Volcanic Tongue: Underground Music Mailorder & Shop

	Poetry Out Loud Number Eight Out Loud Productions #8 LP £12.99 1974. A solo Harlemans set with an appearance from Bernard Heidsieck. Tracks: WARM UP (2:22) The Harlemans, NEW YORK (3:03) Bernard Heidsieck and Francoise Janicot with the Harlemans, EVERYWHERE (2:52) The Harlemans, DRAW A CIRCLE (3:01) The Harlemans, YOU (1:19) The Harlemans, TIGER (4:37) The Harlemans, SHAMAN (4:27) The Harlemans, SOMEWHERE (1:50) The Harlemans, TAMBOURINE (3:21) The Harlemans, SNOWSONG (2:10) The Harlemans, PUSH ON (2:33) The Harlemans, FOR KLYD AND LINDA (3:10) The Harlemans. Tiger is taken from a dream by Jerome C. Romy Pollonto.
	Poetry Out Loud Number Nine Out Loud Productions #9 LP £12.99 1975. Another solo set from the Harlemans. Notes by Robert Palmer (Rolling Stone/Downbeat et al): “With this ninth volume of their “magazine” of oral poetry, the Harlemans penetrate more deeply into the resonances of speaking, chanting, and singing voices, and into themselves. Connections with the “ritual of the irrational,” the cultivation of states of disassociation or trance. were present in their earlier work, but here, in the sound pieces “Trance,” “Fear For My Body,” and “I Give My Body To The Drum,” they are explicit. Using the narrow melodic range, chant-like insistence, drum and metallophone accompaniment, and out-of-body flight images so central to shamanist tradition, the Harlemans confront a “new” use of oral poetry which is, of course, an old use also. The recitation of written texts of written texts – the “modern” way – has been superseded by the creation of poetry in sound and, in these new compositions, by the deliberate use of some of the effects tape makes possible with the idea of affecting the listener quite directly. All poetry, all art in fact, aims at a similar ordering of “thought, feeling, and apparent sensory impressions” (in the words of William S. Burroughs), but certain music, dance and other art attempts to actually trigger and control various psychological experiences. The ritual of the Central Asian shaman is an example. It is the shaman's task to pass into a trance state and report back to his community of the spirit world. In order to achieve his altered state of consciousness he resorts primarily to various organized sounds. He chant/sings, using a restricted melodic range in a repetitive pattern, a process which helps create a trance state because of the nature of hearing. The basilar membrane, a structure in the inner ear where soundwave vibrations are translated into neural impulses, is pitch sensitive and pitch discriminatory. That is, various areas of the membrane respond to various specific pitches by sending electrical “charges” along specific nerve pathways to the brain. When these areas of the membrane are “massaged” regularly and in sequence, as in strictly modal music or in much chant, the repetition sets up a hypnotic pattern of impulses. The shaman accompanies his voice with a drum and some sort of metal instrument, both of which produce the kind of sound physicists refer to as “steep fronted,” that is a “noise” sound with tightly packed overtones. In addition, drum sounds have an extremely rapid decay time. Such sounds, with their welter of enharmonic pitches, stimulate most of the surface of the basilar membrane, thus ensuring the transmission of as many simultaneous neural impulses as possible to as much of the brain as possible. And the neurons are able to rest between firings because of the rapid decay time of the sounds, thus insuring continuing peak effects for the sound and allowing changed or other sung material to periodically resume its own hypnotic pattern. In other words, the shaman's basic equipment – voice, drum, rattle – is actually a sophisticated tool for self-induced hypnosis, or trance. This self-programmed, inner-directed cultivation of dissociation, which is at the heart of magico-religious traditions the world over, is contrasted on the present recording with involuntary disassociation from each other and from the wellsprings of their own thought and actions. The first kind, practiced as a rite, puts one in touch with worlds within. The second, accepted by many as the price of living, is the source of much unhappiness and pain. Thus the narrator in “Take A Sip Of Me” casts herself in the extreme role of a disembodied cup of coffee in order to reach out to another person: “I won't burn you,” she is forced to add to her invitation. Thus the quintessential evocation of mortal fear, “Fear For My Body,” which in its more morbid manifestations bespeaks a dissociation bordering on the pathological. “I Forgot Your Name” is a somewhat lighter treatment of disassociation; as a vision of the widening gulf between the sexes it is a little reminiscent of a Rolling Stones put-down song, with echoes of Elvis in the delivery. The musical comparisons are apt ones, because with this album the Harlemans move closer to music, just as music is moving closer to the inflections of the voice. In “Curing,” which Peter proposed as an antidote to the malady of separation, Patricia's opening whines sound like an electronic synthesizer, until one recalls that the synthesizer was originally designed to give computers a “voice” and is thus an imitation of the Real Thing. And while “Trance” has the proscribed melodic vocabulary of the chant, “I Give My Body To The Drum” makes use of that most musical of devices, the well-timed modulation. But this use of music, and again it is a very old one, has to do with the creation of magical effects for the purpose of achieving magical results. In his The Wellsprings of Music Curt Sachs wrote that “Everything that sounds, be it in the cruder form of frightening noise or the organised patterns of music, bears the brunt of mankind's eternal strife against the hostile forces that threaten his life and welfare; and, just as well, nothing better than sound can summon the powers of luck and prosperity . . . Even language stresses unity of singing and magics as the Latin word incantation, ‘magic formula,' derived from cantare, and the English charm, from carmen. Whenever singing is an act of ecstasy and depersonalization, it moves away from ordinary human expression. The voice is often remote from being as ‘natural' as we believe our own execution to be. It is coloured by pulsating, yodelling, ventriloquizing, or bleating. One screams, yells, squeaks, mumbles, and nasals.” Sachs sentences on the origins of music are strikingly descriptive of what the Harlemans are up to They've been pioneering in this area of speech / music / magic with each successive album, and with # 9 they've done it again.”
	Poetry Out Loud Number Ten Out Loud Productions #10 LP £12.99 1977. Final volume of this incredible set, very affecting. Trio recordings by the Harlemans with Klyd Watkins and one solo Peter Harleman invocation. Cover by Patricia Harleman, produced by Klyd Watkins and Peter Harleman. Tracks: LET'S GO HEAR THE HOLY ROLLERS SING (3:48) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, BAD MAN (1:59) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, WILDERNESS (4:49) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, I CAN SING FALSETTO (3:05) Peter Harleman, MAYBE (4:09) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, YOUR LOVE IS A WEAPON (AFTER A THEME FROM HOWLING WOLF) ((1:29) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, LET'S LET THE WORLD GO DOWN (2:41) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins, GOING BELOW (12:25) The Harlemans with Klyd Watkins.