Robert Beatty

I Wish I Was A Fire

Genre: FOLK / ROOTS, INDIE / ALTERNATIVE

Cassette

Boomkat Product Review:

Legendary illustrator and noisemaker Robert Beatty welds together 80-minutes of psychedelic treasures for his addition to Berceuse Heroique's remarkable mixtape series. Fans of dusty private press biz, Broadcast, Will Bankhead’s deep rummaging mixes, Efficient Space’s folk surveys; or Jessica Pratt's AOTY contender 'Here in the Pitch', you're gonna love this.

Robert Beatty's iconic cover art - from his zeitgeist-catching work with Oneohtrix, to those Roland Kayn reissues (aye plural) to that influential eye-popper that graced Tame Impala's perennially popular 'Currents' - is the kind of relentlessly imitated and obsessively literate art that demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of the past, with a fierce dedication to progress. Though perhaps lesser known, Beatty's music is equally noteworthy, whether tearing a hole alongside Wolf Eyes as a member of exalted noise outfit Hair Police, or coughing thru vintage fractal electronics on his solo material as Three Legged Race.

'I Wish I was a Fire' is predictably off-piste, connecting Beatty's art to the US psych revolution that flipped music on its head in the late 1960s. It's music that never really went away, but it's often just the top layer that's been skimmed and regurgitated. Here, Beatty goes much, much deeper, unearthing the kind of cult oddities that have fuelled interest in private press reissues over the last couple of decades.

Beatty opens with a jammer so rare it was never even properly released. LA outfit Penny Arkade's sole recorded album was shelved after it was dubbed in 1967, and only rediscovered two decades ago when a 1/4" tape of demos turned up. Lead track 'Not The Freeze' is peak material; Beatty snips out the best bit, a lysergic judder of metronome chimes, organ arpeggios and sunny harmonies. It sets the pace for a mix that exposes not only the relentless experimentation of the era, but also its wider cultural impact. Tommy Roe's 'Moon Talk', for example, was penned in 1969, the year Apollo 11 made its lunar landing, its bubblegum pop inspiring a woozy, bass-led anthem filled with sing-along lyrics and mad, dizzying percussion textures. Then there's the spaced-out 'Poison' from Brazil’s Som Imaginário, acid folk from These Trails, Boston psych rock band Chamaeleon Church's chirpy 'Spring This Year' and a real highlight from actor/singer Orriel Smith.

On the flipside, Beatty leads us in with a proper slice of celestial psych - The Open Window's 1969 ambient-raga-folk masterpiece, before he dives into even more distant galaxies with Julian's Treatment, a British band led by Dominican sci-fi writer and keyboardist Julian Jay Savarin, who had the good sense to interpret his bizarre stories musically. Elsewhere, there's loop-filled madness from the Executives, The Peppermint Trolley Company's Beach Boys-influenced pop, and another clear standout from Music Emporium, whose whimsical, synth-led sounds could have dropped from the same cloud as United States of America's Broadcast-prototyping debut album.

A proper labor of love from a real all-timer.

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