My muse is shot to shit at the moment, derailed into submission/autopilot by heavy psychic damage and domestic bad vibes, so I’m determined - perversely - to start blogging again just to kick it back into its previous healthy shape. Fuck it, you know?

To start with, here’s an extract from something my good friend Dr Wommm wrote after the Ramleh gig we went to last week. I think he may have a point. In fact, I’m sure of it - much as I love a good knee-trembler of a bass frequency and have been known to throw myself at a cavernous drone, chasing the high end of noise-based music is one of the great pain-pleasures in life, as is trying to sing the ever-ascending theme of Morricone’s ‘Vergogna Schifosi’ and ending up dizzy, knowing you’ll admit defeat before the singer’s even got halfway to her peak and not really caring. Onwards, as they say, and most definitely upwards.

Those skull-ringing harmonics that most players roll off, deeming them too harsh or cutting, just too fucking much, are the essence of real sonic psychedelia for me, ‘cos they’re the frequencies which really disorientate and fool the ear, which change the sound so drastically when you move yr head an inch in any direction, which make yr fillings rattle, make the top of yr skull vibrate like a coked-up throat singer whistling through their brainpan, make you feel ecstatic one moment, confused and agitated the the next. Especially with judicious use of phase effects, the treble is the key to yr unmind.

Have composers throughout history called for a bass or a baritone when they wanted to give a feeling of the other? Nope, they called on the services of the castrati, or (particularly in these more apparently enlightened times), the countertenor. At the other extreme, what instrument, in the soundtrack of an otherwise trite and tacky 50s B-movie, has ever provoked the feeling of cosmic unease like the high warbling glissandi of the theremin? Or listen to Hermann’s score for Psycho, or Sala’s trautonium on the soundtrack to The Birds, Hitchcock understood.

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