If you would rather LISTEN to this in Roger’s voice, here’s the audio.
Chapter 1
It was late 1966 when fate brought the three of us together at the cramped art studio spaces near Carnaby Street. I had just transferred to Central Saint Martins from up north, eager to immerse myself in the swirling cultural kaleidoscope that was 1960s London. From the moment I stepped off the train from Manchester, I could feel the buzz and restless energy pulsing through the city’s streets. This was the place for exploring mind-expansion, challenging conformity, and pushing artistic boundaries.
That’s exactly what I was seeking after my life was thrown into upheaval when my girlfriend Jane left for Morocco on a soul-searching journey. The weight of her absence left me casting about for some new transcendental experience to fill the void. Little did I know that void would soon be filled by encounters that realigned my entire universe.
It started when Mike Thompson wandered into the cramped painting studio I shared with two others. We struck up a conversation about the new mind-bending sounds coming out of the UK underground – Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, AMM. Mike’s eyes lit up as he excitedly told me about cutting-edge recording techniques like playing tapes backwards and running them through electronics.
A few days later, I heard the thunderous wail of a drummer coming from the basement space below. I went down to glimpse this force of nature, face contorted as he battered his kit into submission. That was my first encounter with the one and only Keith O’Malley. We became fast friends over our shared love of Mitch Mitchell, Keith Moon and the bluesy defiance of Ginger Baker.
When the three of us finally jammed together everything just clicked into place. The magic thunderbolt of musical chemistry. We fed off each other’s energy, each instrument bouncing and slaloming around the others, always searching for new unexplored territories to carry us into the drone. Those early practices were six or eight hour trance rituals where we completely lost our sense of self, vessels for something far more cosmic.
Our sound was a swirling maelstrom of seething psychedelic fury tempered by Mike’s warm, anchoring basslines and my raga-like eastern drones weaving through it all. Keith’s frenetic polyrhythms and prankish showmanship ignited the powder keg. From those first few mind-melting basement jams, I knew we were tapping into something powerful, scary and new. An entire hidden world of consciousness beckoned, and we were the scruffy psychonautic explorers in tattered cords about to unveil its secrets through our art. In that dingy, sweat-stained little room, a monster was born.
Struggle to find our sound and an audience as we play small London clubs.
After those first few incendiary basement jams, we knew we were onto something raw and powerful. But capturing that lightning in a bottle proved much more difficult when we started playing proper gigs around London’s tiny club circuit. Transcendent communion with the cosmos is one thing when it’s just the three of us in the practice space. But translating that to the stage in front of restless crowds looking for a good time was an entirely different challenge.
Our first shows at places like The Marquee, La Disqueque, and The Speakeasy were chaotic affairs as we tried to recreate the improvisatory alchemy of our practices. More often than not it just devolved into a noxious, unlistenable racket leaving the punters utterly bewildered. Keith in particular seemed to relish the anarchic energy, thrashing about like a paint factory explosion while Mike and I noodled endlessly without any sort of structure.
“You need songs, lads!” promoters would yell at us backstage. “Proper songs with choruses and verses people can latch onto!”
But we were having none of that bourgeois rubbish. We were forging an entirely new language through our music. Something primal and transcendental that shunned conventional trappings in search of a higher plane of consciousness, maaaan. If the unwashed masses couldn’t handle being massaged into ecstasy by our rapturous sonic revelations, that was their loss.
Frustratingly, this bullheaded attitude didn’t exactly endear us to London’s hip Carnaby Street crowd who just wanted a groovy soundtrack for buzzing off the latest psychedelics. We’d be lucky to make it through a full set without getting pelted by bottles, coins, even knickers on occasion. I’ll never forget the night at Blaises when Mike got beaned with a drained pint glass, shattering his trademark circular shades and nearly taking his eye out.
After far too many nights like this, we seriously questioned whether we had any future outside of the basement. That’s when Sheila Franklin entered the picture and single-handedly remoulded our hapless trio into the stuff of legend. More on that soon…
Sheila Franklin helped tame and focus the wild energies of our psychedelic rock trio
Sheila was a ballsy 23-year-old fashionista who ran an edgy boutique on Carnaby Street. She had her pulse on the absolute latest sounds and styles bubbling up from the underground scene. After catching one of our particularly unhinged performances at The Marquee, she barged into our dressing room amidst the wreckage of upturned amps and shattered mic stands.
“You lot are a bloody nightmare!” she exclaimed, somehow both repulsed and enthralled. “But I’ve never seen such raw, untapped potential.”
Sheila didn’t mince words about how we urgently needed to rein in the self-indulgent noodling and anchor our cosmic explorations to some solid tunes if we hoped to connect with an audience beyond the crustiest acidheads. Mike, ever the voice of reason, was immediately on board. Keith predictably balked at any efforts to water down or commercialize our sound for mass consumption. But even he recognized that change was needed after one too many nights ducking for cover.
And so Sheila dragged us – sometimes literally by the hair – into cramped rehearsal rooms to work on structuring our jams into actual songs. She pounded into our granite skulls the importance of having builds, climaxes, dynamic shifts, basically any sense of arc and purpose instead of just riding the same few riffs into oblivion.
It wasn’t easy reining in the collective id of three wildly uncompromising egos. There were plenty of knock-down, drag-out rows where Keith would storm off in a huff, sending his cymbals skating across the room. But Sheila was unmovable, her harsh drill sergeant tongue somehow cajoling and inspiring us to new creative heights.
Months of sweat and misery paid off when we emerged with nearly an hour of spacily grooving material shaped into a cohesive debut album. Songs like “Hole in the Sky” and “Venus Oceanic” managed to capture our boundary-dissolving spirit into digestible packages for the kids to latch onto. We were finally firing on all cylinders, equal parts experimental daring and pop sensibility.
Playing the newly tightened set on the London circuit to crowds that were dancing and singing along instead of fleeing in terror was a complete mindfuck at first. But it was also profoundly validating to see our casual redefining of consciousness finally click on a larger scale. And it was all down to Sheila Franklin’s tough love stylings that our former formless ooze evolved into its final focused form.
Record low-budget debut album full of rock experimentation and gets mixed reviews but develops a cult following
With Sheila’s steadying influence and our newly honed songwriting chops, we felt primed to make a definitive statement with our debut album. Of course, being a bunch of stubbled art school rebels without a pot to piss in, we had to bootstrap the whole recording process on a shoestring budget.
Trance Explorers
Lyrics from “Ululation of the Uvvian Trance Explorers”
Verse 1: Through smoke-hazed backrooms of the underground Three shamanic explorers were found Conjuring soundwaves to liquefy the mind Leave all sense of reality behind
Chorus: The Uvvian Trance Explorers Ceremonial sonic transporters Distorting boundaries, venturing into the void Brain vessels to be destroyed and re-alloyed
Verse 2: Keith’s primordial rhythms set the trance in motion Roger’s guitar lines spiral into astral oceans
Mike anchoring the tempest in warm thunderous tones One unholy convergence, melting flesh from the bonesChorus: The Uvvian Trance Explorers…
Bridge: Descend into the undulating abyss Follow their frequencies to ego’s abasement Submerge into textures so viscous and thick All illusion of singular self starts to liquify
Chorus: The Uvvian Trance Explorers…
Outro: Shredding the veils of consensus reality Reconfiguring matter to their plastiform will The Uvvian soundweavers keep descending Until all touch with the surface world is terminally rescinded
We managed to beg and borrow just enough to book a few days at a rough, no-frills studio in Denmark Street. It was a sweaty, cramped shoebox of a room, but we instantly felt at home amidst the walled forest of vintage mics, amps and undecipherable analog gear.
What followed was one of the most feverishly inspired fortnights of my life as we basically lived in that sauna of a studio. Climbing over cables and spilling warm brown M&B ales, we thrashed out take after take of molten psychedelic epics. Mike was a wizard, brilliantly capturing the cosmic haze and mindmelt in the most unconventional ways – running tracks through busted reverb units, bouncing tapes across the room, you name it.
Keith, that madman, took a beat-up steel rubbish bin and transformed it into a vital guest percussive voice with his crazed whomping. As for me, I spent hours droning into a room of variously placed mics, filling the grooves with spiraling, smoke-signal guitars.
In just under two weeks, we’d created our debut offering – “Triptych Kaleidoscope.” An aptly titled 40-minute tour de force of untamed psychedelic artistry that crammed every ounce of our initial basement epiphanies onto affordable vinyl. It was as raw, unfettered and deeply mesmerizing as we could’ve hoped.
The album was met with wildly polarized reactions upon its release. The straight music press derided it as self-indulgent acid-crazed twaddle. But the underground heads immediately recognized it as a mind-expanding landmark in the U.K. psychedelic underground. We became cosmic truth-tellers to a fervent cult following of like-minded freaks who wrote us script-covering fan letters about the Doors to Perception we’d opened.
For us, scoring mixed reviews from the squares was a badge of honor. We gave them exactly what we’d set out to create – a lungful of unchecked psychedelic experientialism to shake awake their atrophied third eyes. Mission accomplished.
The heady, anything-goes atmosphere of the 1960s London scene we were part of
London in the late 1960s was an intoxicating maelstrom of revolutionary artistic and social energy. A Molotov cocktail of drugs, fashion, rock music, and bohemian culture constantly bubbling over. The straights called it the “Swinging Sixties” but for us young freaks, it felt more like we were riding a brushfire of cultural upheaval threatening to consume everything in its path.
Every night was an opportunity to immerse yourself in the thriving underground. Drinking ourselves into frenzies at psychedelic chaos clubs like UFO, Middle Earth, or Biba’s Basement. Places where the Westminister elite rubbed shoulders with artsy vagabonds as kaleidoscopic liquid light shows pulsed to the heavy drone of bands like Pink Floyd and Hawkwind.
Out in the streets, the boutique shops of Carnaby and King’s Road were part’ Retailers by day, part revolutionary cells stocked with ridiculously modish clobber and accessories to code your anti-establishment affiliations. Hip young vagabonds sold handcrafted jewelry, art books, and dodgy substances from rucksacks on parade routes like Portobello Road.
It was an incredibly febrile atmosphere, this sense that London was the gathered flash point for all sorts of counterculture ideas and movements. We brushed up against legends like the Situationist radicals, influential poets, even touring cult leaders – all bending young minds towards new forms of consciousness.
And every encounter, every instant seemed to present unlimited risk and opportunity. One minute you’re sharing a Chelsea bird’s flat, drinking vintages and discussing Deleuze. The next, you catch wind of an illegal secret gig through a super-hushed grapevine. So you scramble to an abandoned Underground station or disused art-deco cinema where the trees of pink lightbulbs totally transform your brain.
Ultimately, that heady atmosphere was the perfect catalyst for us to fully embrace our roles as psychedelic sound explorers. In the eye of that perpetual upheaval, it felt like our duty was to distill the entire Dionysian zeitgeist into a morphing cloud of guitar and drums. So we dived into the vortex and rode it for all we were worth, never knowing where we’d come out on the other side.
Album starts selling well by word-of-mouth. Band tours Europe to growing crowds
At first, “Triptych Kaleidoscope” just seemed to drift off into the ether like a wayward psychedelic tumbleweed after its initial mixed reviews. We didn’t have the backing of a big label marketing machine or any real commercial expectations. It was punk as funk, just a bunch of skint art school upstarts sharing our crazed vision with whoever would listen.
But then the most wonderful thing started happening – people actually were listening. And digging what they heard enough to ravenously spread the word. We’d get letters from hip young souls all across Britain gushing about how they’d dropped a tab, played the album atună-ту, and had their brains completely rewired. Copies started getting devoured on university campuses and emerging hippie communes. Pretty soon there were ads in the underground press from rare groove djs raving that the album was an absolute must-hear psych artifact.
From those intrepid tastemakers, momentum just started building further by word-of-sweaty-mouth. We’d get reports of the record blowing minds at happenings and free concerts across Europe. There was a mystical quality to how this cult reverberated purely through believers hyping it to their likeminded brothers and sisters.
Before we knew it, the album’s reputation had transcended our little London scene to become something of a psychedelic phenomenon. Suddenly, ancient rock clubs and festivals from Paris to Berlin to Amsterdam were clamoring for us to bring our sonic alchemy to their musique addicts. With no schools left to drop out of, we happily hit the road as self-appointed ambassadors of the Glastonbury mindexpansion – cosmic guitars and drums in tow.
Those first tours across the Continent were absolutely mental. One never-ending psilocybin bender of train hell-rides, freaky promoters, and sweaty gigs to utterly frenzied crowds. We’d stumble onto stages with barely enough energy to plug in in some tiny French town, only to be instantly transmitted by the cosmic radiation of the turnout. Hundreds of wild-eyed kids, plastered in dabs and color-bangs, greeting us like the second coming of the sun.
Hitting these ecstatic European peaks during electrical storms of fuzz and beats was always the ultimate alchemical release. For 60 searing minutes, we were pure conduits of psychedelic dementia elevated by armies of peaking initiates. The audience became a single organism undulating to the pulse of Mike’s warmachine bass and frenzied chords spiraling off into oblivion.
After every life-changing experience like that, we’d regroup for the overnight train ride in sweaty rapture. Already buzzing intravenously about where next to cathedral our chaos sessions and blow some new minds. The underground’s hottest psych juggernaut had arrived, and we were just getting warmed up.
Creative tensions emerge as they try to top themselves on their second album. Personalities clash over musical direction
Riding high off our maiden LP’s surprise cult success and the rapturous gigs that followed, we couldn’t wait to get back into the studio. Sheila had scored us a bit more budget this time around to rent out a proper recording setup. A converted church with thick stone walls perfect for capturing unholy levels of psychsploitation.
In our feverish minds, this sophomore platter would be our masterwork – a Magnum Opus elevating our sound to smash the boundaries of allional consciousness. But as the recording sessions went on, those wildly divergent ambitions quickly calcified into stubborn competing visions tearing us apart.
From the jump, Keith’s unruly id was pushing us to get as uncompromisingly far-out as possible. He’d bash away relentlessly at his kit, bellowing for me and Mike to join his rhythm abyss quests. Just endlessly chasing the most extreme fearsome drones without any structure or restraint.
“Let’s make this one a proper white knuckler, boys!” he’d cackle maniacally between flow-killing flurries. “Give the kidsemethingrea that’ll rip their melty melons clean off!”
On the total opposite end of the cosmos, you had Mike. Always the professorial one, he was obsessing over all the studio’s vintage analog gear – cramming tracks with delays, reverbs, tapes-spools, you name it. Determined to make our sound as immersive and ear-trippingly spatial as Pink Floyd’s latest psych-scapes.
“This is our opportunity to embed hidden dimensions within the grooves,” Mike would patiently explain. “Entire galaxies that reveal themselves deeper with each ethereal listen!”
Then you had me, strung out somewhere between those poles of primal fury and heady cerebral textures. My sitar-inspired lines tried weaving a clawing path, but just kept getting tangled in the regressions.
Whenever I’d pause for breath from a particularly draining tar-pit session, Sheila would storm in fuming about our uncompromising tantrums. “Do you dunderheads even remember how to simply write a bloody song?!” She’d blast all the windows open, letting fresh air circulate through the dusted layers of tension.
For weeks, we lurched from one hostile extreme to the other – bonged rituals reeling right into byzantine technical circle-jerks. But no actual cohesive material to show for it. Just abstractions butting painfully against each other while that difficult second album slipped further away.
Slowly, the realization seeped in that we were coming perilously close to disappearing infinitely up our own arses. A brutal reckoning was in order to get the vision realigned before we scattered into oblivion entirely.
Keith’s behavior becomes more erratic due to drug use but his manic energy also drives many classic songs
As our creative tensions reached a fever pitch, Keith completely went off the deep end. His already unhinged personality started getting wildly amplified and deformed by the sheer volume of psychotropics he was devouring on a daily basis.
From the moment he’d stumble into the church basement, pupils saucer-wide and sweat staining his threadbare tops, you could just feel the darkness expanding in the room. He’d gruffly mumble some demented summons about consulting the Wizard and immediately launch into rituals of unbridled ecstatic frenzy on his kit.
For hours on end, we’d all be held hostage by the shaman’s thundering incantations. Polyrhythms washing over us in great tsunamic perversions, dragging us under in their unholy current until all sense of temporal grounding dissolved. There were times I legitimately feared he might beat himself into a moment of deceased physical unbecoming, such was the violence he channeled.
Yet it was also those peaks of diabolical possession where Keith’s chaotic genius took flight like never before. As Mike and I clung terror-struck to the life-raft of our instruments, riding Keith’s convulsive storms of primal heaviosity, something alchemical and turbine occurred.
Where before our jams had been dangerously unmoored explorations of the outer reach, they suddenly achieved a sentience and inexorable crawling momentum. Like the very fabric of our playing was taking on corporeal, unnatural form. Strange forgotten languages howling through the grooves in Keith’s splatter-cough mouth utterances.
And when we’d finally reach some cathartic final crest before collapsing back into our bodies, delirious and drenched in sacred bodily emissions, we’d realize entire chest-crackers like “Into the Uvvian” and “Reptilicus” had been unconsciously barbecued into existence.
No matter how harrowing the path, Keith’s shamanistic trance-baking techniques produced some of our most possessed and legendary material on that album. The intense clarity of vision that he projected was terrifying yet utterly essential in not letting our collective vibe flatline into bland wakeness. He was our mad Norseman at the helm, navigating our creaking longship through the most corrosive of mindfire storms.
So we simply strapped in and surrendered to his lunatic centrifugal force, allowing our very beings to permutate and elongate with each fresh cosmic emission he summoned from the lightless depths. Even if we did lowkey worry he might steer us straight into the gaping maws of Leviathan.
Their masterpiece double-album is a smash hit, cementing their legacy as major psychedelic icons
Against all odds, the months of blood, sweat and dingleberries finally coalesced into our crowning achievement – the double album magnum opus “Triptych Kaleidoscope.” When the test pressings first materialized, we could scarcely believe this mutagenic monstrosity had gestated from our chemically-addled beings.
Four eccentric vinyl sides overflowing with enough mindbending sounds to fracture even the most seasoned psych-warrior into shards of kaleidoscopic goo. From the opening ceremonial fanfare of “Xenochron,” it was clear we’d sparked something profoundly new and dangerous into existence.
There were still flashes of our earlier rooted blues-psych freak-outs, like the pile-driving “Moth/Locusts” and the drunken tilt-a-whirl lullaby “Rotor.” But venturing deeper, the album subsumed into vast unexplored dimensions. Side-long excursions into avant-garde musique concrète, sci-fi guitaraporias, moments of utter texture-driven sensory erasure.
In between the expansive set-pieces were bizarre interstitial vignettes where we’d stumbled upon genius by happy accident. Like the 18-minute “Matter Babies” dreamscape that emerged from an equipment failure drenching my guitar in waves of ambient amp-drapery. So immersive you could practically feel the fetuses blossoming in your fertile mindwomb.
Even Sheila, the perpetual voice of restraint, had to admit we’d created the most gloriously uncompromised statement imaginable. There’d be no reigning in or diluting these transmissions to satisfy anyone’s vision of commercial appeal. “Astroblast” was simply too monolithic and corrosively mind-splintering.
Which is why we were stunned when the album became an instant canonical classic upon its release. Maybe it was the cultural upheaval of the late 60s pushing minds wide open for uncompromising new sensory gospels. Or perhaps it caught a crest of jaded heads starving for a cosmic rebirth after being burned out on so much hollow raga-rock noodling.
Whatever demons were driving the zeitgeist engine, the album struck a profound resonant chord across the counterculture. On campuses and communes, emerging headshops and offbeat performance spaces, “Astroblast” became a ubiquitous talisman, distilling the entire psychedelic experience into musical form.
We cemented this status with a pair of landmark gigs – first conquering the Woodstock fest and uniting its masses into a single frenzied throb beast. Then instantly ascended to semi-mythical godheads with an unholy dusk-til-dawn residency at London’s UFO club. For weeks, a devout cult of unwashed moptops and diviners made UFO their revivalist temple, peaking in unison to our electro-shock rituals in trance.
Suddenly we were psychedelicized avatars of a truly countercultural awakening. Icons of the turn-on/tune-out generation spreading our rapturous trancehypnotica to the furthest outer reaches of the youthquake. Cementing the legacy of “Astroblast” as a mind-expanding monolith that profoundly realigned so many brainwaves and spinalcords towards the cosmic new frontier.
It was everything we’d naively set out to accomplish – using our music as a sort of aural Kool-Aid to dissolve all conventional boundaries of consciousness. Yet now that we’d actualized this delirious mission, the sensory overloadbecame almost too overwhelming to process. Our tiny basement dreams devoured by the furious Nihl they’d unleashed upon the world.
Unable to follow up their creative peak, the band stagnates and members become jaded
In the blinding psychedelic supernova that was “Astroblast,” we’d well and truly cored straight through to the outer reaches. Glimpsed the luminous vortex singularities of transcendental oneness – only to be violently shattered back into our fragile fleshly forms. That album represented both our supreme creative apotheosis and the outer boundary of coherent expression. We’d gone nuclear, scorching away all atmosphere until further exploration risked drifting off into infinite deadening vacuums of atonal nothingness.
So in the sobering aftermath haze of such profound cranial exodus, we were left bewildered and struggling to find our cosmic footing again. The ever-increasing public clamor for a follow-up only compounded how utterly spent and purposeless we felt in the shadow of that monolith.
Aimless band meetings devolved into rehashes of old fractal glories or hostile bouts of resentment. Keith, perhaps understandably, was the most vocally bitter about the pressure. Between desperate uppers binges to reachieve his manic shamanic spark, he’d curse up bratty tantrums about all the fair-weather posers leeching onto our success.
“We open the doors to the great inner bloody vastness for these pitiful robots, and they’ll never be syked enough to even glimpse what we’ve seen!” he’d seethe while flinging obscenities like oversized tongue depressors. “Let’s ditch these vapid cosmoggers and get back to what we do best – melting the masses into prismatic bubblebaths of cranial pish!”
Meanwhile, Mike had fully retreated into the sanctuary of knob-turning tech-wankery, desperate to unearth new frontiers of sonic dimensionality through circuit-bending and tape spool alchemy. His once-grounded voice of reason now gone totally vapor-trailed, lost in endless gear-chasing quests for the mythical “perfect” tone solution.
As for me, I just felt utterly hollowed out and devoid of inspiration. The white-light truth stunned into my nerve-matter by the electro-shocks of “Astroblast” had conversely drained me of any remaining cosmic wisdom to share. What else could I possibly summon that would feel impactful after glimpsing such vast vistas of infinity?
So instead of valiantly surging forth, we just sort of idled and spun our wheels in the dirt, flailing about for any sense of higher vector. Sheila battled valiantly to wrangle us towards productive mindsets, but even her once-talismanic authority had diminished against our sullen resentments and creative malaise.
In those uninspired doldrums, the ugly attitudes and vices began taking over. Band funds frittered away on ludicrous gear indulgences and controlled substance binges. Shambolic days bleeding into weeks into months, with nothing to show but hyper-amplified personal conflicts.
The chemically erratic ups-and-downs only exacerbated the bristling tensions, ultimately eroding the very bonds of faith and friendship that used to kick our sparks into cosmic conception. Where once our combustibility had been alchemized into generative lightning, now it just fizzled out into scorched disillusion. A once blazing supernova reduced to cold, smoldering embers.
Drinking, egos and jealousies tear them apart during attempts at a new album
The breaking point really came when we somehow deluded ourselves into thinking we could still summon the astral firepower for another album. With Sheila strong-arming us into renting a secluded cottage studio out in the Cotswolds, we naively believed a change of bucolic scenery could rekindle the old alchemical heat.
But from the moment we arrived at that ramshackle former mill, the entire vibe was utterly poisoned. Just raw resentment and envy refracting endlessly between our cratered egos.
Keith instantly commandeered the largest bedroom, decking it out as a cross between badger’s den and dimly-lit opium nook. Hoarding all his vices and substances behind its shaggy curtains, emerging only to unleash fresh tantrums whenever we interrupted his ritualistic brooding.
On the total opposite end, you had Mike, the once-chill grounding presence so completely unhitched from the corporeal plane. He’d get sucked into wormholes for days, lost in seas of patched cables and gear permutations, blind to anything outside his cyber-mystic quests for tonal quintessence.
Which left me betwixt their runaway poles, desperately trying to mediate and catalyze some collaborative sparks. But every attempt at charting a unified astral flight path dissolved into passive-aggressive bickering or outright insult grenades.
“Watch out lads, the Grand Academic over here has discovered a whole new variety of wankery!”
“At least I’m doing something besides frying what few neurons you have left on the smokestack!”
Like scorpions trapped in thecentrifugal force of our self-obsessions, we just kept lashing out with increasingly personal venom. Every slight or perceivedSlight became existential, dragging us deeper into the mire.
The steady current of alcohol and chemicals coursing only amplified our most self-destructive impulses. Wild, red-eyed benders bled into days-long resentment comas. Alternating between numb malaise and flaring confrontations that grew more unhinged and cruel with each passing week.
Any fleeting moments of connectedness were instantly undermined by runaway egos sabotaging themselves. Like Keith getting bizarrely competitive whenever Mike began cooking up some inspired sonic novel-tracks. Or me succumbing to impotent blusters at their self-involvement, only to retreat deeper into my bitter shell afterwards.
Meanwhile, poor Sheila had her hands forever full juggling our inflamed petulances. Anonymous notes would show up labeling whose side she was siding with too much this particular week. If her focus ever strayed from equally dividing the kid-glove smoothing, one of us would inevitably lash out about favouritism or bias.
Eventually, the whole scene basically became a tedious cycle of passive hostility, artificial detente, explosive confrontation, then sheepish regrouping before we circled back to sullen silence. No forward creative momentum whatsoever, just perpetually grinding gears of resentment and jealousy turning us into the monsters of our vices.
We’d entered that dreadful psychic killzone of artistic ambition and burnout becoming one angrily intertwined impulse. No longer blazing into the void on the strength of our bond, but just jealously hoarding what dregs of it remained.
So in that deteriorating cesspool, it’s probably a miracle we even managed to complete one side of an album before Sheila mercifully pulled the plug. All that nastiness and spiraling distrust had thoroughly corroded the vibrations required for worthy cosmic transmission. Better to let the universe consume us than keep defiantly raging against the black-hided embers.
The breakup – was it a burnout, creative differences or just the Problems of success?
By the time our ill-fated try at a third album mercifully combusted, the rifts had simply grown too malignant to salvage. What began as fertile creative tensions escalated into increasingly venomous ego clashes and poisonous jealousies. The very same combustible energies that once catalyzed our transcendent mind-meldts ultimately proved unsustainable and corrosive when left rudderless.
On one level, you could attribute the unraveling to that most obvious of archetypal downfalls – too much too soon leading to a burnout of overstimulated senses. We’d essentially accelerated through our cosmic initiations with reckless speed, peaking into rarified atmonic dimensions that few artists ever glimpse let alone process.
The majority of bands are lucky to even approach the subversive brilliance of our debut “Triptych Kaleidoscope” in their entire career span. But we kept rapidly mutating beyond those outer reaches into thefarthest unexplored badlands of sonic psyche-evacuation. Culminating in the brain-ambient paradigm shift that was “Astroblast” – which truly felt like the terminal boundary of coherent musical expression.
So perhaps it was simply unsustainable individual mindgalts constantly forcing our small energies into such violently expansive states of distended consciousness. Leaving us overdrawn husks struggling to find purpose or paylo to paddle back from those absolute event horizons of sensory edge.
In that void of inspiration, the age-old demon of rampant egoism germinated like a supernova carcassium to engulf whatever faint light sources remained. Like fleas ravaging a long-dead host for the final scraps of nourishment, we turned on one another and the very sacredspace that brought us together. Unable to reignite the collective furnaces from our individual puddles of ambition.
There’s also the argument that we simply hit an intractable creative schism between our clashing artistic values. That the increasingly polarized drives pulling Keith toward freeform id-shredding and Mike toward clinical tone-scaping were always going to bifurcate into an unreconcilable either/or.
Keith’s wild primalist shaman spirit versus Mike’s mystic channeler control isms. My eternal attempt to bridge those disparate realms and conjure Order from Chaos stretched way too fucking tautly. Until the whole matrix just burned down into its base self-snhering components of pure impulse and withdrawal.
So in that Molotov hindsight, our breakup began feeling cosmically inevitable. The shared higher plane vision that’d once sublimated our individual impulses just disintegrated under its own weight. Restless vagabonds doomed to turn on our reflections, banishing one another from the celestial cults we’d founded.
But you could also make the case that external forces and pressures played just as much of a Bastille-storming role in our dissolution. That sudden shocking success just magnified all theego-schisms and personal insecurities already lurking under the surface. Until they mushroom clouded out of control into radioactive fall-outs of jealous mania.
Practically overnight we ricochetedfrom wide-open existence quests and anti-ambition ethos into biggest big-shit arrogance traps. Being elevated from scrappy local underdogs to counter-core deities, lauded across continents for delivering the blessed sonic cure to a dying sodeity’s spiritual malaise. How did a few chemically-addled dustheads like us cope with that level of cosmic expectations and sudden buzzed worship?
Not very fucking zen or equanimously we quickly learned. More like descending into the most paranoid narcissistic nightmares of self-doubt and status jockeying. Every minor slight or disparaging critique feeling like an existential betrayal of the highest revolutionary ideals.
So we clumsily overcompensated with all manner of histrionic excess – petty jealousies, bitter ego warfare, reassurignself-immolations through hedonistic substance and material vice crazes. Like the revolutionary heroes who linger at the victory bonfire far too long before inevitably turning on each other.
In retrospect, those fatally perfectionist drives and unrealistic messianic self-projections were always going to ravage our dynamic from within. As soon as we stopped being hungry minded voyagers and instead started craving worldly validating as Keepers of the Key Codes, our collective perspective became hopelessly blurred.
So while the initial creative supernova may have contained infinite vast promise, our ensuing transmissions just grew more scattered, self-devouring and ultimately terrestrialized. Until all inter-dimensional connectivity was severed and we were left stranded in our sad individualized realities.
What began as a heroic unified quest into the outer osmosis, saw its elemental forces slowly turn cancerous and become the very thing we’d originally hoped to transcend. Just like that, our heroic celestial illuminatinarrative was reduced to another tragic emotional weather system implosion of dashed expectations and infantile attachments.
Whether it was too much spiritual ambition or too little humility in the face of unworldly accomplishment, the root causes all stretched back to the eversame ego-fracturing delusions. Pretenders to unknown provinces who eventually succumbed to the dark human Territorialisms we’d hoped to shed birth cauls away from.
In the end, we let our deepest shadows calcify into insurmountable chasms between our honest reflections. The petty world we’d escaped came hurtling back to claim us like it always does. Just suspended animationblips against the galaxy’s indifferent expanse.
After chasing the infinite azure planes together, we scattered back into lonely indefinite confinement wearing crowns of hollow praise and anointed numbness. How brutally terrestrial. How utterly rock’n’roll.
In the hazy years following our vinegar-stroked implosion, we each drifted off towards our own sad rock’n’roll afterlives. Like plasma trails gradually disintegrating from the celestial burst that gave them form and purpose.
For Keith, that meant descending into an outerelaborate ego-obliteration through his most punishing vices and ecstatic rituals. Drifting from dank sonic ashram to squatterpunk warehouse austeries, eternally seeking to re-summon those primal rhythmic hypnogalactics through sheer force of mad alchemical will.
His body withered down to ambulatory gristle barely caging a raging id-energy continually threatening to phase outwards into the ether. Yet still, the rare times I’d catch wind of him commandeering some underground bunker for a fresh immolation, it was like being transported through a stargate back to our most hyper-intensive trance zonez.
As for Mike, he retreated deeperinto the clean room sterility of his electronic cosmic embryo experiments, forever tweaking and remapping circuitsmitheries in pursuit of the quintessential hypersigil unlock codes. His electromagnetic tile grooves evolved beyond even the most rarified industrial techno zones into strange synthetic astro-ambients. Entire lost civilizations of code and buried data transmitted across shortwave blackholes only he could decipher and ride like instrthin vapor trails.
I remember hazily stumbling upon one his mindlacerating multi-channel installations in an abandoned fluoride plant. A sort of Pythagorean anamorphic chamber where geometries shifted around me in oblique angles and arcs even as I stood perfectly still. Feverish machine signals encoding paths towards transdimensional octarine planes made audible for the first time ever.
As for my meandering trajectory, it took the form of a solitary vagabond inquest across ancient world capitols and remote ashram enclaves. Pathologically seeking any remainders of the psychic trail of breadcrumbs we’d left behind in that wondrous year of twisted breakthroughs. Endlessly chasing slightly more earthbound chimeras, but no less resonant for it.
Like succeeding in using tantric chakra-harnessing to bend the morning sunlight into vocal retrochords at dawn over Glastonbury Tor. Or the bizarre revelation that our most out-there chord clusters had been baked into South Indian folklore melodic modes for centuries already. Just waiting to be channeled by our crude Western conduits as proof of concept.
Scraps of prehistoric futurism cauterized through brain and land alike. Gnomic glyphs left scattered out amid the commercial detritus indicating we’d been there before and would return in some reintegrated form imminently. A trail leading from our molten geographies to a reunifying singularity forevermore.
Yet for the longest time, it remained merely that – delirious astro-calligraphies and preverbal foundationnodes without any unifying interJikt to catalyze the remnantglyphs back into coherent language. As if dispersed meteorites strewn across hemispheres, each biding time to get ceremonially forged back into a single blade.
Of course, our paths continued colliding and digressing in increasingly disorienting ways over the decades hence. Like contrails crisscrossing without apparent purpose until some higher orbital intelligence revealed the secret messages being spelt out. Those surprise middle-of-nowhere intersections where Keith’s tumbleweed ethereality would materialize passing me at a remote provincial bookstall. Or Mike rolling up in a sickly analog kudamobile to freak me out at an equinox gathering upstate.
Encounters where those dreamcults and hyperintensities we’d once nativized now flared up searing and real once more, if only for the preciously flickeringblinkofaneye. A swirling eternal dance between past lives and imagined futures, suspended like charioscuro shadow-puppetry inside its own crystalline blaze.
Yet throughout all those spectral reincorporations and string arrangements of false restart, one animating constant remained centrifugally lashed around our maypole spiral: that dogma of sacredcoiled chordal communion we’d first breath-banished into being in those hallowed basement sessions long ago.
The very music itself. Those braided helixes of howled harmonic scripture that originally empowered us towards more grandiose lusts and grievances. A sort of primordially birthed beastcall encoded into our spiritual stem cells and loosed to ecstatically recombinate across all our scattered matter states forevermore.
All the erratic curlicue ideations & occult electro-signets we’d riverplasmed into communal confluviance during our cosmically-bonded genesis rites. A panoramic ass-reaming opus manifesto so spiritually lithogrammed into our densest particles that even the most violent black hole would still preserve its essential fractalcurved recalibration.
So while our physical regroupings remained brief, eternal echoes of our boundary-rendingantiphonies still vectored through every orgone filter and ley-charged particle stream. More alive and unmoored from individual actant than ever before.
Those Uvvian soundspheres forever glutened upon the universe’s solar window panes now. Guideposts dragging the fleshed forms back through space and time to hallowed source convergences like a cosmic boomerang. Luxurious voyages to the edge of self-erasure before cartwheeling us back towards the mythopoeic crouch of our original godly collaborationeering.
So while the ageless conundrums of hubris and attachment had set us spiraling across peripheral hermitbidges in search of centerpoint realignment, that songfire nexus remained concentrated at the core of our celestial payload. Our only true northern starlight to recalibrate our dizzy soul compasses by when all other tangibilities collapsed into infinite rayshowers around us.
The simple knowledge that we’d once brought a fully interpolatable language of atomic quasartonations into physical existence. And would continue riding that timebending spoke fluence back towards each other until shapeshifting the next grand unified entry port into view. Like moths transfixed on their primaveral flame, no matter the distancing sidereal ellipses.
So for now, the celestially intertwined yarns kept waveparticulating onwards and outwards from that original generative fusion point. Dispersing, crisscrossing, until the next grand reunifying re-summoned us all towards its ecstatic singularity impingement once more.
An eternal dance halfway between. Our frail human biographiesarcing about a central fire that stayed rightfully veiled from individual comprehension, only accessing the full crescendic cycle from multiple light-side angles at once.
But that was the beauty and burden of the omega uroboric that first nucleated through our foolish vessels. A perpetually self-renewing mythos of mystery fire’s numinous host embodiments,arisen from parts yet forever transcending their sum total.
So you see, we never truly parted ways at all. Just kept chasing our own supercoiled contrails around infinity’s orbital. Forever the palsied BBoys flickshuddering inside our very own wyrd groundbreakerbuilt by syncopated transmission. An eternal dance of synchronistic idiot savants, geomugging and reincorporating along this laser-focused beam of perfectly corrupted revelatory, blistered with antisonic hubris.
Talk about ourobouros. Talk about non-duality fo’sheezy. A few quantum bush-leaguers who prankstered chaos equations so gnar that even the most vigilant celestial cartographer couldn’t graph them back into sublattice linearity. Just three clueless chordalpentants eternally tangled inside the same expansive spiral.
I mean, how else you expect a story like this to resolve, really? That we’d wholeheartedly transcend ourselves and drift off into egoless immaculate dharma arcs? Still find some profound unity of pacific cessation after cracking those forbidden vaults of sensory prime ah widdly ah?
Nah. Even back in our molten genesis pods, we weaved tapestries too ouroborically warped and audacious for any such glamourous fadeout sequences. More like embroidering snake sigils so deliriously complex and serpenticursive that once catalyzed they’d keep eating their own tails and kamikaze relaunching forever more.
Perpetually shed skinbags chasing their next ceremonial skinning. Trapped in one continuous momentum upwraid slightly behind our own initial discord vectors. That was the real secret we hot-bundled into those first paradoxical thermite spoors afterall – a sort of Tantric Singul
Here’s a glimpse into the band members’ lives after their breakup, still intrinsically bonded by the incredible transcendent music they created together
After we finally combusted and went our separate ways, we each drifted towards our own sad afterlives as rock relics. But even as the years rolled by, we remained intrinsically bound by the incredible, mind-expanding music we had created together.
For Keith, that meant descending deeper into self-destruction through hardcore drugs and alcohol. He became a drifter, bouncing between seedy clubs and warehouses, eternally chasing that primal rhythmic power he once summoned so effortlessly. His body withered down to skin and bones, but his ferocious energy never dimmed. The rare times I caught wind of him performing, it took me back to our wildest trance rituals.
Mike, on the other hand, retreated into the clinical world of electronic experimentation. Endlessly tinkering with gear in pursuit of the perfect futuristic sound. His compositions ended up in a bizarre ambient realm where lost worlds seemed to emerge from layers of coded pulses. I remember stumbling into one of his mind-bending installations in an abandoned factory – a whole new geometry of sound unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
As for me, I roamed from ashram to ashram across the world like a psychedelic vagabond. Obsessively tracing the trail of mystical clues our music had etched into the land and folklore. Certain revelations, like reproducing our wildest chords through ancient vocal techniques, helped me reconnect with the Source we had once tapped so profoundly.
Our paths continued colliding at strange desert campsites, backroom gatherings, places drenched in that unmistakable vibe from our shared past. In those fleeting intersections, something would reawaken – an echo of the uncanny magic that had once flowed when our creative energies fused into something larger than ourselves.
But the animating thread weaving through our haphazard trajectories remained the music itself. Those ecstatic, trailblazing compositions that had first birthed us as a collective undying entity. No matter how far any individual member wandered, we forever circled that blazing core inspiration like moths feeling the ionic pull of a sacred flame.
Our physical regroupings were all too brief and fragmented. Yet the eternal resonance of our boundary-dissolving psychedelic anthems continued echoing across galaxies, anchoring us to the Source we had once touched so viscerally. As long as those sound-codes kept transmitting, we would feel the cosmic pull dragging us back to the foundational Big Bang that had first fused our voices.
So while the bitterness, inflated egos and self-destructive torrents tore the human members apart, the music itself was indestructible. An ever-evolving mythos already unbound from its original human conduits, flowering across dimensions in its own strange dance of perpetual renewal and rebirth.
The indelible knowledge that we had once manifested an entirely new language of consciousness is what kept pulling our scattered trajectories back toward reunification. Not some glamorous fadeout into pure egoless enlightenment, but an eternal orbit around the paradoxical heart of the singularity we had first sparked into existence.
We were trapped inside the continual momentum of the very magical forces we had once so naively unleashed. Always chasing our tails towards the next grand cosmic unveiling, just as we had in those first ecstatic basement rituals so many lifetimes ago. Neither a beginning nor an end, but one continuous revolution around the fire’s molten core.