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The late percussionist, poet, calligrapher, mystic, shaman and visionary Angus MacLise was pure '60s free spirit all the way. He was a founding member of the Velvet Underground -- but promptly quit as soon as he found out they were being paid to play their first gig. He claimed the band was too structured (!!) for his tastes, anyway. A list of MacLise's collaborators and compadres reads like a who's who of American counter-culture mavericks: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, Charlemagne Palestine, Jonas Mekas, Sheldon Rochlin and Ira Cohen. MacLise's work has made him a bona fide legend among vintage psychedelia enthusiasts; his intricate, India-influenced drumming propelled any number of tranced-out jams in New York's lofts of the era. This Milford Graves for the psychedelic set (if you will) was very meticulous about his recording; however, very little of MacLise's music has been made legitimately available. Until recently, that is. The vaults have been opened, and the first installation, MacLise's The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, was made available in late 1999 via a collaboration between Tim Barnes/Quakebasket and the Siltbreeze label. [below] Angus and Hetty MacLise. Brain Damage in Oklahoma City is the second installment in the Siltbreeze/Quakebasket series of music by Angus MacLise. Culled from the archives of Mr. Tony Conrad, this volume (covering the years 1967-'70) highlights MacLise's unique and intricate drumming style. Cembalum, bongos, hand drum, barrel congas -- all are majestically thumped'n'bumped for maximum orgasmic sensory satisfaction. Comprised of eight tracks, the acme of this collection is the two large ensemble pieces, "Dreamweapon Benefit for the Oklahoma City Police Dept. parts 1 & 2," featuring Angus (barrel conga), Hetty MacLise (tampura), the poet Jackson Maclow (recorders and voice), Henry Flynt (song flute and voice) and Tony Conrad (limp string). These tracks, recorded in May of 1968, are the apex of maximalist loft style psychedelic improvisation. Conrad's illuminating, occasionally hilarious liner notes set up the narrative of this volume, offering a brief glimpse back into the mind-scrambling fracas that was NYC, USA, Earth 1968. "Brain Damage In Oklahoma City" will be released on Monday, August 21st, 2000. Consumers can order it direct from Midheaven mailorder. Stores and distributors can obtain it from Revolver USA distribution.

The Siltbreeze/Quakebasket Angus MacLise Series:

Brain Damage in Oklahoma City SB/QB-81

The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda SB/QB-78

From Tony Conrad's liner notes for Brain Damage In Oklahoma City: It's early 1968. Beverly and I live on West 42nd Street between 6th Avenue and Broadway. We almost never leave the loft any more, except for food. I'm setting up a dry lab to make films. During February John Cale and I tape five amplified sets together; he plays guitar and I play a new instrument I've made from a length of 1x8 and a section of vacuum cleaner pipe. It has one very slack string that I can pull and stretch in novel ways, so I call it " slip string" at first, then "limp-string." I'm also experimenting with electromechanical signal processing, and in early March I tape two hours of solo material with various instruments, to explore a new tape-loop effect. Suddenly Beverly gets a call from Angus in the Oklahoma City Jail at 200 North Shartell. Angus says they were just passing through on their way East but he and his new wife Hetty, whom we still haven't met, were busted along with a third person, Loudon Snowden Wainwright for pot. This Wainwright, Angus alleges, is the son of a bigtime Staff Writer at LIFE magazine, and he's got himself bailed out with a high-class lawyer and left Angus and Hetty in jail. We call around and raise money from Richard Foreman, Douglas MacLise, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Lew and Rosanne Oliver, John Cale and Betsey Johnson, Stanley Alboum, & co... On March 24 I send a Telegraphic Money Order for $30.00 to Mr & Mrs Angus MacLise at Western Union Office, Oklahoma City, from Tony Beverly John Betsey Stanley Lew Rosanne La Monte Marian; and they head out for New York. This week, LIFE editorializes that "probably most U.S. cops have learned by now that fear and hatred are bad for their business," and talks up a new Broadway "rock musical" HAIR. Back in the City at last, Angus brings the cembalum over. It's been on the road with him a lot since I gave it to him to tape "Chumlum." More strings are missing, bridges are busted, but it always sounds good. In late April I tape several sets on it myself with Beverly playing string drone. Angus and Hetty jam with us on the 28th. Hetty knocks us out. She carries a tanpura with her; she talks in her incongruous bouncy British accent about playing in shows with the Grateful Dead--wiring her harp up into the wall, so the strings explode in a shower of sparks when she hits them, and everybody's high on acid; she is always ebullient. Two days later Tiny Tim is on the Tonight show. Since we "knew him back when," he worked with us in Jack Smith's "Normal Love," Beverly and I tune in and tape it just in case. And everybody is stunned; Tiny Tim is funny. He is pure freak! But he is heartbreakingly sincere; he has the whole audience wetting their drawers. "This," he sings, "Is All I Ask." And this IS, you know, 1968, the Sixties at their peak. On May 11, I tape the Velvet Underground actually appearing on TV, at noon on local Ch 5's "Upbeat" with the McCoys, Yardbirds, the Outsiders, and Harami. Somewhere Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy are gearing up for the Democratic primary; the anti-war movement is booming; and the cops in Oklahoma City all hate "Hippies." Meanwhile Angus, Beverly, and I record several jams. Angus's cembalum playing is ferocious; strings pop and go flying, the bridges shatter; the title I write on the tape of one set is "Destruction of the Chumlum." It's Friday, May 10, and the Dreamweapon Benefits are just four days away. I am working up a new device, a programmable optical-electronic signal alternator; I record two test sets on Sunday. I have also decided to play the benefit through a swinging speaker. Tuesday; the first Dreamweapon Benefit. Beverly stays home to tape John Lennon and Paul McCartney on the Tonight Show. The Sergeant Pepper album has just come out but the Beatles really have nothing to say except New York is noisy and they've had enough of it. The benefit is incredible; Ira Cohen's ecstatic slides, film, and of course the music. Piero Heliczer swings my speaker. It sounds as good as you would imagine, but it's heavy and the wire is long, and Piero's tank is empty in no time. La Monte Young has a most excellent tape machine to record this and the other nights he and Marian Zazeela play; Terry Riley blows soprano. Finally it's night four, a very rare moment for me when I play with Henry Flynt. We have been talking together for ten years, but not playing. Jackson MacLow and Henry chase each other across a shrill landscape of flutes and voices. Could there be two poets more different than Jackson MacLow and Angus MacLise? Listen, it's a limpid poetic night. Hetty's tanpura has found its most lushly florid key, D, and in the May heat we grasp at some median between strangeness and lyricism, between a crisp avant-garde statement and the trance of nostalgia, between cold weapons and pumping hearts. Angus's drum pounds, and I know he must be thinking of Bion's song: "the lovely Adonis, his white thigh with the boar's tusk is wounded, his dark blood drips down his skin of snow, beneath his brows his eyes wax heavy and dim, and the rose flees from his lip, and thereon the very kiss is dying," because Angus always named May 17 the Day of the Boar, which is the spirit of grain or vegetation. Tony Conrad, June 12, 1999, Buffalo From Ira Cohen's liner notes for The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda: Sensory Overload I just woke up from a dream where Angus came to me bringing lost fragments of out past life in Kathmandu, the revelatory manuscripts, The Soundings of Omission, the smile of an ancient voyager -- wandering Angus who once reigned in Tir-nan-Oge (the country ofthe young.) I looked over a rare Dreamweapon publication Angus made of a Tibetan musical score for the short Mahakala puja wherein he describes Mahakala as once being an implacable enemy of all but Chaos turned staunch defender of the Dharma."He holds the skull cup filled with blood. He is barefoot and stands with legs spread, and is surrounded with the flames of wisdom. . . No pallid rites here, no insipid music." Since he died in Kathmandu on the summer solstice (1979) at the age of 41, he has become a legendary figure, especially to the young. To those who knew him he remains a constant presence like those Himalayan winds he once recorded in the ear of time. Always a Hermetic messenger, he brought music and poetry with him and inspired others to join him in the ritual. An old soul, he was the cutting edge of a future he will always be part of. Angus was larger than life and although he played with many of the best musicians around -- LaMonte Young, Tony Conrad, Terry Riley and Terry Jennings among them-and was a founding member of The Velvet Underground, his greatest magic was in making everyone he came in contact with part of his cosmic humming. When Tim Barnes called to ask me if I had started to write something about Angus, I cracked, "After twenty years even the dead get tired of waiting." Although Angus never stopped long enough to wait for anything and probably believed with Heathcote Williams that "Fame is the first disgrace," it is time to make his music and his word available. Thanks to Tim who wanted to know. Thanks to the fact that sound, like words, can never fall into the void. I first met Angus in Paris in 1964 just after publishing Gnaoua, a magazine dedicated to exorcism I had put together in Morocco and printed in Belgium. It was on the Rue Mouffetard and I remember that there was a plaque on a nearby building which proclaimed that Dante had once lived there. We met again two years later when I returned to New York and went to The Cinematheque on 42nd St., where he was performing his Dreamweapon Rituals with John Cale playing viola, and I had with me the Jilala Trance music which was recorded in my house in Tangier by Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin. And so it began, the long nights of inspired conversation, Angus playing music, Jack Smith magic-markering light bulbs, nights full of poetry and calligraphy. It wasn't long before the heavy influences began kicking in. I began making mylar photographs after working with Jack Smith in Reefers of Technicolor Island and created the Universal Mutant Repertory Company. Angus went off to San Francisco and came back after being married by Timothy Leary in Golden Gate Park to Hetty McGee, my old friend from Spain and Morocco. I was living with Paulina Rose with whom I had done The Hashish Cookbook - Sheldon and Diane Rochlin had just finished their great film on Vali, The Witch of Positano and were working on Dope. Loren Standlee and Ziska Baum who had been in Dope stepped into the magic mirror world and became charter members of the Universal Mutants, as did Robert La Vigne, Pedro Arbol de Pera, Tony and Beverly Conrad and many others. It was then that I realized we were a special group of dedicated visionaries, electronic multi-media shamans. Bill Devore, Don Snyder, Mary Topp and Lionel Ziprin swelled the ranks. It was in 1968, the year before Woodstock, that we came together to make the film, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. Between the giant bottle of liquid mercury Tony Conrad found in a doorway on 42nd St. and the Mylar chamber, we experienced a shared voyage conceived in three parts: The Opium Dream, Shaman and Heavenly Blue Mylar Pavilions, an alchemical journey born of out common consciousness -- culminating in the akashic bindu drop swirling in the sky's reflected azure. No minimalism here, but a maximalist adventure which demanded a special soundtrack. The film was shown at the St. Mark's Church on the Epiphany with The Tribal Orchestra made up of members of the Pagoda cast playing live and it is the recording of that performance you hear on this CD. Later I incorporated one of the sessions we called Benefit for the Oklahoma City Police Department into the film's soundtrack. When some of us, including Angus & Hetty, met a few years later in Shangri-La, I was hardly surprised since The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda had, in some way, foretold our Himalayan experience. From Angus' poem, Smothered Under Astral Collapse:"You are not limited to one room, there are many rooms." Ira Cohen, July 1999, NYC

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