Woods, live at the Joshua Light Show Festival, Abrons Art Center, May 13, 2010
Joshua White is a New York artist who began his career creating liquid light shows for Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in the late 1960s and early 70s. The Joshua Light show was in residence at the Fillmore and provided visuals for all the major artists associated with the classic psychedelic and heavy rock scene of the era, from Hendrix to Joplin.
After the scene faded, White moved into professional television production. Although his trippy visuals were forever immortalized in the memories of clued-in boomers and the freaky party scene from Midnight Cowboy, White would not revisit his light show past for nearly 40 years. In 2004, he teamed with artist Gary Panter to recreate some of the light shows for a one-off at Anthology Film Archives. Renewed interest in the classic light shows has peaked in recent years, and White has been performing regularly with his ensemble of visual alchemists and artists to accompany acts like Yo La Tengo, as well as various iterations of the Darmstadt New Music series and one-offs at the Whitney Museum and Lincoln Center.
The Joshua Light Show Festival, which premiered last week in New York, is a festival of contemporary psychedelic music, curated by Nick Hallett and paired with the light show’s distinctive visual component. The festival ran for over consecutive nights (the opening night with Steve Moore and itsnotyouitsme, and closing night with Dean & Britta and Spectrum) at the Abrons Art Center, a community center at the Henry Street Settlement, which has its own history as an incubator of avant-garde practice, including big name past associates like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, and Martha Graham. (more…)
This past Sunday was jam-packed, but I am glad that I got to stop by Newtown Radio for an hour and squeeze some sound files into this most musty and archival of Arthur Radio episodes. Among the transmission’s many mind-warping attributes, DJ Ivy Meadows (Camilla Padgitt-Coles) took a dip into her bottomless vault of spoken text recordings, which includes the sound of Freud’s own voice and a 2003 home recording by the legendary American poet/filmmaker/wanderer Ira Cohen. In the poem “Atlantis Express,” excerpted below, Ira provides as fitting an introduction to the episode as any:
Let’s take a silver train underground
to the back streets of Atlantis
thru the corrugated iron roots &
then to the peak itself, to the
saddle of the last ridge past strewn
boulders,
finally meandering thru cascading snow
wearing miner’s hats on the perpendicular
dark night &
going up to the edge of the Southern Cross
where we reach at last the pure white
glistening glaciers &
begin to chant over bones in rags
of Scorpio
Armless in the sticky substance how could
they ever have had a chance?
Permission will not be required
only poems of blood offered to
the memory of TREE
It is not ice which is eternal
but the fury of the absolute
separating the void from the spirit
of man,
uplifting like life when it is used
against itself,
that is, Radical Love — & again, we
are reduced to living beings
Caught by the instant
we are taken away
We live in the imprint of the flame
& we are helmeted within the internal
blackness
where the ray begins its passage
across the indignant sky
Vain clouds uncaring in a tangle of
crossbeams
culminate in the hermaphroditic mirror…
“Arthur Radio Transmission #13: Clouds in the Hermaphroditic Mirror”
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Episode #8 of of Arthur Radio definitely makes Visitation Rites’ universal internet heart sing. Ivy Meadows and Harry Painter shower you in an ecstatic medley of psychedelic dirges from all four corners of the planet. Special guest Robert Damore (aka Bobby Bouzouki) whispers some bittersweet nothings on his Bouzouki, and even takes the time to recount some of the narratives behind the rebetika (Greek folk songs) he plucks. Visitation Rites concludes the voyage with an ode to the past, present, and future of drone.
A tentative listening guide, straight from mobile writing desk of DJ Harry Painter:
“The sun is here and opens the curtains slowly! It brings the slow glowing dust! It springs the earth out of polar jail, the winds blow the desert sand to make for better traction. If you sit, it will make your hair look sexier! The tectonic plates are shifting all around us, their quakes make the planet spin faster, and change the pitch! If you jump, you can land in buttes, the plateaus, or the Isle of Cyros! Through our earth’s muzak, the winds blow Bobby Bouzouki up to the Arthur radio treehouse for a jaunt upon rebetika mountain. Happy trials!”
“Arthur Radio Voyage #8: The Bobby Bouzouki Episode”
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Woods, live at the Joshua Light Show Festival, Abrons Art Center, May 13, 2010
