The Eve of May

It is the Eve of May, Beltane, one of the Holy Days in my calendar, and I'm getting myself ready for tomorrow, Oxford's May Morning. As usual I'll be leading out a band of artists, poets, dreamers and ne'er-do-wells - The Hurly Burly Whirly, by Christ it's Early, got you by the Short and Curlies, Band - to bring in the May with bagpipes, fiddles, drums and effrontery, at 6am, from the steps of the Clarendon Building on Broad Street. Do come along.

Here's one of Nomi's photos from last year. I've used it here before but it brilliantly captures the revellious spirit of what we do.


There will be May celebrations up and down the land (try and stop us if you dare Mr Cameron), most famously in Padstow, where they dance two Obby Osses through the streets all day, and which by all accounts is a wild and magical affair. We're getting there.

Padstow has its May Song, sung by one and all, and I'd been thinking for some years now that Oxford needed something comparable. A few May Mornings ago a tune arrived, and last year, the words. So here is my May song, an offering to the city I love, for the day when I love it the most. If you like it too then do sing it tomorrow.


Oxford May Song by andyletcher


It was also at this time of year, a couple of years back, that I heard a bird singing at dusk out on Burgess Fields, by Port Meadow. Its song was like nothing I'd ever heard: rich, plunging, inventive, ever changing, as if it had its hands on some vintage analogue synthesizer and had patched in strange loops and filter sweeps. I was transfixed, agog.

The hard thing about learning birdsong is remembering what you've heard until you can get home to compare it to a recording. In any case, I was fair twongled that night, which perhaps contributed to the magic of what I'd heard. But I couldn't help wondering if it weren't a nightingale. No way, said the birders. Not in Oxford. Too rare. You're imagining things. Almost certainly a song thrush.

Well, I know my thrushes and a song thrush it wasn't. So a mystery.

Anyway, the other night we were on Jim's boat having a Wod rehearsal when he announce with delight that he'd heard a nightingale singing in the scrub not far from where his boat is moored (he should know - he used to live feral in France where he heard them regularly). Sure enough, at 10.30pm sharp, we cocked our ears and heard the distant, unmistakeable sound.

Last night I went out with Nomi, sound recorder in hand. Stealthily, we managed to get right up to the tree from which this virtuoso sings. It was every bit as enchanting as the Romantic poets keep banging on about, but hey, I'll let you decide for yourselves.

Nightingale edit by andyletcher

I have a fantasy about the past, that the ancient Bards graded themselves according to their progress through the rigorous training, and named those grades after the thrustle family. You began as a Wren, progressed to Blackbird, and finally, to Song Thrush. A woeful Bard would be lambasted as a Mistle Thrush (beautiful bird but a dismal singer, the karaoke crooner of the family). And the highest grade of all, the Chief Bard? Why, Nightingale of course.

They are so rare these days that to hear one in the lea of a major road, on the edge of Oxford, on the Eve of May, is what I count as a blessing.

Et in Arcadia ego

I spent the Easter weekend in Devon, a long-overdue visit to my parents, who live an hour apart, not far from where I grew up. Just as I remember childhood summers, the weather was hot, unseasonably so, more like June than April.




With my dad we poked around Totnes' legendary market, and everywhere the air smelt musky. Hmm. Good to see civic pride rubbing off on the young.


The Devon hills are as round and inviting as a dollop of clotted cream. They draw the eye, and encourage you to explore their secrets.



Treasures await those prepared to walk.



I don't know why I try and photograph bluebells. Photos don't ever come close to capturing their exquisite beauty, the shimmering layers of purple then green. They can't convey the smell or the accompanying birdsong or the feeling of being there, the relief of having made it through another winter. But every year I go ahead and do it anyway in the hope that it'll be different this time.



And even there in the woods, bursting with spring, a reminder of transience and of how quickly everything is forgotten. Et in Arcadia ego.


Before leaving for Oxford, I took a spontaneous detour to Dartmoor. Picked a place on the map, somewhere I'd never been before, parked the car and found a footpath. Was pixie-led up through a wood jammed with granite boulders, every one a forgotten shrine.


At the top of the hill I emerged again into bright, hazy sunshine. A hidden wooded valley on the other side, burnished with the cascade song of warblers. Buzzards circled and ravens crawed.


And sitting on a granite promontory I heard the true herald of spring, a cuckoo, my first of the year. How strange. His call descends a major third, the happiest of musical intervals - cuck-oo, cuck-oo - but it bugles in an annual rite of suberfuge and murder, a sacrificial act of the most primitive kind, the genetic urge to live no matter what the cost. Darkness at the very heart of light.

Castaneda documentary

He doesn't fare well, I'm afraid.

Ethometric museum

More delights at Oxford's Museum of the History of Science, this time a sound installation - The Ethometric Museum. Consisting of rare and antique ethometric devices (that's analogue circuits to you and me, but couched in a parallel steampunk universe from where they might have been crafted by Nikola Tesla himself), and played by artist Ray Lee, the created soundscape is beautiful, while the working of the instruments is fascinating. With its haunting textures and sonic oddness it reminded me of early Tangerine Dream.

It's on till the end of April, but be sure to pay to go and see one of the performances, all held in the basement of the museum, otherwise you won't hear the instruments being played.

The Great Elf Debate

At short notice I went down to London yesterday to take part in The Great Elf Debate, a session organised by the tireless Dr David Luke (one of the brains behind Breaking Convention), as part of his excellent Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness series at the October Gallery.

There are numerous trip reports from people taking indole tryptamine hallucinogens - DMT, ayahuasca, psilocybin, iboga etc - of encounters with entities, tricksy discarnate spirits who seem to possess agency and are eager to communicate with us. In short, elves. The $64 million question is, of course, what is their ontological status? Are they objectively real, conjurations of the mind, or simply symptoms of insanity?

During my last, large, excursion into the psilosphere, and rather to my annoyance given my sceptical approach to the matter, I had the distinct impression of being observed by alien intelligences, who were poised to welcome humanity into some kind of galactic citizenship, should we merit the transition - the 'full McKenna' as it's called. Bollocks! I stood dumbfounded, thinking perhaps that all the psy-fi stuff I'd read about was true.

In the half-light of dawn I watched a strange light dance back and forwards across the downs, almost within reach. Bollocks again, I thought! Fairies! That is, until the light resolved itself into the headlights of a car, commuting through the early hours along the A4. Double blast and bollocks! Someone was playing games with me...

Back in the October Gallery, David gave an erudite summary of elves in folklore and psychedelia, illuminated with his own otherworldly encounters. I spoke briefly about how difficult it is to ground elvish contact in objective reality (which is not to say that they are figments of the imagination, just that it's very difficult to say with any certainty what they are), while James Kent skyped in from Seattle with the view that elves exist only in the mind. That his elves have been unable to say anything useful, beyond mischievously returning his every question, seems strongly to support his case.

Two ideas occurred to me during the evening. The first is that elves might be some gestalt creation of the mind. Occasionally, during that hypnagogic half-awake phase, song lyrics come tumbling out of me and, what's more, they rhyme and scan perfectly while the images they evoke elide together into unexpected metaphors. It's as if with my conscious brain distracted, my unconscious mind can work freely such that the lyrics arrive in one glorious and unexpected gestalt: almost as if they were presented to me. Perhaps the same is true of the elves, that under the influence of certain hallucinogens, the mind gestalts beings - in truth, extensions of itself - that appear autonomous. Maybe.

The second came from thinking about that most seasonal of birds, the cuckoo. The cuckoo doesn't rear its own young but lays its eggs in other birds' nests, and fools them into rearing its monstrous, parasitical chicks. Is there a parallel with our relationship to plants? It takes a lot of energy to maintain a brain capable of consciously acting, so perhaps, in evolutionary terms, certain plants have saved themselves the bother by simply producing molecules by which they can hijack that of a passing mammal. By affecting the parts of the brain to do with language, vision, and people-recognition, the molecules create avatars of themselves which appear to us as other-than-human-persons, to use Irving Hallowell's phrase. So, if this were the case, the elves would literally be plants talking to us.

There are two problems with this Cuckoo hypothesis. First, beyond encouraging us to become Johnny Appleseeds, it is not entirely clear what a plant would get out of the bargain. If we could establish beyond doubt that the elves had some kind of consistent message for us, which is not culturally-bound, then that would certainly lend some support to the idea, but I'm not sure this can be done. Second, it requires that humans and hallucinogenic plants have had a long evolutionary relationship (symbiotic or parasitical - take your pick) , and, as readers of Shroom will know, evidence for this is, at least in the case of psilocybin mushrooms, is questionable. Perhaps the Cuckoo hypothesis is simply cuckoo.

To return to my dancing light - was it a fairy or a car headlight, or both? Trust a denizen of the otherworld to leave me utterly bewildered...

Bulbul Tarang

Ever on the lookout for strange and unusual instruments I was excited to discover the bulbul tarang , or (misleadingly named) Indian banjo, a strange cross between an Appalachian dulcimer and a typewriter.

According to sources on the interweb, the name means waves of nightingales. The instrument was invented in Japan in 1912 by Goro Morita but on reaching the Subcontinent has become thoroughly Indianified. It consists of melody and drone strings, strummed with a plectrum by the right hand, and a set of piano or typewriter keys, played with the left, that stop the strings. No toy, some players have become virtuosic as this clip demonstrates.



They come in all shapes and sizes, acoustic and electric, and I want one!




I find the process by which instruments and their music migrate from place to place, changing as they go, endlessly fascinating.

Here's another instrument in the process of change. When the British Empire collapsed, the British Army left both highland bagpipes and marching bands behind them in India, Nepal, Pakistan and North Africa. Here's a marching band from the Punjab that sounds anything but Scottish. I wish I could be around in a hundred years to see how the tradition has evolved.

What is folk?

It's been a busy week with two pub sessions, two gigs, one Wod rehearsal, a late night jam in a hotel bar and a tune sesh with a cream tea. The cream tea was in honour of Colin's birthday (bassist with Telling the Bees), and we duly ate cake and scones in his honour, on a warm and sunny afternoon by the canal at Pigeon's Lock (it's a tough life). Josie (cello, TtB) made it out too, and we got to coo at her beautiful new baby, Rueben, born on tuesday.



Friday saw me down in London, playing with Raagnagrok at the ICA, another intensely enjoyable improvised set (during which I discovered a new fingering for a tricky note on the pipes, and that you can achieve a slight chorus effect by waving the chanter rhythmically around the mike). Also playing were Alexander Tucker's Decomposed Orchestra - deep drone textures on cello, violin, sax and drums - and the frankly extraordinary Amal Gamal Ensemble who blasted on stage with their thrilling and uncompromising electronic weirdness. Here's a video clip of a recent gig of theirs to give you a flavour.



My other gig was with Telling the Bees, at Loughborough University, as part of an academic conference on English and Welsh diasporas. Our first with Mr Barney Morse-Brown on cello, we played a tight set, with enough primary material to keep our intellectual audience in papers for a year.

Afterwards we attempted the impossible, trying to inject some soul into the featureless ghetto of the hotel (where even the staff were made of MDF) by playing tunes in the bar, together with Ceri Rhys Matthews and Christine Cooper. Both fabulous musicians, I met them a few years ago at the English Acoustic Collective summer school. I particularly like Ceri's take on tradition, which is that it is a resource to be used, not something to be preserved in aspic. Here they are, playing fiddle and Welsh pibgorn pipes. I'm always awed by their ability to extemporise around the tune with such grace and fluidity.



At about 1 o'clock in the morning, one of the academics still in the bar leant across and asked the dreaded question: so what is folk music, exactly? Needless to say this led to a spirited discussion. Colin's take is that 'folk' is a category of economic, not stylistic, necessity. In other words, as soon as you're paid for it, it is no longer folk. Ceri, who danced around the argument with the nimble dexterity of a flyweight pugilist, refused to be pinned down, saying that each of us would define folk differently.

Me? I think of myself as an artist who works within the forms of traditional music. I still call myself a folk musician, but given the week I've had, and the gigs and music that I'm involved with, this may be inaccurate. At the very least, I'm probably an atypical folk musician, but then as a liminal vagabond, that's just how I like it.

Liminal vagabonds

Rima and Tom (not forgetting their otherwordly companion, Macha the lurcher) came to visit us this weekend and a fine time was had by all. They brought a bit of Devon (our homeland and source of much longing) with them - some mead, fudge and cheese - and we showed them some of the delights of Oxford, starting with the canal, which is currently fringed with hedge garlic, freshly leaved willows and birdsong.


Oxford is a beautiful place to live, but after a while you get a bit jaded and stop seeing. Guests make you look again. There are treasures everywhere. On the rooftops:


In the museums (an Indian 'map' of the cosmos, since you asked):


And especially in the Pitt Rivers museum, (a Noh mask that forms a salutory warning to us all):


In the evening we went out to a secret spot nearby. Nomi hung up some bunting and lit lanterns in the trees.


A waxing moon lit the gloaming.



And we did what you are supposed to do around a fire. We played music, homegrown and other: Breton, Balkan, and the occasional bhajan. Rima and Tom delighted us with Eastern Gypsy tunes from Russia and Poland. Nothing captures the beautiful ache of outsiderness as much as an accordion and clarinet, played in the small hours round a well-tended fire. We were liminal vagabonds, aesthetic pilgrims, children of the hedge.



In this modern, consumer world of ours, they haven't just papered over the cracks, they've grouted them in. There's so little space to be. They've made it harder and harder for anyone to live as artists: you know, old fashioned romantics who make music or poetry or art from a sense of calling. Because we have to no matter what comes of it. The worth of what we do can't be measured or quantified or assessed but it matters nonetheless. The agelasts don't know it but they need us.

Liminal vagabondage is a tough path to tread. It brings riches beyond compare, though scarcely any money. But there never was a choice. What a gift to be reminded of this by such wonderful friends and in such a wonderful place.

Breaking Convention

Just back from an exciting weekend at the Breaking Convention conference, which covered all aspects of psychedelic drugs: scientific, therapeutic, anthropological, phenomenological, legal, historical and cultural. The flywheels of my brain were cranked to the max, leaving me sleepless with ideas.



My highlights included: Skype presentations from Ram Dass and Stan Grof; a showing of the film DMT: The Spirit Molecule; some ethnographic films of shamanism in Siberia; a panel on ayahuasca and ayahuasca religions in South America; and, of course, the chance to network with some extraordinary people, all experts in their field.

My own paper, 'Notes towards a minimal theory of psychedelic consciousness', seemed to go down well and generated helpful feedback - a great relief.

Mike Jay gave an excellent paper on the history of nitrous oxide and mescaline use in Britain. I was captivated by William Rowlandson's comparisons of McKenna and Borges, by Charlotte Walsh's legal arguments for cognitive liberty, and by Roland Griffiths' research into psilocybin and mysticism. Ras Binghi Congo-Nyah gave the most cogent explanation I've heard for why Rastafarianism honours the Emperor Haile Selassie, while Cameron Adams drew our attention to the way certain psychonauts describe their experiences through the language of healing.

What I found most exciting was the sense that the psychedelic movement is starting to reflect back on itself, to question its assumptions and to unsettle old certainties. In other words, it is coming of age. Of course there are tensions between the old-guard modernists and the newer, more critically informed, generation of post-modernist scholars, but the willingness of all sides to engage in dialogue is heartening.

Thinking or writing about psychedelics can feel a lonely business but to be in an environment where the subject can be talked about openly, without the usual titters, discomfort or embarrassed glances, is simply invigorating. Whatever the politicians and media would want to be the case, psychedelics haven't gone away. In fact, psychedelic use has become normalised. There is therefore a pressing need for the subject to be addressed openly by the academy. In that, the conference could not have been more timely. My only complaint: that I couldn't be in two places at once and consequently missed out on many enticing papers. Ho hum.

There were some nice artistic touches too: the posters were all beautifully designed, our name badges were printed on acid blotters (fake, I hasten to add), and we were all given flowers as we arrived on the Saturday morning. It gave the conference an almost festival feel.

Another highlight for me was an invitation to play pipes with ambient doom drone raag terrorists, Raagnagrok. I've played with them once before, at the Green Man festival a few years ago - one of my all time top gigs. As then, our Saturday night set was entirely improvised: electric sitar jamming over analogue synth drones and textures, with me adding pipe shenanigans over the top. No idea what the audience made of it, but it was liberating to play without the worry of falling off a tune or making unfortunate reed-squawk. Deeply psychedelic, and apparently our gig marked the fortieth anniversary of Soft Machine playing the same building. Nice.

I'm playing with them again on April 15th at London's ICA, so do come along. Folk it ain't. Here's a vid of what they do.




Then, after all that excitement, we retired to Matthew Watkins' gaff, a caravan just ten minutes walk away, where we sat round his wood burner drinking tea and chewing the fat. A perfect weekend.