Téléplasmiste – Frequency Is The New Ecstasy

House Of Mythology

It’s all in the trails. In a recent, small-scale, study carried out by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, participants took LSD and carried out a number of tasks. The experimenters documented the experiences and noted that tasks that required linguistic and semantic application seemed to be particularly affected by the drug, with semantic errors creeping in and extra (-dimensional) bits being added in to fill in the gaps. Schema activation seemed to be key, and the “cascade of associations” were thought to potentially aid creativity, art and the access to “far away concepts stored in the mind.

Hang on; I’m getting to it.

Téléplasmiste seem to work similar veins. Some of the tracks, the opening “A Gift of Unknown Things” and the later “Astodaan”, are exemplar time machines; drones that push apart the neurons and open up new areas, like that mad dancing in The OA, or the savage Sapir-Whorf arsekick that Amy Adams gets in Arrival. These are spirit molecules in sound and they seem designed to play with the same semantic circuits found during the Imperial College experiments, the same Time Machines as Coil uncovered; long, and lean, perpetually phasing in and out. Spacey, in all the good ways. Inner Spacey. And Psychedelick as the day is looooooooooooong. There’s even a startling bit on “Astodaan” that sounds like that sublime terror-squeal / squall at the end of old episodes of Doctor Who.

But it’s not all drones, just in case you’ve forgotten to bring your ergot socks, or left your Salvia 10X at the bus-stop. “Gravity Is The Enemy” sounds like how I imagined The Master Musicians Of Joujouka before I’d actually heard them, a mesmerizingly vague evocation of the other, which would make beautiful music for dream machines, and would have got Brion Gysin grinning all over his chops. You can’t tell where it’s from, this lilting music, but it’s definitely not here… if anything, reminds me a bit of the near-future world in the supremely odd and under-watched Michael Winterbottom film Code 46 which… (no one much seems to have seen that film). “Fall of the Yak Man” has an almost lulling nursery-rhyme feel, while the last track “Radioclast” mines a similar territory as the awesome Gentleforce; ambient in excelsis but with sawn off edges, like the sound of huge ship cities crossing the plains…

At least…

Yes.

I…

Mm. Maybe I shouldn’t have volunteered for that Imperial College study after all. All the squares have looked wonky, ever since.

-Loki-