Mandragora Records: Pure Psychedelic Noise Occult Experimental Music

Mandragora Records
P.O. Box 219
Greenfield, MA 01302
mandy@mandragora.com

oTo
Paradise Camp 23

MR023

30 min. CDR EP

1. Theory Megatron [mp3]

And you thought we were getting soft...our 23rd disc takes us full circle back to the hard stuff.
Originally released as a ltd edition cassette on the obscure UK Ordnance Tape Only label in 2001, this EP was the very first workout from the newly formed Paradise Camp 23, predating the Bar-BQ Dungeon sessions by a couple of months. Thirty minutes of way over-the-top free acid guitar, feedback exorcism, brain-burrowing loops, subliminal incantations and time-warp production, extending the hallucinogenic fug of Crackhouse and sampledelic ugh of Voodoo Mechanics into the digital realm - a cubist sound labyrinth designed to get seriously lost within. This is the pure psychedelic noise.

The orginal description from the (oTo) catalog read: "All the way from the USA, but sounds like it has been bounced off a star and been dragged back through a grubby little nebula. This collage of noise, voice and rock guitars swims and changes colour like a cuttlefish."

REVIEWS:

Outer Space Gamelan
outerspacegamelan.blogspot.com/
"Paradise Camp 23 is certainly the harder act to get a read on. This is actually a reissue of their very first c60 all the way back from 2001. "oTo" has one track (titled "Theory Megatron", curiously enough) riding out at just under a half-hour. As I understand it, PC23 on this release is Amlee, his wife Aleda Jonquil, and a friend by the name of Nate Longcope. The inner sleeve of this disc boasts an impressive list of buzzwords accompanied by how they relate to the music - cubist, psychedelic, magickal, noise, multimedia, improvisation. I must confess I can't really hear much of that on here - cubist noise I think I could fathom though. Anyway the brunt of this CD-R is weirdo transmissions coming through from the other side as pitched through an 1800's ham radio, with various other stations being picked up and fuzzed out along the way - there's the clatter of percussion at one point, voices come and go, sometimes you can hear actual strings being plucked, looped soul samples (I think)...but it's all lost just as quickly as found in the foggy industrialish wash. Maybe I should search out the group's later recordings and try to figure out where they ended up but for the most part "oTo" comes off as slightly amateurish Nurse With Wound/AMM/Maurizio Bianchi clatter. And who knows, maybe that's just fine by these cats. [ed note: it sure is]"