SAMPLE & HOLD : angus maclise

The early drummer for the Velvet Underground, Angus Maclise, artist, occultist, musician and avant-gardist of the Terry Riley ilk, was a key, though somewhat invisible figure in the development of progressive eastern influenced avant-garde electronic music. His album, Astral Collapse, exhibits a wide array of techniques and styles from spoken word and musique concrete tape manipulations to tambura influenced drones and Arp 2600 synth freak-outs that lead to Coil and Carlos Giffoni. The one track that contains Maclise's percussion, Beelzebub, is so processed so as to make it a gitchy morass of sound. Dracula, his Arp improv, is breath-taking in its free-form explorations and caustic cascades of sound. Ira Cohen's mylar twisted portrait shot presents Maclise in all his cosmic beauty, a perfectly imperfect reflection of the music's psychedelic heart tempered by the 20th century's seething electronic pulse drone smoothered under astral collapse.