Vive la difference

I recently met a woman who dislikes bagpipes. In fact she finds the sound so grating and unbearable that whenever she hears a bagpipe of any kind she just wants it to stop. Quite naturally I was flabbergasted. It's salutary to discover that others may be offended by the things one feels most passionate about.

Well, it's fair to say that she would probably detest the music I'm currently listening to. La Novia is a collective of experimental folk musicians from Central France, broadly speaking the Auvergne. That they are impeccable traditional players is clear, but they add a modern, psychedelic edge, playing tunes for a long time, detuning drones, adding electronics and so on. It's intense stuff.

My current favourite is the band Jéricho, whose extended sets and haunting vocals leave me breathless and uplifted.

Jéricho

Now I freely admit that even without the layers of experimentation, the Auvergne bagpipe, the cabrette, is an acquired taste.

But, as with one of those mould-encrusted French goat's cheeses that offends the nose, burns the tongue and scrapes the palate, once you have it your life will never be the same again. A whole world of experience awaits.

But there I go. I can't help myself. I'm remonstrating. I'm wedded to the idea that with enough persuasion I can get everyone to love the bagpipes as I do. Let it lie.

For the truth is that music evokes such strong passions and powerful tribal loyalties that there will always be polarised differences of taste. The trick is learning how to live with them.

The Lost Elders of Acid

One of the highlights of last weekend's Breaking Convention was hearing and meeting Leaf Fielding. Apart from being a true gentleman, Leaf is known principally for being one of the 'Operation Julie gang', the underground lab that kept Britain supplied with high quality LSD during the 70s before they got rather spectacularly busted. He's written an excellent an account of how, in his words, he got 'into such a fix' and ended up being sent down for eight years. I thoroughly recommend it.

What's quite clear is that Leaf was never in it for the money. Having drunk from the magic cauldron he simply wanted to share it with anyone curious and adventurous enough to try for themselves. At its zenith, his lab was knocking out hundreds of thousands of microdots (their invention) at a time.

Back at Breaking Convention I also met a retired psyche-nurse I'll call Gary. You won't have heard of him. Raised on an estate in the NE he found Acid as a teenager in the 70s. It made 'a golden opening in his heart' and for a time he felt as though the whole world order was about to change. It never did. Operation Julie augured the end. He trained as a nurse, got a job, and somehow filtered back into the mainstream. 'Coming here to this conference' he said, 'it's like coming home'. We both welled up at that.

Dropping Acid at a time before the sneering rage of Punk cried 'Kill a Hippie!', before the New Atheists stamped their jackboots on the balls of popular and intellectual culture, and before listless consumerism leached meaning from the world (such that for many now, tripping is just an extra channel on the digibox, its revelations to be met with an OMG or a LOL or a meh, whatever), both Leaf and Gary were seekers. They yearned to find out who they were and what their place in the world might be. Acid gave them a glimpse.

And their respective stories got me wondering: what happened to that generation? What happened to all those trippers? Given the Julie gang's prodigious output there must be thousands of people with little golden openings in their hearts who somehow just melted away. You'd walk past them and you'd never know.

As the genuine casualties attest, Acid isn't for everyone. It needs careful handling not evangelism. But at a time when we need elders more than ever I can't help hoping that as they start to retire and find they have nothing to lose, the Lost Elders of Acid, the freaks of yore, will come forward, as Leaf and Gary have done, and tell their stories, good and bad. It's time we heard them.

The Lie of the Land

Whenever I travel somewhere new I always want to get a feel for the place, to know the lie of the land. I start by poring over maps - a habit acquired from my father - and I'm reasonably good at picking out likely walks. Then it's just a matter of footwork. This is my new neck of the woods. There's much to explore.

Every crossroad creates tantalising choices...

...though every choice yields exquisite rewards.

The map takes you to interesting places that you might otherwise miss, standing stones, dreaming pools, medieval doorways.

But it's good just to wander, to see what rocks, trees and features draw you.

Quite why certain places exert such a powerful pull remains mysterious to me. It's more than aesthetics. With its foundations in Marxism and Freud, psychogeography has become the popular explanation for the relationship between people and place (at least within literary circles). I'm not a fan. By emphasizing  psyche it privileges the self, such that the environment just happens to be the thing out there impinging upon us. Nor do I particularly like the idea of the genius loci, the spirit of place, simply because the idea was bequeathed to us by the Romans and I'm struggling to think of anything those straight-line thinkers did for us.

It could be leys or currents of earth energy, but for now I prefer the New Animism. While it's very tempting to animate the environment...

...that's not what this is about. The New Animism states simply that the world is full of persons, not all of whom are human. We are necessarily in relationship with these other-than-human-persons, and just as with humans, we are drawn to some and not others.

That said, in the end the explanation doesn't really matter. Some places are pokey and that's that.

Often when I'm walking tunes occur to me. I can feel my creative cogs just starting to turn again after quite a long fallow period, but here's a tune I wrote a few years back while stomping around Gloucestershire. It's called, naturally enough, The Lie of the Land.




But irrespective of whether or not I come home with something, I walk because the land leads me onwards. I can't resist its pull.

It's how I feel at home.