Music Review

fifty years ago to the day; the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 2011, saw a revolutionary combination of the subculture of the crystal skull; a known hoax by explorer Frederick A. Mitchell-Hedges and the song Psychoduct; song six of the album Membranes by obscure British musician Matt Lord of Poems in Stone. The crystal skull of doom, which had already garnered the attention of believers in ancient civilization and technology myths, had been assumed and subsequently established as a hoax, and so at the time of the release of Lords' album there was no immediate correlation drawn between the skull and the song. That is until a young German girl, Uta Von Hepzeberg, who had released the album on her Onec record label, began to investigate possible links. She had become fascinated with lords explanation of the concepts he was working from with the album, which were transcribed by Uta for Hamburg underground press magazine, Laut Gegen Nazis-
"The record is split between a solar and lunar side.
The lunar side is typically wabi sabi in it’s texture having been recorded in a dilapidated agricultural barn in rural France.
By way of homage to the ceasing of the Mayan calendar ML composed the 16 minute opus PSYCHODUCT which takes up a good chunk of the solar side. This piece is an invocation of the Mayan King Pacal Votan and takes it’s name from the tube that ran from his burial chamber to the very tip of his pyramidic tomb."-M. Lord.
Knowing as she did the story of F.A Mitchell-Hedges use of a similar tunnel within the massive stones of the pyramid Lubaantún, in Belize, Uta began to wonder about these passages. It seemed Lords had been similarly intrigued as it prompted him to base his conceptual work on the passages. These objects of crystal and sound that seemed to find themselves within these chambers posed a curious riddle. She decided to travel to Lubaantún, prompted by her learning of a specific day where the whole passage becomes illuminated by sunlight. after a daring theft of the Skull of Doom from the British natural history museum, she set off into dense, mewling jungle. Uta was never seen again but modern myths emminating from the region tell of her arriving at the time she meant too, when the sunlight would fill the shaft. The story goes that she placed the skull at a point where the light seemed to be most concentrated, the skull began to turn on the plinth she had sat it upon, the scraping was said to sound exactly like Psychoduct. This, of course, is unsubstantiated myth but in his later life, Lords revealed his belief that the song came to him in the form of a memory of himself as a musician in Atlantis; the fabled land swallowed by the Atlantic ocean in Platos' Timeas. The whole tale is indeed a fanciful one, but the hugely popular religion, Skullduct, only continues to grow as legacy to it.