Psychic T.V \u2013 Ancient Lights<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i192.photobucket.com\/albums\/z149\/pengy1966\/pengy1966192\/scans633_zps4zrtpc1j.jpg\")
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This must be the rarest record that I own. There couldn\u2019t of been many acetates of Psychic T.V handed out by C.B.S \/ Some Bizarre, and shelved in record collections.<\/p>\n
This 7\u2033 acetate contains four songs from the then, yet to be released, \u2018Dreams Less Sweet\u2019 album.<\/p>\n
Coincidently \u2018Dreams Less Sweet\u2019 is not only my favourite Psychic T.V album, but also one of my favourite albums by any band or artist.The album still gets a spin a couple of times a year, over thirty years since I got a copy (with the \u2018Full Pack\u2019 12\u2033 single included).<\/p>\n
One side of the acetate has the songs \u2018Orchids\u2019 and \u2018Finale\u2019. The other side has the songs \u2018White Nights\u2019 and \u2018Ancient Lights\u2019.<\/p>\n
C.B.S also pressed up two extremely limited vinyl versions with the same songs on, handing them out to the press and to the radio stations to promote the \u2018Dreams Less Sweet\u2019 album prior to release.<\/p>\n
The two vinyl versions have two songs pressed up on each. The first vinyl had the songs on the \u2018A\u2019 side of my acetate, \u2018Orchids\u2019 and \u2018Finale\u2019. The second vinyl had the songs on the \u2018B\u2019 side of my acetate, \u2018White Nights\u2019 and \u2018Ancient Lights\u2019.<\/p>\n
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There were less than seventy copies of each pre-release vinyl pressed up. T.O.P.Y in Beck Road, Hackney sold a boxful for \u00a320 each vinyl. An immense amount of money in the early to mid 1980\u2019s. There was probably only a handful of acetates produced.<\/p>\n
The concept, the thoughts, the ideas, the technology and the numerous performers and field recordings that went into the production of \u2018Dreams Less Sweet\u2019 were immense, and could take several hundred words to explain properly, so I won\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Thankfully \u2018Lord Lucan\u2019 from Julian Cope\u2019s \u2018Head Heritage\u2019 online site has. So\u2026<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis nineteen track album is a kaleidophone full of twists and turns, sweetness and light cohabiting with sourness and darkness, all permeated by an uneasy air of mystery, magick and ritual. It forced open my adolescent ears to sonic possibilities which I didn\u2019t know existed nor even imagined. At the time, I knew nothing about T.G, T.O.P.Y or anything else Psychic T.V had done. This album appeared to me like a puff of magickal smoke in a vacuum jar.<\/p>\n
Once I had got the record home and put it on the turntable and started playing it I felt I\u2019d fallen through the forest floor into some kind of (oc)cult group\u2019s hidden labyrinth. This album drips with the atmosphere of a network of fire-lit caverns populated by the eldritch shadows of cowl-wearing figures. The group image on the back sleeve places this seminal Psychic T.V line-up in a coastal setting on the edge of dusk.<\/p>\n
A large part of the ambience, which permeates the album, is due to the fact that it was recorded using Zuccarelli Holophonic technology, similar to the Artificial Head system used by the 70\u2019s Berlin Krautrockers. Extra spacial dimension and clarity become disorientatingly apparent.<\/p>\n
This encouraged Psychic T.V to record sounds and environments which would make the most of the recording system. Locations included The Hell Fire Club caves 300ft. underground, Christ Church in Hampstead, and Caxton Hall. The album is full of sounds designed to exploit the 3D effect. It\u2019s an amazing experience on headphones.<\/p>\n
The album begins with a car approaching, then the first track, the tiny \u2018Hymn 23\u2019 is played by Andrew Poppy on an emulator, weaving the first of several ecclesiastical and monastic pieces of music into the fabric of this album, which I suppose could be seen as a hymnody for T.O.P.Y.<\/p>\n
This is followed by \u2018The Orchids\u2019, which is a beautiful song played on Reichian xylophone, oboe and guitar, with Genesis P Orridge duetting with himself in his sweetest choirboy vocal: \u201cIn the morning after the night I fall in love with the light\u201d, opening the album in a similar way to \u2018Sunday Morning\u2019 opening the first Velvet Underground album, hinting at a night of excess seen from the inevitable spangled daybreak.<\/p>\n
This mood is dashed by \u2018Botanica\u2019 which drags us into the realm of cavernous ritual drums, possessed metallic tinkering and the distant sound of animal horns.<\/p>\n
Blink and it\u2019s gone though, to be replaced by a small ensemble of brass, cor anglais and oboe wrenched from the recital chamber to the cavern to play \u2018Iron Glove\u2019. Their sad and beautiful tune floats over to the left channel as Monte Cazazza appears in the right channel reading his own words in a telephone call from San Francisco. The track ends with the vicious attack and decay of a tuning fork.<\/p>\n
The telephone line interference gives way to the glorious clarity of a solo choirboy singing \u2018Always is Always\u2019, a song penned by the murderer of psychedelic innocence: Charles Manson, and much sung by his adopted family of waifs and strays. The choirboy\u2019s angelic voice drifts around in the sonic space until we are left with the distant sound of what could be water dripping from the roof of a cave, blood dripping from a corpse, a crackling fire or maybe someone pissing in the distance, with a barely discernible voice, perfectly encapsulating the contrast of seductive innocence and the mysterious threat of the unknown that pervades the atmosphere on this album.<\/p>\n
The next track is a bitter-sweet winter solstice carol played on organ, guitar, and tambourine with lashings of sugary vocal harmonies. And Genesis is back again with his wide-eyed innocent vocal singing ambiguous lyrics which could be about all manner of other things, or maybe it\u2019s simply about \u201cSanta Claus (\u2026) checking his list \/ Going over it twice \/ Seeing who is naughty and who is nice\u201d, though the implication of threat in that last lyric and throughout the song is chilling, particularly as the sound of an Uzi machine gun starts to appear towards the end cracking through the surface innocence [the lyrics are actually part of a sermon by the Rev. Jim Jones prior to the suicide in Guyana].<\/p>\n
\u2018Finale\u2019 smashes right through, beginning with the sound of petrol being thrown on a fire, then all hell breaking loose a mediaeval military fanfare, complete with machine guns and barking and growling hunting dogs sounding like they\u2019re coming out of the speakers and invading the room.<\/p>\n
This is followed by \u2018Eleusis\u2019, a ritualistic chant by those figures in cowls ringing ritualistic bells. The monastic figures melt away and are replaced by \u2018Medmenham\u2019s swarm of Tibetan Thigh Bone bees buzzing all around the cave.<\/p>\n
\u2018Ancient Lights\u2019 follows with its dark, unpredictable, sparse funk. Genesis is on full sinister vocal form this time, as the sounds of phones, car horns and various shrieks, shouts and screams fly around him. \u2018Proof On Survival\u2019 follows, with a short piece of psychick motivational polemic spoken by Genesis followed by the sound of earth to earth: The literal sound of being buried alive in a coffin. The ultimate claustrophobic nightmare.<\/p>\n
Side two opens with the trilogy \u2018Eden 1, 2 and 3\u2019. This mini symphony begins as a building cacophony of ringing telephones. The holophonic recording technique means the brain is fooled into thinking one of them must surely be your own telephone. Mr Sebastian, a tattoo artist and body piercer who would become a household name four years later thanks to the notorious Operation Spanner police raids, had pierced and tattooed various members of Psychic T.V; The sleeve of this album alludes to a Prince Albert piercing. Here he is heard reassuring John Balance about the tattoo he is about to give him.Then a creepy-as-hell track cuts in with a killer bass line and buzzsaw feedback guitar following a tyrannical ritual drum beat, the sound of the tattoo needle providing percussion. Genesis intones lyrics possibly about Cerberus. Dog\u2019s eyes glowing. Towards the end the guitar and Genesis\u2019s voice meld in an indo-oriental chant, building to climax. By far the most sexually charged track on the album. Feedback wails as a baritone singer breaks in with his righteous light, banishing the screeching feedback to Hades, whence it came. The voices multiply until a complete male voice choir is filling the room with plainsong chanting. Cerberus rears his ugly heads again momentarily and growls at the choir, however his growling is soothed and calmed and the choir begin again. However they cannot hold off the march of nasty cacophony forever, and once they have faded the hellhound reawakens,and comes running into the room barking, heralding the arrival of more cavernous drumming and a gristled-to-fuck guitar. The volume rises and rises and culminates in a dervish frenzy of feedback which is slain in an instant by \u2018Clouds Without Water\u2019, a beautiful woodwind, horn and xylophone piece with systemic leanings sound tracking distant, rumbling thunder.<\/p>\n
\u2018Black Moon\u2019 follows with Genesis P Orridge at the front of the primary school assembly singing along with the piano as birds tweet outside.<\/p>\n
\u2018Silver And Gold\u2019 brings us back to the cavern as gongs and Tibetan singing bowls are stroked, caressed and gently tapped. What sounds like a large remote-controlled vehicle makes its hesitant way closer and closer to us, then makes a run for it as the swooshing percussive sound that pulls us \u2018In The Nursery\u2019 begins.<\/p>\n
Genesis comes on like a detective William Burroughs narrating as he enters the house that will take him Exorcist-style to the nursery. The music is wailing howling feedback, concrete clicking and crashing of unidentifiable origins, all the while that insistent whip swooshing sound flying around the room, suggesting the vortex in the bedroom in Poltergeist. Genesis screams louder and louder until the whole thing crashes around him and us.<\/p>\n
\u2018Circle\u2019 finishes the album with a short, cathartic recorder solo.<\/p>\n
This record, once it has finished, leaves behind feelings unlike any other. It\u2019s not only the sound that is left ringing in my ears, but my mind feels like it has been well and truly exercised and exorcised too. I was worried that reviewing this album might be like spraying pine air freshener into a room impregnated with a complex, evocative, ethereal odour, but it hasn\u2019t killed any of the mystery or tension in it for me.<\/p>\n
\u2018Dreams Less Sweet\u2019 remains just that, a dream teetering on the verge of a nightmare. It defies anal-ysis, and has the power, unlike almost any other recording I know, to subject the psyche to a severe whip lashing and a tender massage, often at the same time\u201d.<\/p>\n
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