I would talk about Bauhaus and Bela Lugosi being dead, but Halloween’s not my style. Sorry folks, I’m an All Saints Day kind of guy. Speaking of saints, let’s talk about Benoit Mandelbrot. He passed away this week. That’s right; that guy who was responsible for the entire field of mathematics that you’re currently studying was still alive a week ago. Let’s just take a minute and think about how radically he morphed how we as humans experience reality.

Ah, good reader, you’re back! So, you’ve come to the realization that you’re nothing more than an emergent behavior phenomenon and that the way in which you interact with other humans and the world around you is paralleled by the way that cellular structures interact with each other, have you? Well, that’s great. I guess that it’s only natural then that we talk about psychedelic music. Psychedelic musical history is a funny one in that at the time of its origins — the late ‘60s and early ‘70s — the music that was being produced under this name was some pansy-ass folk. You had the Grateful Dead, the Mamas and the Papas, Moby Grape, the Yardbirds, and the 13th Floor Elevators. Simply put, psychedelic music started out slow. Boy, have things changed! Thanks to the pace of audio recording technology, things have gotten loud, abrasive, euphoric and stupidly complex, all of which are good things.

If you’re interested in exploring the truly avant-garde psychedelia that was manifesting itself throughout the world in the ‘70s, explore the Finders Keepers catalogue. Dedicated to introducing fans of psychedelic, jazz, folk, funk, avant-garde, and whacked-out movie muzak to a lost world of undiscovered vinyl artifacts from the annals of alternative pop history, you’ll find the artists that paved the road for contemporary psychedelia. They can be found at .

You don’t have to be tripping hard to experience psychedelia. Check out the following and you’ll see what I mean: Flying Lotus, Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Kristin Miltner, Boards of Canada.

-Juan Fernandez

One day on the Cut this autumn I was scritchin’ and scratchin’ — you know, you know, professionally beat matchin’ some vinyl — when a shadowy figure loomed before me. I squinted my eyes and saw what appeared to be an android bearing an anthracite guitar and a glowing red 2001 iMac monitor on his head. He said no words; rather, he tilted his head, and white buzzing squares on the screen began to race. Slowly he spit out two CDs from his palms and handed them to me.

He turned and began to leave without saying a word. I couldn’t allow myself to see him leave without knowing his name, so I quickly slipped, “Wh— Who are you?” In a bitcrushed tone he crunched back, “Robot Cowboy.”

Robot Cowboy — Dan Wilcox: a futuristic, expatriate American space ranger who combines wearable computing, MIDI guitar, and live energy to wander the digi-range playing for dying astronauts. This is a low-fi guitar show with algorithmic balls from a devospud, laptop-stomping idiot wearing exposed electronics.

His mission, you ask?

“You are unwittingly controlled by your machines; I feel obligated to return the favor through sonic variations in time and booty shaking. I will protect you from the arcane sonic forces which threaten your very existence.”

He’s roaming on campus somewhere. You should find him and ask him for a demo on how to masterfully use PureData.

Want to hear what he’s got in store for you, cosmonaut? Type this universal resource locator into your Internet browser: http://www.robotcowboy.com/category/media/

-Juan Fernandez

Once heard, a sound lives forever within the soul of a man, quietly stirring. Produced by anything, felt through any part of the body, the perception of sound is a bipolar bastard child of the human perception. While lauded greatly when it’s chopped, divided, castrated, and filed in metronomic precision, it goes greatly unperceived in its raw and pure form. This grandeur is not so much one associated with music but with identity. In sound, the intangible and the ephemeral become something physical: a reverberation that physically alters space and time. Vibrations are not respected because they cannot be tamed.
Whether it be the clatter of silverware dancing across the porous walls of an old-age home or the rustling of heather in the empty air of the cold Sierra Nevadas, sound carries an infinite potential whose beauty lies in its unmasterable nature. Yes, while some may become adept at banging out sonatas or strumming tribal breakbeats, the mastery of sculpting something permanent out of that humming quicksilver is not something that the adept few ask for.
Flowers, the material as ephemeral, rejoice in their springtime dances. Sound, which blossoms out from nothing more than the void, is the God of the ephemeral. Enough of that poetic nonsense. Want to get down with the WRCT Sound? Check out the following:
Boards of Canada:
Music Has the Right to Childre
— Experience the beauty of electronic music. Extremely approachable and low-key in its magnificence.
Shoes:
Eccentric Breaks and Beat
— Flawlessly arranged pastiche of esoteric soul and funk.
Flaming Lips, Stardeath & White Dwarfs:
Dark Side of The Moon (ft. Henry Rollins and Peaches
— A sonic blow-out. Dark Side of the Moon for a digital generation.
-Juan Fernandez