Alien Dreamtime

Terence McKenna Archives – Random Item #36 – R. U. Sirius Reviews ‘Alien Dreamtime’ for Wired Magazine

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Today’s random item is a brief review of the Alien Dreamtime VHS video, produced by Ken Adams and Brit Welin as Rose-X Media House (not the audio CD, which was edited by Jonah Sharp, aka Spacetime Continuum for the Astralwerks label–there are some differences between the two aside from the fact that one includes video). This review, by none other than our friend R. U. Sirius (aka Ken Goffman, if you must), appeared in Wired Magazine for its issue of May 1994. [This item is from the digital archives, meaning that there is no physical copy of this magazine yet in the collection. We do have a copy of the Alien Dreamtime VHS, though.]

“Call him unscientific or intellectually lazy, but Terence McKenna’s brand of psychedelic blarney – always more fun to hear live than to read – is so beautifully phrased that it transcends the historic and anthropological bean counters who dis him.”

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Sleeping with the Aliens
The Alien Dreamtime video, produced by Rose-X Media House, is Terence McKenna’s “Greatest Hits,” spoken to the rhythm of the rave, live in San Francisco. Call him unscientific or intellectually lazy, but Terence McKenna’s brand of psychedelic blarney – always more fun to hear live than to read – is so beautifully phrased that it transcends the historic and anthropological bean counters who dis him. In this video, Terence gets off the basic themes outlined in his three books: True Hallucinations, Food of the Gods, and The Archaic Revival (updating McLuhan, McKenna claims that postindustrial cyberculture is leading us back into the future toward archaic prepatriarchal modes of living – witness the rise of Modern Primitivism), the oppressiveness of “mono” culture (“monopoly, monogamy, monotony”), and the place of tryptamine hallucinogens in human evolution (“the psilocybin mushroom is the catalyst of human evolution and language”).

Alien Dreamtime is the second video Rose-X has produced with ethnobotanist McKenna. (The first, Experiment at Petaluma, was a 30-minute rap on the possibilities of visual language.) Rose-X’s two-person team – Britt Welin and Ken Adams – cut their special effects teeth on visual effects for San Francisco’s Toon Town Raves. Alien Dreamtime stretches the duo’s psychedelic computer effects to new limits, and Stephen Kent’s didgeridoo adds a note of primitive intensity to the techno-rave soundtrack. The high point of the 60-minute Alien Dreamtime is the entrancing dance and sway of psychedelic love goddess Kim Kyle. The presence of the feminine form in all of its grandeur provides a humanizing touchstone amid the abstract imagery. (In fact, my only complaint about this video is that we should have seen more of her. But that’s a minor quibble.) Fans of a good psychedelic rant must run out and purchase this video right away!

–R. U. Sirius

Terence McKenna Archives – Random Item #16 – Billboard Takes on Alien Dreamtime

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Well, the random number generator seems to have a thing for ‘Alien Dreamtime’, so here we are again….another review of the 1993 album/video/event, this time in none other than the iconic Billboard Magazine in their issue of January 22, 1994. This certainly would have carried Terence’s name to a pretty wide audience, though the impression people would have received is less than complimentary. The short and negative review was written by Catherine Applefeld.

The fragile realm of the psychedelic experience and the suffocating threat of exposure to those who are just plain living form the thesis of this performance video, which was filmed before an audience in San Francisco. Leading viewers on the so-called magical mystery tour is a sniveling little man who throws out empty sound bites as quickly and seamlessly as he changes inflection. Here are some favorites: “The three evils of society are hegemony, monogamy, and monotony,”
and “Going through life without having a psychedelic experience to going to the grave without having sex.” Maybe so, but this guy’s delivery is enough to scare Timothy Leary straight. Those going on a trip are advised to leave this pretentious piece of work behind.”

Again, as with Harley Barnhart’s characterization of Terence as “rancorous and contumacious,” not everyone cares for Terence, his prose, or his rhetorical style.

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Terence McKenna Archives – Random Item #14 – Alien Dreamtime in Library Journal

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The 60-minute VHS video tape of the 1993 Alien Dreamtime event in San Francisco, composed of “three raves [and] two interregnums [with] visions [by] Rose X, didgeridoo [by] Stephen Kent, and sound by Spacetime [Continuum], [with] words and ideas by Terence McKenna,” was reviewed in the April 1, 1995 issue of Library Journal (a trade magazine for librarians founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey, of Dewey Decimal System fame). The reviewer, Carol Dratch-Kovler, a consultant with the Upper Hudson Library System gives a very positive review amidst a pretty random array of brief video reviews, including ‘The Papal Concert to Commemorate the Holocaust’ and ‘Color Printing with the Beseler 45A Color Head: A Workshop with Darryl Nicholas (2 vols.)’.

“Take a step outside your mind”. . . this video captures the psychedelic experience without drugs. It incorporates the hallucinatory visuals or Rose X Media House with the transcendent rap of author Terence McKenna. . . The mesmerizing visuals are enhanced by the musical musings of the Space Time Continuum and didgeridooiste Stephen Kent. Recorded live, this is much more than a media performance; it is a hypnotic journey that seduces the viewer into the mysterious realm of alternate reality. The performance is divided in to three movements, each cognizant of McKenna’s ethnobotanical theories: Archaic Revival, Alien Love, and Time Wave Zero. The radical ideas presented here proved that the “Sixties” are alive and well in the “Nineties,” at least in San Francisco. At $19.95, the price is right for “a long, strange trip.”

Terence McKenna Archives – Random Item #13 – Terence McKenna’s Rave New World (Alternative Press, March 1994)

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Ok, the random item of the day is back after a busy period. Today’s random item eluded me for quite a while. Terence McKenna was featured in the music magazine Alternative Press in 1994 for an article/interview by Eric Gladstone focusing on rave culture and Terence’s influence on the philosophical outlooks of many in that scene. Gladstone praises Terence’s Alien Dreamtime collaboration with visual artists Rose X (aka Ken Adams & Britt Welin), electronic musician Spacetime Continuum (aka Jonah Sharp), and didgeridooist extraordinaire Stephen Kent as “one of the most meaningful projects to come out of the culture so far.” For me, it’s always great to hear Terence explain things in words I’ve never heard from him before, even if it’s a familiar concept he has explained elsewhere time and time again. To my way of interacting with T’s output, it is precisely these alternate tellings of the same or similar concepts which really allow one to unpack his ideas. This is one of the reasons that I have focused the archives on print material as it is a whole (prolific) realm of Terence’s output and wordplay that doesn’t exist in the ubiquitous and readily-available online audio/video corpus. It is the print material that is most in danger of becoming lost and forgotten. I’ll continue to search and share for these things, and we value any support that you might be able to offer.

Gladstone interviewed Terence at his home in Occidental. One of my favorite bits comes in the concluding paragraph:

Sounding alternately pessimist and optimist, lighthearted and passionately serious, McKenna’s arguments, both in interview and in performance, show a rare level of contemplation. But not, he insists, much planning. “No, no, none of these things are rehearsed. It’s all ad-lib. We’ve been doing it right here. We can send this to the Shamen and release it! No, it’s called ‘not being stupid!’ Amazing! Miraculous! Line up at the door, folks, a liberal college education displayed for your astonishment! Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

And, here’s Terence’s advice on appropriate drug use in the rave scene:

“Raves are a good place to do pot and take smart drugs, and dance, but I think a psychedelic dose that is effective is too high a dose to be 1) out in public, and 2) trying to negotiate transportation.”

Terence also describes, in this interview, how he ended up collaborating with The Shamen on ‘Re-Evolution’:

“They came to one of my old-style, pitcher-of-water-and-chair onstage lectures in London and said they wanted to sample me. And, we got together in the studio the next day and basically just talked for a couple of hours.” Straight to DAT, the result appeared on the album Boss Drum and single “Re-Evolution,” hits which brought McKenna to the attention of Spacetime Continuum. Collaborations with Zuvuya (a.k.a Jason Grey, a.k.a. Juju Midget) on the U.K. Flow Sound label and another with Coil are due soon.

The only version I’ve been able to locate is the super low-res digital scan that appears below, but I also just (after years of searching) found a copy that was finally posted on ebay and have ordered it. So, I should be able to add a physical copy of the magazine into the archives very soon.

 

If you’d like to donate to help support the acquisition, preservation, storage and sharing of Terence legacy, you can donate here: https://terencemckenna.wikispaces.com/

There is also an ongoing crowdfund effort at present, so please do check out our Etsy storefront. The photo-items on offer are really spectacular!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TerenceMcKennaArkive

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Terence McKenna Archives – Random Item #4 – Digital Dreams…’Strange Attractor’ Review

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Today’s random item from the McKenna Archives is an item that I don’t actually have in a hard copy. It is a review of the film Strange Attractor, produced by the media duo Rose X, who also did the visuals and produced the film for Terence’s Alien Dreamtime performance (Ken Adams, of Rose X, also more recently put out a film called Imaginatrix: The Terence McKenna Experience that you’ll also want to check out). I only have the digital content–not even scans of the actual newspaper, just the text. So, on the very off anyone has access to a copy of the Austin American-Statesman from May 9, 1996 (Section: XL Ent, Page 22), it would be great to add scans or an actual copy of the newspaper (page) to the archive, though for something like this, I typically wouldn’t expect that and am happy to at least have the text represented in the archive. The review is written by Harley Jebens and is titled, ‘It’s a Dream, It’s a Game, It’s a Film, It’s …`Strange Attractor’, a Psychedelic Web Experience Unlike Any Other. It’s an excellent and very comprehensive review and includes interviews with Ken Adams and Britt Welin as well as getting into technical detail about the process of creating the project, the inspiration and philosophical background, and where it fits into a larger scope of projects. It provides a lot of context for a multi-pronged multimedia effort that most McKenna enthusiasts will now only interact with as a video on YouTube or as a DVD. Unlike Alien Dreamtime, though, Terence McKenna is not a main feature of Strange Attractor, though he does make a notable appearance.

Here’s Harley’s treatment:

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Keep your eye out for the blue apples!

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‘Blue Apples’ by KevDotCom from Deviant Art: http://kevdotcom.deviantart.com/art/Blue-Apples-81942960