by Bart de Paepe

Actually both. I have always been extremely interested in all kinds of music since I was a little kid - along w/ the kiddie records I was even then collecting, my parents exposed me to classical, jazz, folk, rock/pop, etc. When I discovered punk rock in ninth grade (1984), it literally felt like opening a door to a mysterious, hidden world, and like everyone else who steps through, it changed my life forever. Growing up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, the only real access to underground music was through the radio and listening to the freeform public radio station, KPFT. Chuck Roast, the DJ of the Funhouse Show, would always spin weird Industrial and experimental records between the hardcore punk and thrash, and there was an avant-garde show that same night w/ nothing but difficult, abstract New Music. So, weird/noise was tied up w/ punk and the 80s underground to me from early on (psych probably began w/ Jimi Hendrix the previous year).

I had been playing guitar for a couple years before, but probably the first music that I "made" was tape and sound collage done with 2 dual-cassette boomboxes, inspired by the weird noise on the radio. My first band was Devil Donkey, which was an inept blend of American postpunk (Minutemen, Meat Puppets, REM) and classic rock (Hendrix, Byrds, garage punk). I had been listening to industrial and other weird music all along, but towards the end of high school I really turned to the dark side and was getting more into hard indie rock (Butthole Surfers, pre-"Daydream Nation" Sonic Youth, Scratch Acid), first-wave industrial (Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Nurse With Wound) and metal (Slayer, Voivod, Celtic Frost). I started playing bass guitar w/ some friends as an outlet for the heavy stuff , which became Crackhouse. We started out under the direct influence of the Texas psycho bands (Butthole Surfers et al), but as we tripped out more and more the Rock was cast aside and it became full-on free acid industrial noise, where we'd hit 'Record' and totally freak out for 90 mins. Most of this was and has never been heard, as it was beyond unlistenable (especially at the time). We did it purely for our own amusement - tripping out to make music to make us trip out even further. And I've been doing that ever since...

Vital. I've always taken the psychedelic in psychedelic music literally. This is music to listen to while on drugs, make while on drugs, and, at its most potent, to induce a hallucinatory state in the listener. In most of my work, the goal has been to make the most tripped out sounds possible - acid rock without the rock, pure psychedelic noise - both evoking the mood and chaos of balls-out peak Experience and invoking altered states where normal perception of time and thought begin to disintegrate. As I stated in the liner notes to the first psychedelic noise comp, ‘Tryptaphonic Mind Explosion’: "audio portals to hyperdimensional soundspace, both taking You There and bringing It Here". These days, though, I've graduated from most of the illegal stuff to more exotic and powerful methods of Illumination.

http://sagewisdom.org/ and magick.

I became involved with the local underground scene here in Western Massachusetts in 2002 through Flywheel, a DIYarts collective & performance space where shows are curated and booked by individual members. Beyond the standard punk and indie rock, people were doing nights of experimental, noise, and other subterranean music, so I started volunteering, doing sound, and putting together shows of my own. I also finally had a venue to take it to the stage, doing live free psych improvisation with Paradise Camp 23.

It's really amazing - this area has become an epicenter of this new underground of free/psych/noise/folk/whatever (I don't know what to call it), especially over the past couple years, with a vibrant community of musicians playing in all sorts of non-traditional venues scattered around the Valley. It's unique in that this isn't in a big city, but a bunch of music freaks hidden in the hills and getting together to create and share their vision. So many superstars of the no-audience underground started out or make their home here (Magik Markers, MV+EE Medicine Show, Corsano/Flaherty, etc etc).

That said, I have been so involved with my own thing (Weirdsville!, recording, Real Life etc), that I've always been hidden in the "scene", rather than being a direct part of it. After taking a break for the past year, I am finally doing some live shows again playing solo sitar improv, so we'll see what happens.

I think Flywheel inspired alot of folks and proved that you could put on shows outside of rock-club/bar scene. Plus, this music has its own built-in audience limit, so shows can be held in nontrad spaces since a small crowd is virtually guaranteed. Along w/ the expected hip record stores and colleges, shows have appeared at galleries, book stores, cafes, churches, town commons, restaurants, private houses, theatres, and I'm sure more places that I'm not aware of.

Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace has recently been doing nights at the Apollo Grill in Easthampton; some folks in Hadley dubbed their living room The Schoolhouse and put on shows for a couple years; and the used bookstore The BookMill in Montague hosts an amazing series of out sounds produced by the Automonous Battleship Collective. It seems like they keep popping up in all sorts of unusual places. For the complete picture, check out the NEWS section of ecstaticpeace.com, which has archived video from most of these gigs featuring all of your favorite New Weird American superstars.

Not much - I'm not really part of "the scene" but more of a tangential outsider working under the underground. Circumstance brought a halt to PC23 live actions just as we were beginning to really perform and open up the doors to new campers. The core members of PC23 have such a deep history and intimate musical telepathy - it would interesting to swing with some new blood and see what comes through.

Same with sitar and other instruments - I've been exploring new methods of technique and timbre, figuring out what "free sitar" or experimental sitar would be, but it is unsatisfying at this point. The sound and drone of the sitar is so fucking awesome that putting it through wild FX, disortion, etc lessens the instrument (unlike say electric guitar), rather than extend possibilities. But I'll continue to try out new things.

I bought my sitar in October 2000, after being in love with the sound since I first heard "Within You, Without You" on Sgt Pepper's as a kid. Through the magic of the Internet, I found a place to order Indian instruments online and sent away for it. The first big hurdle was figuring out to hold the damn thing, since its very top heavy and you can't hold the neck with your fret hand. My then-girlfriend bought me some sitar books and videos for Xmas that year, which shed light on the mystery, and I started playing. I tried to find a sitar teacher in the area but no luck, so I am completely self-taught: practicing, learning, and listening deep within for the past five years.

Yes, there is definitely a development between the two volumes. The first volume of Sitar collects interesting recordings from 2003-04, which was really my first time playing out afterstudying for a couple years. I wanted to wait and make my public debut on sitar once I felt I had something to say and bring a certain level of emotive musicality and technique to the performance. The sitar tracks on the PC23 MU cd come from this same period.

"Sitar Vol. 2" was mostly recorded in July 2005 as I was getting ready for my first performance in over a year, which is track 2 on the disc. I hadn't intended to release a second volume so soon, but I really enjoyed the musical quality of those recordings and felt they were ready for wider exposure. The recording quality, on the other hand, is so lo-fi because theyweren't intended to be released, but simply as tests of a new live set-up of mics, delay, etc. I've always been into lo-fi, field recordings, 'bad' quality, etc, as it always brings an evocative temporal space to the recording, esp. in these days of digital perfection. Some of my favorite and most hair-raising music to listen to is mono field recordings of world music ala the Secret Museum of Mankind series or scratchy old 78 folk/blues records.

I actually don’t know much about Indian music - I am self-taught on the sitar and have not studied Indian music theory or technique, though I've always enjoyed Indian music on record and have a nice little collection of it. I'm definitely a fan of Ravi Shankar, his ‘East Meets West’ was the first real sitar LP I heard and have been in love w/ the instrument ever since. I've had the fortune of seeing him play live twice and both were the best concerts I've ever been to. When I started learning sitar, I wanted to find a teacher but there wasn't one in my area, so I started studying/practicing on my own, not by copying or playing along with recordsbut trying out different things and discovering new sounds and ways of playing. It's funny - I rarely listen to Indian music these days because at about five minutes into the raga I always want to turn it off and just play instead.

Oh, totally...Sitar has become my spiritual and meditative practice. As I see it, God, if It's anything, is the process of creation, and art is one of our closest ways to approach divinity. Music is probably the most deeply evocative and emotional art, and improvisational music is creation in real time, bringing the interior subjective world of imagination and spirit into the exterior objective world of experiential 'reality', uniting the microcosm with the macrocosm. Magic... But rather than Ravi, I relate to those hippies in the audience. I fell in love with the sitar because it is, for better or worse, THE psychedelic instrument and most associated w/ LSD and the Summer of Love of the 60s. From the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" on, sitar or guitars emulating sitar is the quintessential sound of acid rock. So I came at it from the 'profane' Western perspective, but through playing and finding its voice I have come to an appreciation and understanding of the spiritual side, which might not be the same as the Indian wisdom but resonates deep within me as the practitioner.

These days I usually begin by setting up a drone on the delay, which takes the place of a tambura player in Indian classical music, though sometimes I go naked. I start playing once the spirit moves me, either starting out slow by exploring various notes and tonics or I might get into it right away. In my first couple solo shows I did have a basic melody or structure in mind to fall back upon - in case I froze or ran out of ideas during the performance - but now I go into it totally open and without any forethought or planning beforehand. I try to tune into the unique mood, time and place of the performance and allow the music to move as it will. This is contrary to classical raga, where a complex system of music theory informs what notes, scale, melody, rhythms etc should be played at certain times of day, moon phase, etc (i.e. morning ragas, evening ragas). Through practicing over the years I have developed to the point where, at its best, I can completely lose myself and become a conduit for the music to flow through. I hope that doesn't sound too pretentious...

"What excites you in the drone?" - do you mean what other "drone" artists do I listen to, or what about drone excites me? Drone is the core – the ever-present tone that all emanates from, contrasts to, and is swallowed within. Drone is the constant essence of NOW that keeps pressing forward while Reality reverberates in its infinite variation. or something...

PC23 began in early 2001. I hadn't made any recordings in a while, taking a break from the noise and instead concentrating my musical energy on taming the sitar. I was digitally remastering the old Crackhouse, Voodoo Mechanics, and other tapes from the Vault, which I hadn't listened to in a long time, and putting together the first round of Mandragora discs for my own enjoyment. This inspired me to form Paradise Camp 23 as a project name for a new round of sonic exploration, extending the psychedelic fug of Crackhouse and sampledelic ugh of Voodoo Mechanics into the digital realm.

Voodoo Mechanics was my solo psych/ambient/noise project throughout the 1990s. When I was in college, I became fascinated with the ritual use of music, esp. in shamanic and trance rituals, and the idea that sound/music could induce ecstatic and altered states of consciousness. I was always recording and experimenting on my four-track making all sorts of weird tapes using loops, noise, samples, guitar, cut-ups, and the random factor. So the name Voodoo Mechanics reflects both these interests. The CHAOTIKA CDR was the final cassette album from that time, but I have loads of other stuff that might come out someday. I re-use some of those recordings as sonic material for Paradise Camp 23.

I've always been interested in voodoo, shamanism, occult, magick, spirituality, UFOs, New Age, all that stuff, but at the same time don't necessarily believe in any of it. I consider myself a metagnostic: both as in meta-gnostic - into all methods of transcending reality and experiencing the ecstatic - and as a meta-agnostic, believing in nothing except that you shouldn't have beliefs, even in not believing. Nothing is True, Everything is Permissible...

The core group of Paradise Camp 23 is myself, my wife Aleda Jonquil, and one of our best friends, Nate Longcope. I met Aleda while at Hampshire College back in 1991 and have been together since - she plays electronics+effects. I met Nate in 94 or so - he and I played guitar in an indie-rock band Johnny Combatt and our musical tastes/sensibilities were remarkably close from the first time we played together. He's an amazing multi-instrumentalist, filmmaker, and artist. He has played keyboards, guitar, effects, and drums in PC23, and he's the Nate in Rezanate/At the Eat. Nate has recently played guitar on the latest Bright album and in stoner band Donkey Claw.

The Camp expanded in 2003 to include Joel Boultinghouse on bass - this was the group on some tracks on MU and Grassy Knoll. Peter King provided video fractals, Jason Daniels did video mixing, and we had some guest musicians as well. We were at our full power in early 2004, w/ total improvisational free psychedelic music/noise merging w/ improvisational free psychedelic video projections - a total trip.

We stopped playing live at this apex because Real Life took over: Aleda became pregnant w/ our daughter, Nate moved to Brooklyn and got busy w/ a new job, Joel moved to Louisiana, etc etc...I'm hoping to revive it at some point, but for now Paradise Camp 23 is studio-only - we're the subterranean Steely Dan.

Back in 2000-2001 I was constantly surfing the web and checking out all the noise and experimental music sites I could find. I think I had read a call for submissions to his Ordance, Tape Only series on allsound.org, a great long-gone site for experimental and other music where people could post announcements, releases, submissions calls, etc. I was impressed by the descriptions of the tapes he had done so far and that he was aiming for 50 tapes in the series, so seemed open to anything. I took a chance, got in touch, and sent a cassette. I constructed the 30 minute piece from all sorts of source material and different recordings. It was the first releases done as Paradise Camp 23, and the first Mandragora CDRs came out a month or so later. I recently re-released it on disc as 'oTo' - it's way over-the-top industrial freak-out, the hardcore pure psychedelic noise.

Weirdsville! WebRadio (www.weirdsville.com) is my Internet Radio megasite that has been broadcasting the most incredibly strange, underground and obscure sound around for more than six years now. I started it back in early 99 after learning how easy it was to stream music over the Web - as a lifelong music fiend I had always dreamed of having my own radio show, and now I could build my own station. The first stream was an eclectic mix of stuff from my record collection, then I added a Noise channel on both the Weirdsville! and Mandragora sites. A few people started getting in touch and asking about submissions (Robot vs. Rabbit was one of the first), so in 2000 I bought a PO Box and put out the call to appropriate newsgroups and websites asking for weird, experimental, whatever music. The deluge began soon after, with all sorts of bedroom freaks and total unknowns crawling out from around the world. There was push by the major record labels to demand royalties from Internet radio broadcasters, so in 2001 I purged the playlists of tracks from major labels and ever since it has been nothing but submitted music, out-of-print, or obscure micro labels. Probably 90% of our latest additions come from music sent in for airplay, and 90% of that is unavailable or not
heard anywhere else: deep sub-underground of total freaks and geeks. It's great, by dubbing this music as "Weird", it combs out all the boring "normal" music, so we rarely get a disc in the mail that sucks or is inappropriate for the site; almost all is brain-busting, life-shattering bizarre in its own way.

At this point, we have nine different channels (Psych, Noise, Exotica, Moog, Swank and more) and over 8000 tracks available to our randomized playlists. Our next phase is a regular hour-long podcast showcasing the latest and greatest sent in to the PO Box.

Nothing as a direct release, but Robot vs Rabbit, MANDOG, and other bands on the Tryptaphonic Mind Explosion comp got in touch through submissions to Weirdsville radio. The Tryptaphonic comp was a direct result of weirdsville, as I was getting discs from unknown bands all working along very similar lines and, surprisingly, similar to my old Crackhouse tapes – psychedelic noise. I'm planning a new compilation series for next year called Psych Junk Unknowns that will feature bands that have sent in submissions/demos.