2017 was just a great year in music, so I had to span my list over two shows. I actually pulled out 9.5 hours of music in my first run through of favorite albums for this year, and have gotten it down to 4.3 hours of music.  2017 isn’t over yet, and I keep wanting to adding music! The goodness just doesn’t stop!  Because there’s so much good music, for the podcast I’m just going to skip the introductions and just play music.

Listen to VOL 1 here: https://www.mixcloud.com/GlobalPsychedelia/best-of-2017-vol-1/

❤ Please buy the records so these amazing artists can keep making music. ❤

I’ll post my unedited, 9.5 hour list on Friday.

Turn on. Tune in. Freak out!

RMFTM . Subversive III: De Spelende Mens . A Secret Howl In The Ambient Night . Fuzz Club

Henrik Rylander . Från En Obestämd Plats I Rummet . Organ 1 . Höga Nord Rekords

Dead Sea Apes . Sixth Side of the Pentagon . Lo Res . Sky Lantern / Cardinal Fuzz

Sula Bassana . Organ Accumulator . Lichtnündel . Sulatron

Sunwatchers* . Sun Worship . Noise Beers . Drones Against Drones Music

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. . Wandering The Outer Space . Golgotha 13 Chaise Électrique . buh records

Sunn Trio . S/T . Beneath the Sheltering Sun . Sky Lantern Records

Tonstartssbandht . Sorcerer . Breathe . Mexican Summer

The Plastic Crimewave Syndicate . Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom . Future To The Ancients . Eye Vybe Records / Cardinal Fuzz

Kungens Män . Dag & Natt . Morgonrodnad . adansoniarecords.de

Dhidalah . No Water . GRB . Guruguru Brain

Culto al Qondor . Templos . Amenecer en Tres Cruces . Necio Records

Klaus Morlock . Penumbra . Arrival . S/R

100% of all voluntary payments will be donated to S.A.F.E., an animal rescue charity here in Los Angeles. S.A.F.E. rescues animals who are sick, and saves them from being euthanized by placing them with loving families. You can find out more about S.A.F.E. by clicking the link:
www.safeanimalrescue.com
In April 1974, 17-year-old Londoner Molly Kingston disappeared. Three years later, her family received a letter, apparently written by Molly, stating that she had “attained the highest state of spiritual bliss”, and that her “dreams” had been “harvested” by a “celestial organization” called Penumbra. The letter went on to claim that Molly, and her “spirit twin” Ladybird had acquired the long-sought-after ability to infiltrate the dreams of those whose dreams are “ripe for harvest”.
Over the next two weeks, six young women from in and around Salisbury, Wiltshire, disappeared. All six, who were apparently strangers to each other, left identical letters revealing that Molly and Ladybird had “come for” them, and that they “joyfully” had “surrendered” to the “bliss that is Penumbra”. Neither Molly, nor any of the young women, were ever seen again.

This album is a musical interpretation of what happened in April 1974, after Molly Kingston disappeared.

Headroom . Head in the Clouds . Flower of Light . Trouble In Mind

The Telescopes . Stone Tape . Dead Inside . Sly Vinyl

GABBI . Gabbi EP . Animal . #Nº (numeralnumero)/ cargocollective

Suzuki Junzo . Shizuka Na Heya De Ashioto Wa . Shizuka Na Heya De Ashioto Wa . Utech Records

20 Guilders . 2 . 焚曲 // Song Burning . Nod & Smile Records

*also, buy the new Sunwatchers album.

SUNWATCHERS STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE DISPOSSESSED, IMPOVERISHED AND EMBATTLED PEOPLE OF THE WORLD

Albert Ayler — precious spiritual and sonic touchstone of ours to the degree that we named our band after one of his weirder totems — proclaimed it famously, affirmatively and with well-earned intelligence: MUSIC IS THE HEALING FORCE OF THE UNIVERSE. We believe this and preach this and do what we can to live this, but we understand that, now, amid our wrongheaded fascist tailspin, direct action is needed.

We are musicians, and we will leave political specifics to those more qualified than we are. All the time and energy and passion we can muster we dedicate to writing, performing, recording and releasing music: instrumental music, released from the tyranny of semantics into the freedom and hopefulness of universality-of-connection. We thusly realize the need to become overt about our own intentions and our own mores; without the ease and accessibility of direct language, the onus is on us to express our principles in other ways. This is the reason we have chosen for our album cover the beautiful embroidery of our long-held Sunwatchers Mission Statement, included in lesser visual terms in every SW release thus far. This stunning version was made by our dear friend Catherine Wheeler, a surprise end-of-tour gift created as she traveled across Africa by bus. We couldn’t be more proud of it as a totem, an art object, and an album cover; it is significant in a multitude of ways.

We have the unbelievable luck of playing with many amazing collaborators in NYC and beyond, but the core of our group — Peter Kerlin, Jim McHugh, Jason Robira and Jeff Tobias — are white males, American-born. It is an unassailable and deeply maddening fact that white males in this world are afforded a million times more bandwidth and infinitely more resources for communication and mobility than any other ethnic or gender group. Our comrades at Trouble In Mind did not choose to release our record because of this; but, as individuals, we have been emboldened since birth to speak out for what we desire, what we believe in, to express directly our goals. That others are discouraged, overtly and covertly, and are very often jailed, assaulted and murdered is a tragedy beyond measure. However, this is truth, and we view it as our responsibility to use our ill-gotten bully pulpit to espouse equality for the dispossessed and an end to our current exploitative ways of being. Unavoidably, this graphic iteration will be seen as seditious by the mainstream(if it is noticed at all; more punk-battered free-improv on FOX NEWS could start some sort of healing process, tho), and, perhaps, it will be judged as hypocritical by some of our peers in the underground music community — as a mere marketing-scheme, or empty sloganeering in the name of radical-chic. We promise you, it is as genuine as it can be. At our deepest core we desire that our efforts aid in the annihilation of state-supported inequality and the concept and importance of Whiteness altogether.

We are leftists; across the spectrum, yes — abolitionist syndicalist; democratic socialist; antiviolent-resistance advocate; horrified father with a sad eye for his child to the imperiled future — but leftists, all, and we feel that human existence is endangered by capitalism and its inexorably violent, exploitative and objectively harrowing means, methods and endgames. We have sensed this danger since well before the idiot fascistTrump and his confederacy of gangster anarcho-capitalists and racist-activists assumed control and unfurled their sloppy and lethal intent across the governance of the First World. We felt this before racist groups — paramilitary foot-soldiers of Capitalism, knowingly or unawares — were emboldened by our clown-mouthed president to make their violently bigoted intentionality overt and head-breaking as opposed to sublimated, coiled and altogether dominant, nonetheless. We understood this through years past, as our regime— under whatever equivocating leader our electorate supported — upheld foreign dictators and brigands that aided in our own government-for-profit-by-murder; as munitions corporations propagated endless and horrible war by keeping subservient lawmakers in power via their deep-pocketed lobbies; as police militarized their ranks with surplus weaponry and combat armor — justified ironically and nefariously as a “taxpayer money-saving plan” — and initiated assassinations of people of color and terrorized grassroots resistance movements. Capitalism is endangering humanity, and we must end it if we are to survive; this knowledge has devastated us and guided us for years.

Now, things are critical: sabres are rattling, millions of people are dying needlessly in the name of capital, and the injuries and injustices accrue too quickly to inventory. We are on the precipice of our precarious worldwide disaster merging into full-blown “you will not be counting the dead, you will be counting the living”* catastrophe.

As with our first album on Castle Face, we will be donating sales proceeds of this LP to prison abolitionist organizations. Money from the debut went to the Human Rights Coalition, a direct-advocacy group for inmates based in Philadelphia. This summer past, via our activist-umbrella organization Music Against Mass Incarceration, we organized a day-long festival benefiting JustLeadershipUSA and the Close Rikers Campaign; their input and participation was cogent and inspired, their expertise immensely valuable, and the day was edifying and strengthening for our community of progressives here in Brooklyn. Donations from this LP will go to JLUSA, as well. Again: it is on us to increase our Money/Mouth Ratio in these dire times.

Enough of this. We hope you dig the sounds; we worked really hard on them. It also needs to be said that we nearly named this record “LET’S HAVE SOME FUN!!!” because, yeh, we like that too. But, as our radical scuzz-punk forbears No Trend once declared in seething voices indignant, drug-strangled and wholly pubescent: IF YOU STAND FOR NOTHING YOU’LL FALL FOR ANYTHING!

LOVE AND RESPECT — JMM, JDT, JLR, PNK

*A chilling, characteristic quote to embattled Sarajevens by Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic, proclaimed at the upswing of the Milosevic-led ethnic cleansing of the former Yugoslavia. There are many more details about these atrocities that ring true today, which is absolutely horrifying, to say the least.