Psychedelic Musings & Poems

DeconstructionistJunglistRuckus...

One telling clue that you may have stumbled upon the "posteverythingist" terrain of the musical arena is that it becomes increasingly difficult to categorize what you are listening to. The artists who work this particular mojo--turntablists, studio auteurs and other sampledelicians, for the most part--don't just fuse genres and thereby create new sub-genres, the way Miles Davis did when he merged elements of jazz and rock to create the first form of "fusion" music back in the late 60's. Having the entire canon of recorded sound, as well as the technological palette of the modern recording studio, at their disposal, the contemporary electronic musician has an almost ineluctable tendency to mix together sounds from so many genres of music that the notion itself becomes virtually meaningless.

Bristol's Matt Elliott, the sonic visionary behind Third Eye Foundation, is someone whose music reflects this ethos quite clearly. The beat-driven, sampladelic aspects of his music shouldn't surprise anybody, considering the fact that he hails from the city renowned for giving the world such prominent trip-hoppers as Massive Attack and Portishead, as well as top-flight junglists Roni Size and Krush. Many people, however, are probably not aware that he has played in Flying Saucer Attack and Movietone, two groups coming more from the droning, psychedelic school of left-field rock.

This has led many reviewers and critics to label Third Eye Foundation's sound as My Bloody Valentine meets drum 'n' bass. These seemingly disparate styles did, in fact, collide quite beautifully on such early tracks as "Sleep," from the Semtex album, and on the early single "Universal Cooker." But, don't let that fool you. A lot has happened since the early days. Elliott, who actually despises making music for money, has been fortunate enough to have made enough of it to allow him to add a plethora of shiny new gear and recording equipment to his arsenal. The overdriven, at times droning, at times skronking, guitar sounds are still present, but in a reduced, more subtle role. His music has become markedly sample-driven over the years.

The inclusion of a wider array of sounds and textures into the music of Third Eye Foundation has made it a real struggle for people to place it into any easily definable slot. Beat-heavy psychedelia; post-rock drum 'n' bass; illbient soundtrack; noirish industrial; art-damaged dub; trip-hip; and various hybrids of the above terms have all been resorted to over the years. Elliott's music does, indeed, contain elements culled from all of these various styles and genres, as well as many others. When not locked-up in his studio, he works at a music store in his hometown, where he spends his time listening to everything from the Carter family to Ed Rush. This varied taste in music, combined with his disdain of the commercial aspects of the industry and the concomitant need to fit into a preconstructed pigeon-hole, also allow Elliott to join that "rare breed of folks trying things for the sake of creating."

At the end of the day, when you listen to the music of Third Eye Foundation, you aren't confronted with a recognizable genre so much as a patently unique and singular aesthetic vision from someone who isn't afraid to "derive something new from previously known sources," and to defy the boundaries of the music factory and its critics. DJ Spooky once said: "Give me two records, and I'll give you a universe." Matt Elliott must have been listening because that's exactly what he does with every album.

Next time you feel the need to step outside the generic and banal, try payng a visit to Matt Elliott's world:

www.thirdeyefoundation.com

Bluebirds and Flesh-eggs, Gary Waterworth






5:30 is expanding and contracting: Satellite nullities,
supple browns circling the haze of that star. I see codes
everywhere. Red sleeves more than solitary, encased in breath
too warm to be rain at all. The air's tiny death confronted by
its own symmetry. Blank stares at a violent sub-text, equipoise
splattered all over the mechanical glow. A brilliant cosmos
exposes its spear of pleasure tonight, and my nebula has begun to
tighten once again.

9 Talks Back

slowly into with each say in bomb-burst
breaks squad of the long itself. the categorical
is vulgar, every power forms the representation of air.
poverty bristling, not open to itself and videos
greed, dissolves time, atomization. reflected as not on
camera, the coming of looped struggle, which attracts the
climax.

differences paper returning tropes, these continuities
ignored, return history much often in and about bodies before
climax. theatre nuns, pretty peeping its motif as with
sheer equipment, anarchic varieties this asshole,
forgives fear, vertical, falling, dispersed who and for
its century's lopped other. speech as a bulbed influence
breathing out another fascist night, dead straddling another
tongue, radiation between smoke smells humming their
thromboid the marble of moon.

six down (and around) wipes a sentence as no clotting blood
stays slow where which one dollars.

Songs for My Enemies to Sing, Gary Waterworth

The Pre-Socratic As Swirl
...the pre-Socratic as swirl, in laughter with every apex.

glass is a dialectic, its labile gestures an everlasting monologue walking
backward with dawn. bouncing off the silken palace, perception bathes in
naked waists, a lyric from its own song straining to crumble, the cusp
of a warm variance. wine glows softly before evaporating on the dunes.

heights split where our voices glint on crazed torsos, cells between angels
and water to yellowing carnage. dwarfed 15th century quiverings, a lunar
equation for your breasts, joyous swords obscured by the automatic.
a long, crescent arousal at the hour's greenest edge, this sweet mirage...

stamen the need to escape memory, am I nothing but striate to aura this?

lilted, strobed there next to radiant, dancing anythings for scarlet
mascara draped next to worry-lines. the quotidian eats a furred aphasia,
yet another feeble grope among trickling spring trances, a written leg.
metallic pageantry, dreaming zeros, yearns for new, narcotic eyes and ears.

you, an endless butterfly wing's latest algebra, blazing verdantries
ricocheting off untitled solitudes. abstraction is "electric and vast,"
said green sperm to a possible halcyon flow in outer-space. the theater
of signs vibrates left and sips from nothing's circadian lullaby.

outside the writhing, ineffable harmonies swim the source of light
itself, stroke fluid curlicues of hip asleep in the dim abacus. the
wrong time collides against a tender layer, which is not fate's thrum,
this luscious machinery beyond dripping cherubim, an abyss to celebrate.

the motif of tiny, crystalline breasts crowds, tames, then impels thought
toward the recognition of what has filled a billion galaxies, what presses
cold fingertips and damp genitals against cognition. the sigh of skeletons,
tantric delight to burst ideologies, to emerald your sleep.

your prophecied beginning as synaesthesia, an ancient now's bare,
sparkling disorder. goodbye veneers our communion from so much blood
oozing into the ashen center. forgotten sacrifices to the cascading
limits of what can be known, levitating eyes surround the temple.

Robert Chrysler is an inspired subway-ranter from Toronto, Canada. He enjoys challenging capitalist property relations, trying to figure out what the post-structuralists are going on about, and dreams of someday living in a tree. More of his surrealist-inspired meanderings can be seen here: http://peyoetryhut.blogspot.com. And he edits a blog-journal called Oarystis, where he'd love to post some of your experimental, surrealist-style meanderings: http://surrealistcity.blogspot.com.

You can find more of Gary Waterworth's work at http://devotionalhooligan.blogspot.com.