever they lodge”-was a key figure for Benjamin, a phenomenological detective, always peeking around the corner into the shadows, trying to summon the spirits of a place and break through the clutter and bric-a-brac of modern life.

Hashish, Benjamin believed, gave its user a similar kind of perception-a sort of X-ray vision providing access to the inner workings of time and space, culture and history. In a 1933 entry, he writes, “There is no more valid legitimation of crock”-Benjamin’s code word for hashish-“than the consciousness of having suddenly penetrated, with its help, that most hidden, generally most inaccessible world of surfaces.” Beyond the veil, Boon explains, lay “secret transcendental forces” that Benjamin hoped might point to revolution.

Benjamin tried to harness these states of intoxication for the purposes of his inquiry into the nature of capitalism. He hankered, as Boon notes, for a “left wing politics of intoxication,” and indeed he turned sharply towards Marxism after the rise of the Nazis. But his drug writings are too inward, scattered, and serene to point towards any revolutionary upsurge.

Like others before and since, his desire to wed mysticism to a revolutionary politics failed to produce satisfying results. (There is a reason Benjamin’s drug texts are not among his most influential writings-and why his ambition to mount a large-scale project on hashish remained unfulfilled.) Benjamin’s drug experiments may have honed his sociological and literary senses-“feeling of understanding [Edgar Allan] Poe much better,” he writes in 1927-but there would be no communal rush to the barricades. The revolutionary potential of the drug trance exists purely in the mind.

There are darker premonitions as well in Benjamin’s drug notes. “A formula for the nearness of my death came to me yesterday: Death lies between me and my intoxication,” Benjamin wrote in 1928-an especially haunting remark given the circumstances of his death.

In 1933, Benjamin fled Germany for Paris, where he scraped together a hand-to-mouth existence. When France fell to Hitler in 1940, he tried to escape across the Pyrenees to Spain. Hung up on the Franco-Spanish border, unable to secure a transit visa, he committed suicide by an overdose of morphine tablets, which he carried in case of capture. In the end, Benjamin was a victim of National Socialism-a political intoxication, one might say, of an entirely different order.

Matthew Price is a frequent contributor to the Globe.

@ Pehrspace
325 Glendale Blvd. (one block south of Temple)
Los Angeles, CA 90026

New York Times Worlc Cup blog…

Background Music for T&T-England

Thanks to reader Stacy-Marie for sending us the url for a more comprehensive Soca Warriors music site at TnT in Germany. Not only can you listen to all the current Soca Warriors anthems there; you can also listen to the classics from the ë89 Strike Squad team we waxed sentimental about in a recent post. Among them: the awesome Sound Revolution soca joint ìLicks Like Fire, Licks Like Peas,î which coined the contagious singsong chant ìT ahnd T! We want ah goal!î; and the awesome Sound Revolution reggae joint ìFootball Dance,î with its poignant warning, ìEe-oo-eh, check the danger/Oh, Latapy in ah the area.î

Another ë89 soca tune here, SuperBlueís excellent ìRoad to Italy,î begins with the mournful lines ìSixteen years ago in Haiti/We were denied fame and glory/On the road, the road to Germany.î That reference is to a match infamous in the Caribbean. It was played between T&T and Haiti in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, during the Concacaf qualifying tournament for a berth at West Germany ë74. An incredible four Trinidad goals were waved off for offside or other infractions in a 2-1 Haiti victory, a result that in effect kept T&T out of the World Cup and put Haiti in instead.

The Salvadoran refereeís decisions were so bizarre that corruption was immediately suspected, a notion furthered when Haitian President for Life Baby Doc Duvalier ordered jewelry stores to open and allow the Trinidad players to have their pick of watches, rings, etc. FIFA later banned the referee and a Canadian linesman who worked the game, and the entire episode seared itself into the Trinbagonian memory forever, as this account from the T&T football federationís official history illustrates.

That ë73 campaign may have ended in deception and disappointment, but it generated another brilliant tune found at the site, from the legendary calypsonian Lord Kitchener. Itís called ìMas in Germany,î mas meaning the masquerade that takes place during Carnival in Trinidad. Lord Kitchener sings: ìThis year after Carnival, I am heading to the North/Guess where? Up in Germany ó thatís where Iím going to be/Ah just have the feeling that we should be spreading this creole bacchanal.î

Sixteen years after Trinidadians were robbed in Haiti, they were pipped at the last moment by the United States for the final World Cup berth at Italia ë90. Now itís 16 years after that, and here they are playing in the World Cup at last. For a great article full of links about T&Tís long journey to football nirvana, go to the superb blog The Global Game.

And today, as you watch the Little Giants from Trinidad and Tobago go up against England on TV, let these songs play as a soundtrack. T ahnd T! We want ah goal!

“GRIDES”
SOFT MACHINE
May 2006

RUNE 230/231

“Soft Machine were one of first and one of the greatest jazz/rock bands of all time. Their importance and influence was especially great in Europe, where they influenced several generations of bands, and their influences can still be heard to this day in bands like Jaga Jazzist and beyond. Grides presents the most famous version of the band (Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt) recorded live at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on October 25, 1970, in a high-quality, previously unreleased recording, just a few months after the release of Third and at the peak of their popularity.

“It showcases them in transition between releases, with the band performing 3 of the four works from Third, as well as some of the earliest recordings of material from the upcomming Fourth, including some very different arrangements to what would eventually end up on that release. In addition, it features the earliest recording of Elton’s Neo-Caliban Grides, which has a fairly lengthy composed section that was never heard again.

“Also included in this set is the first-ever DVD release by Soft Machine! It was recorded at the TV studios of Radio Bremen on the same date (March 23, 1971) as the radio session that Cuneiform released as Virtually, but is a completely different performance. This was the band’s final European tour with Robert Wyatt and is a 20 minute set, professionally recorded by a multicamera crew. The audio and video quality is excellent for the time period (over 35 years old now!), as we worked from the original videotape master in the archives of Radio Bremen….”