I’m now the proud owner of one of these:



It makes some absolutely awesome droning psychedelic racket when turned up full.. VERY Acid Mothers Temple.. I think they must have bought a whole shipment of the things. So that’s cool. It is, however, quite difficult to make it sound like a sitar, or at least, a sitar that’s not disintegrating through a hyperspace gateway to a distant galaxy. This is mostly because when you turn the knobs down to under halfway, there’s a MASSIVE drop in volume and the effect is inaudible. As such, it’s not a great deal of use in regard to conventional rock music – I’m still unable to recreate those glorious Chocolate Watch Band / Strawberry Alarm Clock moments – but ESSENTIAL for space-rock psychedelic droning.
What would improve it I lot I think is if it had separate controls for what essentially amount to two separate effects – the twangy sitar sound, and the spaced-out phaser sound. As it is, you can’t get the former without the latter, and combined with the signal loss on lower settings this means a choice between utter drone freakout or nothing. I haven’t tried it in combination with distortion and delay yet, but it should be pretty stormin’.

In other news;

I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but... did anyone check out that great programme on Radio 2 last week in which Paul Morley narrated an alternative history of popular music in terms of how it related to modern composition and the avant garde? It was really cool… you’ve got to love someone who appears on the most populist radio station in the country and totally disses the Beatles and Radiohead (YES! THANK YOU!) before envisioning an alternative timeline wherein “Stockhausen is Chuck Berry, Can are the Beatles, Throbbing Gristle are the Sex Pistols..” and so forth. Admittedly most of the artists discussed were pretty familiar to avant-rock fans, but all the same hearing snatches of all this amazing crazy music, and tracing how certain ideas and sounds travelled through it and developed into the language of electronic/dissonant sounds we take for granted in today’s pop music, was pretty exciting and inspiring stuff. It’s certainly inspired me to fill in some gaps in my musical knowledge by heading down to the library to scoop up armfuls of Can, Neu!, Eno, Throbbing Gristle, Robert Wyatt, John Cale etc. Sadly I drew a blank on Le Monte Young, Sun Ra and Faust, but I guess I’ll bump into them when the time is right.
The only beef I had with the programme’s presentation was that it had a tendency to suggest that innovation and experimentation was the only thing that made music worthwhile… no room for emotion, tradition or entertainment value in Mr. Morley’s shiny, clinical Wire-subscriber world!

Nevertheless though, It was such a good programme (and so daring for Radio 2!) it almost made me want to give up listening to Black Sabbath rip-offs 18 hours a day. Not quite though.