The Garden Mix

In the past, I waited until my books “Retreat” and “The ‘S’ Word” came out before pulling together complimentary mixes.

However, this time, with “The Garden” my book about the visionary growers and farmers of the counterculture, I am running the mix beforehand as it were to set the mood. I’m also marking the moment today when this book that the team at Repeater and I have been toiling over for years has finally gone to print.

Both “Retreat” and “The Garden” have large discographies in the back. This forms part of my mission to reconnect people’s interest in this music with the ideas to which it was originally conjoined. These ideas were what gave it its power.

Music has become largely divorced from other contexts – to the extent that it’s become part perfume – part wallpaper – a decorative filigree draped over business-as-usual. If you wonder why some contemporary music (let’s face it, a lot of contemporary music) sounds a bit bland and empty – it’s not to do with the format, or the bit rate, or the way it was recorded… The hot music of the past, of the counterculture and other eras, was genuinely communicating something.

Mix is here and below.

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The Move: I Can Hear the Grass Grow
An extremely early salvo of hippie plant consciousness released in March 1967 – critical mass not reached until 1969. Roy Wood here makes the connection between taking LSD as prescribed in rural settings, and from thence getting in touch with mother nature on a more cosmic level.

The Grateful Dead: St. Stephen
The Dead denied that this was named after the home-grown spiritual guru Stephen Gaskin of Haight-Ashbury’s then-exploding Monday Night Club. However, I believe this is largely owing to the firm wanting to put some distance between their business and Gaskin’s. Subsequently, Gaskin was the leader at Tennessee mega-commune, “The Farm.”

The Beatles: Mother Nature’s Son
McCartney was The Beatle most in touch with the soil. In “Mother Nature’s Son” he stakes that claim himself. Elsewhere, in Paul’s “Get Back” Jojo leaves his home in Tucson, Arizona “for some California grass” (here, I think, implying San Francisco and marijuana, not the lush countryside). McCartney advises him to go back home to the country, like agricultural philosopher Wendell Berry did, returning from California to Kentucky.

The Incredible String Band: The Half-Remarkable Question
This track was mentioned to me in an interview by the legendary dairy farmer and sustainability guru Patrick Holden. The ISB themselves had strong rural connections, retreating as they did to Temple Cottage in Balmore, in the countryside north of Glasgow. There they worked on the songs on 5000 Spirits (1967) and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968). But this from their underrated “Wee Tam” LP.

Vashti Bunyan: Window Over the Bay
Bunyan dreamt of having a flock of white sheep, a dreamy-eyed cow, and a cockerel to raise her at dawn. Lorra livestock.

Ron Geesin: Breathe
Roger Waters, accompanying his friend Ron Geesin, laments that “Something is killing the land before your eyes.”

Trees: The Garden of Jane Delawney
UK folk rock from 1970 with a psychedelic edge.

Alicia Bay Laurel: Planting Day Ceremony
Here Alicia was joined by Ramón Sender Barayón, co-founder with Morton Subotnik of the San Francisco Tape Center and her fellow communard at Ahimsa ranch, to craft this lovely hymn to plants.

Joni Mitchell: Woodstock
Like her “Big Yellow Taxi”, “Woodstock” is positively bursting at the seams with luminous and eternally durable imagery. The line, “And we’ve got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden” gives my book its title. But as hippie legend, and Biochar pioneer Craig Sams pointed out to me, Mitchell also sings, “We are stardust/ Billion-year-old carbon.” Let’s not neglect to mention the track’s brooding, portentous sonics: Mitchell’s plaintive vocals soaring high above her Fender Rhodes like an eagle above a smoking, ravaged landscape.

Neil Young: After the Gold Rush
Famous for the line, “Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s.” Neil has been farming since he bought Broken Arrow Ranch in 1971, where he lived until 2014. He’s been a stalwart supporter of the Farm Aid music festival.

Jackson Browne: Before the Deluge
“Before the Deluge”, with its apocalyptic mood, was from Browne’s 1974 LP “Late for the Sky”. It was picked up by a generation of back-to-the-landers.

Bob Martin: Midwest Farm Disaster
The title track from Martin’s jewel of an LP. Right at the country edge of rock, it was recorded at the same Nashville studio Dylan used. Heartbreakingly documenting the failure of small farms in the Midwest.

John Cale: Hanky Panky Nohow
“The cows that agriculture won’t allow.” Never mind the bullocks.

The Groundhogs: Garden
The garden chokes the house, however Tony McPhee insists, “I’m not going to cut a single blade of grass / My garden will look just like the distant past / Before the days of agricultural land.” Truly rewilded.

Dando Shaft: Rain
Martin Jenkins’ mandolin here like dancing raindrops.

Lal and Mike Waterson: Child Among the Weeds
Devastating and mysterious UK folk rock from this seemingly cursed LP.

Dave and Toni Arthur: The Barley Grain for Me
“The farmer came with a big plough and ploughed me under the sod.”

Paul & Linda McCartney: Heart of the Country
McCartney provides a homely update to his rural narrative.

These Trails: Garden Botanum
Organic Hawaiian psychedelia.

Mort Garson: Plantasia
Exotic synthesised precursor to Stevie Wonder’s soundtrack to “The Secret Life of Plants.”

Dr. Alimantado: Just the Other Day
The good Dr. says that no one wants to be a farmer but advises: “So, be wise there, for you sons an’ daughters of earth / An’ know dat you got to go to the soil to toil, as I would say / ‘Cause, if you no reap, you cyaan not eat.”

Julie Anne: The Gardener
AKA Judy Mowatt, was one of Bob Marley’s I-Threes, and later singer of the roots classic “Black Woman.” “The Gardener” deftly weaves the strands of the hippie, the spiritual, and feminine power into an underappreciated ecological anthem.

R.E.M.: Gardening at Night
This remains my favourite R.E.M. song – saying a lot for a band I loved right up to “Document” (1987) – first they jangled and then they choogled. The original inspiration for “Gardening at Night” was a nocturnal piss-stop – a car’s drunken passengers bundle out into the night air to urinate by the side of the road. Urine, of course, being high in nitrogen is great for stimulating plant growth.

Scott Walker: Farmer in the City
You can take the boy out of the country…

Smog: Let’s Move to the Country
There’s a perhaps unintentional overtone with the motif of moving to the country to retire, “When my travels are through.” It is as though one were taking a step closer to becoming the humus (neither ashes nor dust, please!) that should be our rightful mortal destiny.

Charles Ives: Thoreau
The fourth movement in Ives’ lovely Piano Sonata No. 2, or “Concord Sonata”. The first movement dedicated to Ralph Waldo Emerson also of the same small Massachusetts town where more historic events took place than seems strictly feasible.

Gurdjieff: Kurd Shepherd Dance
The great guru’s memories of rural Armenian folk music patiently notated by his shishya Thomas De Hartmann. For fans of Popol Vuh’s “Hosianna Mantra.”

RFK Jr

There’s been a lot of support for RFK Jr from unusual quarters in recent weeks. A number of my acquaintances have expressed hopes for his potential role as director of the Department of Health and Human Services in the otherwise dreaded Trump administration.

RFK Jr is Democratic Party royalty. He’s the nephew of assassinated president John F. Kennedy, and son of the assassinated senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. He ran an independent campaign for president, which was successful in swing states like Michigan but, to the disgust of his family, threw his weight behind Donald Trump. And he has bad form for choosing friends in the past too, hanging out with, at various times, Harvey Weinstein, OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Cosby.

RFK Jr, to his chagrin, is mainly known as a COVID vaccine denier. He does temper this position when he’s scrutinised in public forums, claiming that he just wants to see proper trials for vaccines, but in more intimate surroundings it seems to be a different story. His involvement in a measles’ outbreak in Samoa LOOKS pretty bad.

I don’t have a problem with vaccines. I’ve travelled a lot in the developing world – and you get very blasé about taking them. I took three vaccinations for COVID. I did it out of social responsibility to protect vulnerable people in my household and community, but also (lol) so I could leave the UK on holiday. It didn’t do me any good because I subsequently tested positive for COVID twice. The first time I caught the virus, it was very bad. I was the most ill I have ever been. Whether I should or shouldn’t have taken the vaccine is immaterial to me. It didn’t really make any difference either way – but it was worth doing out of esprit de corps. This is nothing more than my personal opinion, but I don’t think vaccines, which have done modern societies an immeasurable service, pose significant risks.

What does pose significant risks to health? Diet. And diet, especially with regard to nutrition, connects us to farming, because biologically-grown food is more nutritious and untainted by dangerous chemicals. And this is where it gets complicated because, even if you disagree with RFK Jr’s position on vaccines, he is simultaneously a staunch opponent of processed foods. Here, in a video with 4.3 million views, he is railing against food additives, singling out Tartrazine. Why on earth are food additives like this still allowed?

The platform he shares with Trump is deregulation: Trump for corrupt ends and to give tax breaks to the richest (speciously) in the name of growth; RFK Jr to support small businesses crushed by expensive bureaucracy. However, it’s ironic that the removal of additives from food is largely going to be one requiring… yup, that’s right… regulation. Indeed, he praises the previous Trump administration for making some additives illegal where the Democrats did nothing.

Even firebrand of the left, senator for Vermont (like being the MP for Brighton), Bernie Sanders has recently found common ground with RFK Jr in a shared focus upon obesity and diabetes. Overlooking processed meat and the absence of micronutrients in chemically-grown food, the true enemy, however, is not additives but something far simpler: sugar. Good luck regulating (or deregulating?) that! It’s closer to a society-wide addiction, a social problem like alcoholism, than anything to do with government.

As well as his interesting approach to foods, RFK Jr also has an impressive grasp of the arguments around organic farming. This is on display in this interview he undertakes with legendary progressive farmer Joel Salatin, the star of Michael Pollen’s landmark book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Salatin, a Republican, talks passionately about his ability to be able to compete with much larger organisations and to be able to leverage technology to reach markets which have been stifled by their local administrations. It is a strategy right out of the small-state play book.

I’ve got to admit that on the back of research I’ve been doing for the past three years, what RFK hints at sounds potentially very interesting. The problem with agriculture in the US and UK is that government subsidies, bolstered by the claim that food security is only possible under the aegis of chemical agriculture, have pumped money into supporting industrial farming. Truthfully, large farms do NOT farm their lands for profit, they farm the government for subsidies. A whole toxic architecture is held in place by these subsidies. This is the principal reason that organic food seems expensive. Yes, their removal would be cataclysmic if it happened quickly. We’ve come so far from the small-farm, local food model, that it’s almost inconceivable that we could turn the clock back. But the current status quo is still a nightmare on many fronts, not least ecologically.

Besides this call for a reduction in state regulation, RFK’s position feels like it ought to be a position taken by a Democrat – and his family background in the blue camp makes sense. However, equally, there is plenty of libertarian anarchism inherent in the idea of growing organic food. The fundamental principle is, after all, that a healthy undisturbed soil creates a healthy plant. That can be construed, as in Sir Albert Howard’s model of the forest manuring itself, or Masanobu Fukuoka’s call for no tillage, as a call for no intervention – a classic right-wing trope. Of course, this ignores the idea and role of composting – which might be equated to lavish state intervention.

Organic cranks have always taken pride in not taking medicines or stimulants, and historically there have been minority elements within the organic movement that have been on the right. Knowing the history, I wouldn’t over emphasise this especially, but it’s a factor.

The libertarian aspect of these ideas have already influenced fringe ecologists such as the beautiful Artist as Family group. This fascinating, radical self-sufficiency collective from Australia who I find entirely enchanting, also, like RFK Jr, adopted an anti-vax position. No, I don’t necessarily agree with them, but unlike so many commentators I’m not fearful of it, and I appreciate the coherency of their logic.

So what’s going to happen as this Trump/RFK Jr saga unfolds? As I understand it, he’s yet to actually secure the nomination. Like the woebegone Pete Hegseth, he might even now fall by the wayside. And if he gets the job, will Trump actually keep him in the role? I can’t see that working. RFK Jr is going to infuriate too many rich and powerful people who the Donald will want to ingratiate. But maybe, just maybe, RFK Jr will hang in there and will have a positive effect! Who would have thought there might be a silver-lining in this dark cloud?

Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of all Possibilities

 

Selling my records on Discogs has been an intense process. I have parted with 1,866 items since August 7th. There have been ample opportunities for reflection on the past, upon the original activity of finding them in shops, and my historic participation in those musical worlds.

Even though carefully considered, many separations were emotional, and inevitably there were a few regrets. I’ve been fortunate to be able to rectify the handful of mistakes I’ve made. Mostly, though, I’ve been glad that they have gone to new homes.

One unexpected result was that, after not engaging with vinyl for over three years, whether I liked it or not, I was thrust back into its universe. Thinking about it all the time became necessary, not just in practical terms so as to deal with the flow of orders, but to stay on top of my own feelings; to be certain I wasn’t making mistakes.

Having to confront actually parting with this stuff, rather than just having it packed away unconsciously in storage, some attachments became surprisingly pronounced. I didn’t know I felt so strongly about certain items (talismans?) – that I would be compelled to rescue things from the sale inventory at unusual moments (before breakfast) or in odd places (on a walk over Dartmoor). What stood out most was a deep reverence and affection for the dance music of 1989-1996 that I anthologised in mixes. I’m referring to that run through New York House, Chicago House, Detroit Techno, UK Techno, Hardcore, Jungle, Two-Step, and Grime. The demand for these old records is insatiable…

Not, in the strictest terms a dance music record, one of the last items I rescued from the sale was Holden’s “The Inheritors” LP, which I had bought in 2013. I found an old download code for it in the inner sleeve, which actually worked still. From thence I found my way to this his 2023 album. I also read a nice interview with him conducted by John Doran at The Quietus.

Holden is enchanted by this same era of dance music and the possibilities for a new society that it suggested. Indeed, it’s striking how little of the retro-rave music goes deeper than reviving old technology and fetishising old twelve inches. The reason that music glowed, even as it was at the end crushed into tiny clubs and pirate radio stations, was that behind it was a dream.

Nothing can stay the same and mean the same thing, and where “Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities” dazzles is in its invocation of that elevated optimism in a new form. Holden finds a way to channel that spirit in these troubled times.

I really admire Holden not (apparently) being preoccupied by physical formats, as is evident in his sharing of his collection of digital music and his expression in interview of “an idea for a rhizomatic, decentralised, community owned version of Bandcamp”. I bought this album as a 24bit 48khz FLAC. It sounds better than even a CD ever could, and that did give me food for thought.

 

The Art of India

 

I’m not sure exactly how I came across this book, “The Art of India” (1954) by Stella Kramrisch, but I’m pretty certain I read Allen Ginsberg talking about it.

That naturally led me to want to hunt down a copy. But this was at the tail of end research for “Retreat” when I was consciously attempting to dial back my focus on Eastern philosophy. Not an expensive book, really. But I satisfied myself with finding a PDF of it on archive.org.

A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging around in my wife’s study. Disturbing her when she was trying to write something on Le Corbusier, probably… As I was looking through her bookshelf, my eye caught upon the spine of this copy of “The Art of India.”

When my grandfather, the art collector Michael Ingram died, once their family’s house sold, the entire family was invited, almost as though we were vultures, to take whatever we wanted from the building. I was very fond of my grandparents and remember being a bit dazed. I think I took only one item, a small iron frying pan that I remembered my beloved grandmother frying me an egg in.

Thank god, Mrs Ingram had her wits about her. She took the Kramrisch book from his massive library of art books. In its frontispiece there is this review notice from Phaidon, announcing the publication to the reviews department of The Illustrated London News, which was our family business. Unprompted, and without any unseemly pleading from me, she gave me the book.

My grandfather took a deep interest in the culture of the far east. This ran in the family. His uncle was Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram – famous for saving for Japan one of their cherry trees.

By 1926, he was a world authority on Japanese cherries and was asked to address the Cherry Society in Japan on their national tree. It was on this visit that he was shown a painting of a beautiful white cherry, then thought to be extinct in Japan. He recognised it as one he had seen in a moribund state in a Sussex garden, the result of an early introduction from Japan. He had taken cuttings and so was able to re-introduce it to the gardening world as ‘Taihaku’, the name meaning ‘Great White Cherry’. His 1948 book Ornamental Cherries is a standard work.

Wikipedia

His father Herbert Ingram, son of William Ingram, was a collector of Chinese porcelain, whose collection is the heart of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford’s collection.

The arrival of the Sir Herbert Ingram’s generous gift of over 3,000 Chinese and Japanese objects to the Museum of Eastern Art in 1956, then housed in the Indian Institute, more than doubled its original holdings. In 1962, these were moved to become part of the collection of the Ashmolean Museum.

Eastern Art Online

In spite of his father’s generosity, their house was still full of lovely ancient pots, urns, and vases. But my grandfather was also fascinated by Eastern thought. I remember this quote from Confucius pinned up in their kitchen:

“If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character.
If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home.
If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nations.
When there is order in the nations, there will peace in the world.”

Confucius

This is, of course, the same call for “bottom-up” action which bewitched the counterculture as it rebelled against the political activism of the previous generation.

There are two particularly lovely pictures of the Buddha in the book.

And an exquisite “Tree of Life of Knowledge” perfect for this blog.

The Story of a Raised Bed

I had grown a little before November 2021, zinnias from seed and dahlias from bulbs in 2020, but never vegetables or indeed anything with serious intent.

It was a combination of two things, reading Theodore Roszak’s collection of essays “Ecopsychology” (1995) in August 2021, and watching an interview with Eliot Coleman in October 2021, that truly set me on this path. The latter providing the lightning bolt moment.

Immediately before this I had been reading Alfred Adler’s majestic “Understanding Human Nature” (1927), at the tail end of my research after “Retreat” , which carried on quite a long time after the end of that book’s publication in 2020. Indeed, I must have finished “Retreat” in mid 2019 and there I was still working through, not even yet fully integrating, the ideas I had unearthed in that book.

So, my journey into gardening had little to do with lockdown, as it did for many people. However, the same etheric conditions that we all experienced in lockdown, the ones which gave rise to other phenomenon like the huge growth in the amount of dreaming recorded in western populations, and the emergence of racial trauma out from the unconscious onto the social canvas, tracked in parallel my own etheric research into the dematerialised highs of LSD and meditation against the backdrop of the counterculture, and that generation’s subsequent post-countercultural integrated fascination with organic farming.

The immediate upshot was that I was keen to get involved somehow in growing food. I’m yet to totally work out how to make that transition in a meaningful way. It is, after all, a massive leap for a music-obsessed animator working in the centre of a city to undertake. A more etheric, less integrated existence it would be hard to devise, perhaps a coder working on a space station would be able to trump me? In consequence, the journey back to earth is harder to make.

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Working on my psyche art project, I got in the habit of picking up pieces of wood in the street. Some time in November 2021 I found two huge beautiful huge planks of wood in this skip on Pear Tree Street round the corner from where I live, and decided that they would make the basis of an excellent raised bed.

I cut them to size outside in the street, soaked them in linseed oil to protect them from the weather, and assembled them with beautiful rust-proof, stainless steel screws. The frame looked great already.

Because it was going to be resting on a slate roof, with a base level of large stones beneath the soil, I left a centimetre gap along the bottom to help with drainage. I didn’t want it filling up like a swimming pool and busting through the roof. Accordingly, I rested it straddled on top of a supporting wall which runs beneath the surface.

I designed the bed with a central column, so I could suspend mesh across it. The mesh to protect against insects, slugs, and snails. This worked very well, but was a faff to remove every time. Eventually, when it became clear that the black cat wanted to scramble over the top of it, I built a bamboo frame to rest upon the columns.

I bought a number of bags of a mixture of topsoil and compost. This is where I betrayed my ignorance, indeed none other than Charles Dowding rolled his eyes when I revealed to him that I had been convinced by a garden supplier that it was necessary to have a mix of the two. Compost on its own would have been superior. I mixed a huge bag of perlite in with this – both to lighten the mixture and allow it to drain better. I don’t really like perlite, an industrial product, with the benefit of hindsight biochar would have been better, if more expensive.

And so it was for nearly three years.

Perhaps you’ve seen the pictures I’ve posted of all the things I grew here over the past three years? Carrots, Cabbage, Spinach, Pumpkin, Lettuce, Cavalo Nero, Rocket, and Beetroot. More besides.

But this year it had to come to an end.

I got sick of the rigmarole of removing and replacing the netting. I’m figuring that a small greenhouse, or a cold frame would be more interactive, that I might have more fun with something like that if we stay put.

Also, I needed to tidy up the roof garden because we’ve put the house on the market and, well, it looked too bloody eccentric.

So everything got harvested.

And the whole thing was dismantled. I was surprised how horrible and clay-like the first soil I used was. It came off in large clods. Also, how meagre was the inch-thick topsoil which I had created with fine mulches and biochar. This I bagged up and kept. There was no digging ever on this patch, and I would have liked to have seen more evidence of soil structure. Maybe that’s precisely what I had? Sure, it was productive…

And this is how the space looks now. Like a regular bourgeois roof terrace.

I’ve got to work out the big picture. Sure, I’m dismantling this tiny part of the dream – but I’m working on a much larger and transformative scale these days. Times are very hard in consequence, but that’s to be expected.

More news soon. Stay tuned veggies.