Astronomy Domine

Craziness. Telekinetic powers. A Tintoretto-ish sense of ascension/descension (moving the music, moving the audience). But, most of all, Syd Barrett, as a signifier in rock music, had and has so much to do with mind expansion, over and above anything else. Syd Barrett: a human conduit for expanding your mental, or hyper-mental, parameters. The Philly Free School wanted that energy around us. The shows at the Highwire Gallery we staged, as I have written about, were meant to be as mind-expanding, awareness-expanding, as possible, and by any means necessary. Spectacles. So that, helps to understand that as the initial audience began to shuffle in, what they would hear, more often than not, is Syd. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This embedded, is the first track from the album. And this is relevant to what just went up on P.F.S. Post, and elsewhere, about the incredible debauched ambience of the shows, because we put the right talismans out, like Syd, and bang! Presto! They worked! Syd was what was most representatively spun at the Highwire. The Khyber, btw, didn't give us enough control to spin anything. You couldn't do that there. But the Highwire was boundlessly about what we boundlessly wanted it to be about. Some people took that energy, Tintoretto-style, and ascended, some, like Anastasia in the piece, went into descent mode. Odd intervals. Chromatics. Our translation of UFO in 1967. There aren't many authentic ways to recreate that energy, if anyone is interested in doing so. This song is one.