AP Strange: 00:22

Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.

Mike Fiorito: 00:31

But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.

AP Strange: 00:40

Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back, my friends, to the AP Strange Show. I am your host, AP Strange. This is my show, and today's show is brought to you by several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pig. If you like grooving, especially with pigs, you like hanging out in caves or gathering together with small species of, furry animals, then several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving where the pic is probably right for you.

AP Strange: 01:36

So, tonight on the show, I have a returning guest and this is gonna be a really fun episode to do because we're talking music, we're talking UFOs, we're talking altered states of reality and everything in between. My guest is Mike Fiorito, he's the author of book a coming out very soon, The Inner Space of Outer Space. He was on before for his book, UFO Symphonic, and I am really happy to have him back. So, welcome back to the show, Mike. Good to see you.

Mike Fiorito: 02:11

Hey, great to see you AP, and thanks so much for having me on. I'm really looking forward to, I'm sure it'll be a fun conversation.

AP Strange: 02:19

Oh, Yeah. Well, it's always, we try to have fun around here. So, yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 02:25

And I was gonna say, the pigs three different ones, there's on the animals album, there's lots of ways you could rephrase some of that stuff, but I was going where you were, the small furry animals.

AP Strange: 02:40

Well, it's just one of my favorite track titles on any album ever. Yeah. The people that have never listened to Pink Floyd are like, what the hell are these guys talking about?

Mike Fiorito: 02:51

Yeah. I I went to see oh, gosh. You know, and I know this is just, I just don't remember his name right now, but he is he was a major kind of avant he's alive still. Avant Garde player and he, I, you know, I'm just getting old, I guess I'm forgetting things. But I went to see him with my wife and I said to my wife, this is going to be pretty far out.

Mike Fiorito: 03:17

So are you, you know, you're good with that? She has a pretty open mind, but it was stuff like, you know, putting a magnet on a platform that was mic'd up and the magnet went like, and then he took that sound and put it through a flange. And then there was a cello. It was all of this kind of interesting improvised, but highly articulate musicians putting together something. And, know, at one point, my wife looks at me and she says, you owe me, because this was, you know, this was hard music to listen to.

Mike Fiorito: 03:52

But anyway, after the music, the performance, it was a small space, I walked up to the stage, they kind of welcomed you up and I said to the musician, a composer, I said, oh, be careful with that axe Eugene, You know, my wife looks at me and she's sort of like, what are you talking about? But he completely got it. So we're we're aloft on a conversation about strange music.

AP Strange: 04:21

Well, it's yeah. There are those artists that like, if you drop the right hints, people will pick up on it. I find Frank Zappa is like that. If you you there's little Zappa isms that you can drop and others Zappa fans will pick up on it right away, you know?

Mike Fiorito: 04:35

Yeah. Sarcon and Crested Tweezer, you know?

AP Strange: 04:38

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 04:39

Arrogantly twisting this sterile canvas snoot of a fully charged icing anointment utensil, he puts forth a quarter ounce green rosette near the summit of a dance but radiant muffin of his own design.

AP Strange: 04:55

There you go. Yeah. That's one of my all time favorites is muffin man on Bongo. Yeah. Whole album is great.

AP Strange: 05:02

Yeah. Yeah. I was I was actually gonna ask you about that, because Zappa does get mentioned a few times in

Mike Fiorito: 05:10

the

AP Strange: 05:10

book, but I feel like you could do you could have done a whole chapter on him too or maybe even a whole book.

Mike Fiorito: 05:15

Yeah. I you know, I Zappa is one of those, you know, I grew up listening to him and I have to admit, you know, because I, he, there is a lot of immaturity in Zapp and his lyrics and, you know, there's very juvenile. You know, I got a girl with a little rubber head, take her out every night just before I go to bed. That that being said, just super interesting musician, composer, people honored his music. I mean, was you know, he was, he had great musicians playing with him top level.

Mike Fiorito: 05:52

And some of his classical music, modern classical was, you know, put on performances of his work. So yeah, I mean, I have high esteem and I could see myself going down there at some point. Doesn't really connect up on the, like, say spiritual level or that other place that I tend to go to. He's, you know, that's not his bag really.

AP Strange: 06:18

Right.

Mike Fiorito: 06:19

I tend to connect up with the, like I call them syncretists, you know, people that are bringing things together, bringing, wisdom traditions, philosophical ideas and kind of bringing them together as a sort of integrated thing in the way Sun Ra does. There are other composers and musicians that do that and I really resonate with that approach.

AP Strange: 06:49

Yeah and it's a fascinating way of looking at it in the book that it's kind of an odd collection of musicians, they're all people that I think most a lot of people would have heard of. So we're talking about like Pink Floyd, the band, yes, Sun Ra, Steve Halper, and you cover like a lot of names that people might recognize, but the esoteric aspects of them that maybe people don't know the full story of.

Mike Fiorito: 07:21

And

AP Strange: 07:24

in addition there's more of yourself in the book to your own personal experiences which I thought was really cool and one of the first questions I wanted to ask you in this is or maybe even just compliment you on is is is framing the structure of the book around tarot cards. I thought that was a really interesting idea where you had kind of like a tarot card pulled for each personality that you're talking about in the book. So how did you come to that idea?

Mike Fiorito: 07:53

Well, you. Thank you for that. I mean, could see it being cliched too. I could see it and I and I didn't want it to be so structured and manufactured and so I, you know, I was reading Tarot and I thought bringing some chance factor into how we would go about writing this and basically using exploring my unconscious participate in the creation of the book. You know, as you said, even in UFO Symphonic, but here as well, I tend to, I like to make myself the subject of the experiment.

Mike Fiorito: 08:34

So that it has a journalistic aspect to it. And here I am, I'm gonna put myself, I'm the Frankenstein on the table here. And I also feel that's my strength too, is I love one of the things about writing AP that I love is that it's very nourishing. So I love to be obsessed with the topic and I mean obsessed, you know, we're accumulating piles of books and reading and thinking and dreaming and making associations even when I'm not thinking about it. And there's a kind of learning as you're writing, because of course I'm discovering things I didn't I'm reading things I didn't know.

Mike Fiorito: 09:21

It's forcing me to change my direction. I thought the tarot would be a fun way to just explore Ra as magician, which he certainly is. I mean, that really fit. The Pink Floyd kept coming up ace of pentacles, you know, and it wasn't, I wanted to do the major arcana, but it somehow it crept into the deck. I don't remember.

Mike Fiorito: 09:48

And then use those concepts and ideas, but in earnest to find it in earnest in the music. So I'm glad you, I'm glad you, you it is there. It's not a heavy hammer either. It's not like I say, I make it at the intro that I'm associating the composer with with a tarot card but I don't I didn't try to box it in. I tried to let it be loose and bleed at the edges and it was interesting that yes, that John Anderson said that he wanted to name yes, world.

Mike Fiorito: 10:25

So that was a discovery. How synchronistic is that? He wanted to name yes, world. And that was the card that I chose for yes.

AP Strange: 10:32

It was the world, yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 10:34

And they really do have that kind of that aspect of and I think that's strewn throughout the book is this notion of terrestrial and extraterrestrial. This notion of as above, so below. And while some of that music is kind of space music with these Moog synthesizers and projecting this kind of futuristic sound, there's also the very terrestrial, the very folk kind of feel in their music too, with mandolins, particularly on the song and You and I, and it has this kind of beatific running stream, you know, quality to it. And I, that was something I was going for is this synthesis of when we're looking out there, we're also looking in here and when we're looking in here, we're looking out there and they're kind of, you know, they're interwoven. Inner space of outer space is corny as a title.

Mike Fiorito: 11:38

I've basically remade, I've redone how you put the words together because outer space is two words. So someone's going to say he doesn't know how to spell or something. But yeah, that was a key component. And what I tried to do as well, so you notice there's a lot of spiritual traditions like learning and knowledge, and it's a kind of book of perennial philosophy. So I'm trying to make the associations between, you know, the Bhagavad Gita and other wisdom books from sacred texts and weave that either the composer was influenced by it or I'm making that connection.

Mike Fiorito: 12:29

And just before you may have another question, I think the main premise of the book, I don't think it's anything new. Actually, what I'm saying is that music, dissolves the ego, it takes you out of yourself. And now that that's a broad spectrum, you know, it could take you out of yourself in a very prosaic and everyday way, or music and what I learned when I began doing this work with UFO symphonic sound. And that could be chanting, that could be bells ringing, it could be binaural beats, Stephen Halpern. It could be listening to music at a certain megahertz to achieve a certain state.

Mike Fiorito: 13:15

So, and you can go as far with music as you want to, But I think there's something while that goes back to Pythagoras, what I tried to do is to put it in modern dressing and make associations with modern musics. The UFO topic is sort of in the tapestry, but it's not in the center. Because it doesn't belong in the center. It belongs as a part of the discussion. I actually began thinking of know, how does UFO fit into the central part of it?

Mike Fiorito: 13:56

It doesn't. So that's through thinking and kind of playing chess with the writing approach and structure and just saying, well, that that deck of cards collapsed. Is about this is about, you know, esotericism and UFOs spoke in that hub.

AP Strange: 14:18

Yeah, I've always thought UFO lives in the margins and esoterica in general, it's always kind of right there at the edges and or in between the lines, you know, so.

Mike Fiorito: 14:32

Right. Yes.

AP Strange: 14:33

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 14:34

Yeah. And what's interesting is that, you know, as I said in the book, there's a period where musicians become UFO or composers, songwriters become UFO obsessed. And that co that happens at the same time as sort of the technologies are developing satellite technologies. And it's, it's sort of, I think it's echoing, which I say in the book, Valet's notion that the way we perceive the phenomena, it wears the dress and the external presentation of what's in the culture. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 15:19

And it's not any one thing, it could be many things, it could still be a luminous orb or illumination of the Virgin Mary, or it can be something that resembles modern metallic technology that has speedily disappears and all that kind of, and of course the musicians I'm writing about Sun Ra are hugely obsessed with these concepts. So it's sort of in the middle, but it's like you said, it's at the margins too.

AP Strange: 16:00

Yeah, and sometimes it's just kind of simultaneous like I always like to think about how, the birth of rock and roll kind of was around the same time the first satellites were going up into space.

Mike Fiorito: 16:15

Mhmm.

AP Strange: 16:15

You know, it seems like those things are intimately related and it's like, whether you can make the case that they are or aren't, you have to take note of that was part of the zeitgeist is thinking about space, flying saucers and rock and roll is they're kind of ultimately tied together.

Mike Fiorito: 16:36

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, and having to do to some extent with the technology innovations that are coming out of war making on some level. And it's funny how the UFO topic is everyone's going somewhere, it's sort of zooming, coming and going. But all of that, the bleep bleep bleep of Sputnik, you know, the first satellites that bleep, those sounds become a part of our inventory of how we perceive, like, say the future. It's kind of interesting in that.

Mike Fiorito: 17:14

How do we see the future? How did musicians project it? And not just musicians, it was in the zeitgeist of the literature, science fiction, film. So, yeah, I think there is a, even the technologies being used are, people who came out of working in army and radio technology, or in sound or technology, working with instrumentation. So it just kind of makes sense there would be this this UFO surge and obsession but also as a spiritual component.

Mike Fiorito: 17:59

Somehow they they they get, you know, certainly Ra connected the two very much so. It wasn't, I mean, he was born in Birmingham where the first, I think NASA or the initial NASA installation, I think there still is a NASA installation there. He a felt

AP Strange: 18:22

training camp now or something, right?

Mike Fiorito: 18:25

You know, I'm not sure. I'm not But I know that, you know, he said he was born in the place where the spaceships were made. He had that affinity for And it certainly was a part of when he said that he was from Saturn. He said he wasn't born. You know, he was never born.

Mike Fiorito: 18:49

He always was. He was eternal.

AP Strange: 18:52

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 18:54

I love if you listen to him speak and like space is the place or a joyful noise. He's so clever with his his commentary, you

AP Strange: 19:05

know. Yeah. His poetry too. He wrote poetry.

Mike Fiorito: 19:09

Right.

AP Strange: 19:10

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 19:10

And people ask him like, a reporter asked him, said, so, because he had many names. He had, you know, mystery, Mr. Ra, of course, his real name, Herman Blunt, but some reporters said, well, what does your mother call you? And he said, well, she calls me son. So clever always, you know?

AP Strange: 19:33

Right. Yeah. And then you could play that as a pun too for sun, you know?

Mike Fiorito: 19:40

Right. Yeah. That's what he was doing always is this kind of very esoteric way of these anagrams and puns and trickster ways of looking at reality.

AP Strange: 19:55

Yeah. It's funny because I was familiar with his music and I had seen Space is the Place, but I didn't really know that much about him for a long time. And then when Greg Bishop and Adam Gorele's book, a is for Adamski came out there as he was included in there as a contactee. I was like, he was really serious about that. So that's when I started learning more and in your book, think you do an excellent job of encapsulating kind of how for Ra, the art and the performance and the music, the persona and you know, the belief in not just life on other planets, but the continuation of consciousness out throughout the cosmos, it was all part of the same thing, there was no really differentiation or dividing line between like the fictions of it and the reality.

AP Strange: 20:46

There weren't even these separate things, it's all just, he was an expression of consciousness, right?

Mike Fiorito: 20:52

Yes. And thank you, thank you for that. And he said from his experience where he said he was transmolecularized, I think is the words he used. And I loved his Alabama accent, always so interesting the way he put things. But he said that he was told by the beings that he was selected to bring music to the world, to make the world a better place.

Mike Fiorito: 21:24

And so that's such an interesting idea, you know, and just from a technology perspective, if you think of like Rudolf Steiner and oh gosh, what is what was the system of of theosophists? So, they were very interested in the relationship. They thought, you know, electricity was new, electromagnetism was new. And they associated, I don't think wrongly, I don't think wrongly, but that there was something in the electromagnetism that was powerful, potent. And Ra echoed that.

Mike Fiorito: 22:09

And I think to the extreme, to the extreme, I mean, there's songs like Space Probe. And if, if I turn it on, it's, I think it's, what is it, maybe a ten minute song or something. And it's, it's not a song proper. It's just him playing with a Moog synthesizer. And it's like, and, but there's real artistry in that.

Mike Fiorito: 22:36

I mean, it's way ahead of his time. You could hear Rick Wakeman's, the seeds of Rick Wakeman. You could hear Ornette Coleman, you could hear that cacophony of what jazz would sort of come to punk, you know, even punk music, this sort of, sometimes he could just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and it could sound like smash bang and it could be, maybe hard to listen to. There are definitely parts of Sun Ra that that you have to ease into.

AP Strange: 23:13

Yeah. Right.

Mike Fiorito: 23:14

You may not turn it on and be like, I love this stuff.

AP Strange: 23:17

It was like a free jazz aspect of it. But yeah, he really was like ahead of his time with a lot of that.

Mike Fiorito: 23:25

Yeah. And the stuff he was pulling from, whereas he wasn't doing, if you listen, it's not like rhythmic in the sense of jazz complex rhythms. He started to do, there's something called from Bali, the Gamelan Orchestra. So it's like this sort of continuous, very percussive, and it's not changing pattern. But what that does that shimmery kind of background drumming and stuff, and it has horns too.

Mike Fiorito: 24:00

It gives a lot of room for the canvas on what you want to lay over it, where your focus is now not on the rhythm, it's on just the sound, just the sonic, you know, creation. And he listened to like lounge music, there was a guy, what's his name, Les Baxter, who did music for movies. And he played in that kind of style, like lounge music. So he was really pulling from everything differently than what say Coltrane was, or Davis, Miles Davis, or Thelonious Monk. And you hear a bit of all of them in him too.

Mike Fiorito: 24:40

Right. But you know when it's Sun Ra.

AP Strange: 24:43

Yeah. And vice versa, I think. Mean, I think you can, on some of Miles's fusion stuff, you can hear a bit of influence there, you know, so

Mike Fiorito: 24:53

Yeah. Sure.

AP Strange: 24:54

I think of like, In a Silent Way is like one of my favorites. That's got that kinda

Mike Fiorito: 25:00

Mhmm.

AP Strange: 25:01

Driving rhythm that just kinda stays the same and returns to those phrases a lot, you know, so

Mike Fiorito: 25:06

Yes. And then you hear that the stride piano, he was, you know, a kind of jazz stride piano player, Sun Ra, and there's always that layer. And if you peel back, you listen to his older stuff, you'll hear that stride piano, core, know, Thelonious Monk did that also in his super unique way. But yeah, that's just a super inventive mind.

AP Strange: 25:35

Now as far as the synthesizer goes, he was introduced directly to Moog, right? Bob Moog?

Mike Fiorito: 25:42

Yeah. And that's kind of

AP Strange: 25:43

how he became interested in the synthesizer. Took to it right away, yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 25:48

And it's interesting because the the the MOG, and I always called it a MOG, but according to I read a book about Robert Mo MOG, and it said MOG is in rogue.

AP Strange: 25:59

Right.

Mike Fiorito: 26:00

And I think it I think it said that, or was it Rouge? Okay. Now I'm now I'm forgetting.

AP Strange: 26:09

It was definitely pronounced Moog.

Mike Fiorito: 26:11

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that he said, you know, it wasn't that you just play it like you had to it's a piece of technology. And when it was first introduced, it wasn't simple.

Mike Fiorito: 26:25

But yeah, he just took to it right away. But when he first played it, I've read Fiorito Fiorito was the journalist that made the introduction and he tried to play it and then he was kind of stumbling in the first go at it. And Mogg said, don't have the right, maybe you don't have the right hands for it. And then Sun Ra in his clever way, you know, sort of says, well, you know, is a black hand can't play it is what you know, that was sort of always aware and always making that observation.

AP Strange: 27:03

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 27:03

In parallel with his esoteric ideas. And to me, that's super, that's very, that's vital that when in art, and I know that's a complicated thing, you we can't always make art that it's hard to match art with ethics. Yeah. Because that could be you're just going into a wall or it's too much of an agenda. But the intention to make the world a better place.

Mike Fiorito: 27:33

That goes throughout the book. It really is this using art to expand the potential of your consciousness to reach more of yourself, ultimately reaching more of what I call the ecology of being. So more of your being and as you go into that place, it's peopled it's more than you and it's maybe more than people.

AP Strange: 28:07

Yeah, I mean, if it's consciousness we're talking about that is all people in all sentient forms everywhere, in all time periods. Right. It's a lot. Exactly.

Mike Fiorito: 28:22

And it involves, you know, this rivers and mountains and space and wind.

AP Strange: 28:29

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 28:29

So it's this, you know, big ecology of phenomena.

AP Strange: 28:33

Well, think that's I remember seeing a clip of Sun Ra where somebody was interviewing him once and I asked who his influences were and he's like, I'm influenced by everything I see. He's like, I'm influenced by the birds. The birds are singing like they're the original Yeah. Musicians, the

Mike Fiorito: 28:54

And you see the interviewer is sort of like caught off guard. I think that was on Saturday Night Live. And the host asks him a question he wants to hear like Miles Davis or something. Right. And he just goes like, off on a whole other direction.

AP Strange: 29:08

Yeah. Yeah. Influenced by life. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 29:17

While clever, insightful too. Yeah. And mind opening.

AP Strange: 29:22

Right.

Mike Fiorito: 29:23

If you were listening, if, you know, as you were, as some people were, he was largely ignored until the hippies got ahold of him and they started to dig his sound. He was sort of, you know, amazingly was able to keep a band together, a big band, and managed to just kind of keep, playing and doing gigs and was highly respected. But it's not like he was making a ton of money and mostly ignored.

AP Strange: 29:57

Well, and they've continued even with him passing, right? The orchestra still out Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 30:04

Marshall Yeah. Allen, I think it was something like his ninetieth or one hundredth birthday, something like that last year. So immediately Yeah, he released

AP Strange: 30:12

his first solo album. Yeah. Right. I mean,

Mike Fiorito: 30:16

jeez, that's that's like a real that's respecting your mentor, you know? I waited, you know, like, forty years until he's passed or I don't know how long it is. I think he died in the nineties, which is about forty years.

AP Strange: 30:29

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 30:31

That's that's respect, man. That really is.

AP Strange: 30:34

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I think, you know, listeners will, I'd recommend picking up the book because you will be able to get the the full experience of, of of Mike writing about Sun Ra because I think you really do capture it really well. But, you know, when we were talking about the Moog and how hard it was to handle, I did like when you were getting to the Pink Floyd part, because it was something I didn't know, was, it never occurred to me that even in the mid seventies, a lot of this was still analog for for live performance, so you're talking about like on the run with that repeating, synth line, they had to do that live every time they played because there really wasn't a way to like loop it and have it recorded and played back every time ago.

Mike Fiorito: 31:30

Yeah. Yeah. Those musicians, and I think I talked about, was it, yeah, I think it was Roger Waters or David Gilmore, I forget whom, and saying, man, you know, we had to do this stuff all manual. We had tubes and wires and had to do things and, you know, now you can press a button and sit back and drink your, you know, cappuccino and make it happen. But it was interesting too, that Pink Floyd was so that their influences were, you know, stock housing and avant garde players.

Mike Fiorito: 32:09

And what they said is we did stuff like that because we couldn't play. That's what they're, that's, you know, tongue in cheek. But it's interesting that they launched from that place. And of course, go to the arc of Floyd goes to, you know, very popular few minute, you know, fifty second bites of pop tunes, great pop tunes, but their beginnings are something completely different.

AP Strange: 32:40

Right. Yeah. And I mean, one of the places they got their start was in the UFO club in Crazy

Mike Fiorito: 32:49

stuff was happening.

AP Strange: 32:51

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 32:52

Yeah. It was sort of like a cauldron and a lab of where composers, musicians came and it was a total experience. So with projectors, with images, with on screen wild crazy images and this swirling music that's accompanying it along with probably Aaron's behavior, let's just say, you know.

AP Strange: 33:19

Yeah. Lots of artsy young folks and college kids in London

Mike Fiorito: 33:28

Yeah. And

AP Strange: 33:29

the crowd and everything, yeah. Yeah, because I mean, Syd Barrett is almost as interesting a character as Sun Ra with some of this stuff and you kinda get into him. Mhmm. And then, know, talking about having yourself in the story, I think you reference having having been a fan of the later albums and then one day kind of discovering the early stuff.

Mike Fiorito: 33:54

Yeah, yeah, Relics, yeah, it was the the one I discovered that led me to the earlier ones, but yeah.

AP Strange: 34:01

Yeah, I think a lot of us have had that experience that are Floyd fans is just, cause everybody knows songs like Money or you know, another brick in the wall part two. But then you go back and you find those early Sid Barrett tunes and man, they are strange, but they're pretty cool.

Mike Fiorito: 34:24

Yeah. Let's see Emily play and that like bow with that whoosh sort of mechanical, I think I call it like a psychotic wound up toy. It has that complex, really detailed electronic sound, but still almost a folky tune really.

AP Strange: 34:48

Yeah. Yeah. He gets kind of strummy on some of those. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 34:55

Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, what did you did you you first came across Floyd but what was your first Floyd album?

AP Strange: 35:05

I mean I was I was familiar with The Wall and I always thought that was okay but then Wish You Were Here was the big one for me like when I the first time I actually listened to that and it was just being a teenager and it was just kinda like in my early teens and like sneaking cigarettes by smoking them out the window in my friend's room and Yeah. And like staying up late and drinking coffee like I hadn't even graduated to weed at that point but yes. It was an altered state anyway you know it felt like an altered state because you know nicotine was still new you know it's still getting kicks off of that. Yeah, and the first time I heard How A Cigar, big riff where the synth really lands, it was a game changer for me. So that one album really, really hit.

AP Strange: 36:03

Yeah. But it was much later that I that I discovered like Piper at the Gates of Dawn and stuff like that, and it was a totally I I ended up buying like all the albums at some point, Adam Heart Mother and Abigail all those. So

Mike Fiorito: 36:19

Yeah, no, the same. And I think most many of us did just what you did is we heard you got hooked on the popular thing and then you did the kind of excavation and you began to do the work of where this came from. And I did try to make a point of Sid Barrett the pursuit of you know, higher realms I don't even like to use higher realms because that means it's like up here and just the pursuit of more being is one that should be done respectfully and in stages and cautiously and with deep respect. And I think poor Sid kind of took a big swallow of stuff and it hurt him, you know, and there's a kind of cautionary tale, know, the Ace of Pentacles, you have all of these riches, all of this success. How do you manage that?

Mike Fiorito: 37:26

How do you keep it in check?

AP Strange: 37:28

Well, that's that's kind of what have a cigar is about the song, you know? Yeah. Which

Mike Fiorito: 37:36

one's pink?

AP Strange: 37:38

Yeah. Which one's pink? I want to talk to pink.

Mike Fiorito: 37:40

Yeah. And it's Roy Harper on vocals there.

AP Strange: 37:46

Yeah. That's the weird part is that he's not even in the band. It's just they they Yeah. Hired out for that part.

Mike Fiorito: 37:55

Hats off to Roy Harper.

AP Strange: 37:56

It's a great vocal. It's great job. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 38:00

It's very screamy in a way, but you know, so much rock music, you as a I play guitar and I play a live. And with rock music, you you have to project. It's it's it's designed. I mean, unless you do a a subdued temp down version of it. But I'm here, big boy.

Mike Fiorito: 38:20

Have a cigar. Dear boy.

AP Strange: 38:22

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 38:23

And he's really screaming, you know, it's it's projection. Right. But, yeah, great vocal.

AP Strange: 38:29

Yeah. And he can he can do those falsetto jumps really well. That's that's tough.

Mike Fiorito: 38:35

I crack. I'm like, yeah, you know.

AP Strange: 38:37

Yeah. I could never really sing that one, but I always wanted to.

Mike Fiorito: 38:44

Yeah. I've not tried it really. It's funny how things come There's a point sometimes where you try something and I think I've learned to hit the higher registers over time. And so I can do, I do a version of Wish You Were Here, I'm comfortable with it, but I couldn't touch it, you know, ten years ago. So it just there was a point where pushing my voice in a higher register, learning how to use head voice.

Mike Fiorito: 39:12

I was able to put together a non terrible version of it. Let's put it that way.

AP Strange: 39:17

Yeah. Yeah. Well, one thing, I've always appreciated Floyd for their ability to do soundscapes and tell a whole story. I think I had heard at one point they sketched out, basically did a drawing of where they wanted the song to go with peaks and valleys and stuff like that, so that they had a story to tell and they were gonna stick to that, you know?

Mike Fiorito: 39:40

Right. And I think that's one consistent thing throughout the book is I like music that comes from a framework. There's a kind of architecture. And there's a sort of system behind it, certainly when you get to Ino, but throughout the whole, all of the composers that I'm talking about and say genres, because there's when you put constraints, and when you, like you said, draw the images, and you elevate the creation of it as opposed to me just sitting down doing this. But I'm using another template, another modality and trying to synthesize these things that are, I love to use the word orthogonal, they don't really connect, but you're making them connect somehow.

Mike Fiorito: 40:32

So you're making them reflect each other.

AP Strange: 40:35

Well, it's like pulling a tarot card for a musical artist because it's adding in a third element that that you're yeah. That's one one more place you have to go. Mhmm. And and that those are the rules. You have to touch base over here at least once and tie it together, you know.

Mike Fiorito: 40:52

Right. Right.

AP Strange: 40:54

Because I mean, I I you know, you do get to it. I think a lot of these artists, they're visionary, so like there needs to be a visual element as well. For Sun Ra, that was no problem because he would crazy costumes and stuff like that. He wouldn't have considered it a costume I guess, that's who he was you know. Yeah.

AP Strange: 41:14

But the whole kind of cosmic theme of everything and especially making films like Space is the Place. I And think for Pink Floyd that was similar even if it wasn't them, but the whole hypnosis album covers became part of the story you know, became part of part of the whole product. I think you referenced that with Yes as well, some of the Yes album covers. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 41:42

Yeah, and and I think it's the school too, the the the English art school And this promotion of an education of having these were kind of for it was conceived with the notion that you had to be well schooled and well rounded so that you could do engineering diagram, draftsman like work, you were literary, you had a kind of knowledge of poetry and language and there is something that look at the music from that period and what it created and the art, even just the album covers, like you said, that is a work of art and it bled into other musics as well. I mean, you look at, you know, funk music and R and B, you see there's intergalactic imagery, earth, wind and fire, you know, throughout all of their catalog, you see pictures of, you know, Egyptian images and spaceships and that kind of thing. Just became ubiquitous.

AP Strange: 43:03

Yeah, Parliament. Right.

Mike Fiorito: 43:06

Yeah, exactly.

AP Strange: 43:07

And you mentioned in the book Boston with like the UFO guitar cover, like that is pretty iconic for the seventies, right? Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 43:17

And that one note, I love what he does at the end. I was obsessed with spaceships and I talk about that. And when I got that album in the album, what is it called where you slip the album in?

AP Strange: 43:34

The sleeve.

Mike Fiorito: 43:35

Yep, the sleeve. It had a diagram of the spaceship Right. And I was just agog with that looking and all of that. But I love what he does on the it's on the first album, More Than a Feeling. When I see that old the last note, that old song she used to play, I think it's dreaming.

Mike Fiorito: 43:57

I see Marianne Walk Away.

AP Strange: 43:59

Right.

Mike Fiorito: 43:59

And then Tom Shultz takes that note Walk Away. And this is very manual. This is analog before you can do it with, you know, a press of a button. And I discovered it listening with my headphones and that last note becomes an electronic sound from the singing to the electronic sound and then breaks up into a million bits that like kind of scatter throughout the solar system. I just love that.

Mike Fiorito: 44:29

When I kind of discovered that I was like, oh my God, that's incredible. Know?

AP Strange: 44:34

Yeah, I don't think that people have the experience as much now of listening to music with good noise canceling headphones on, because I don't think they make them that way anymore because they will make you deaf.

Mike Fiorito: 44:51

What? Yeah, yeah.

AP Strange: 44:53

That was my preferred way of listening music was put the headphones on and because especially back then they did a lot of really interesting things with stereo and moving moving sound from one channel to another.

Mike Fiorito: 45:07

Right.

AP Strange: 45:07

Floyd definitely and that Boston album was particularly innovative in its engineering, especially with the limitations they had I guess recording is they only had, I think like an eight track recorder or something like that. So they did a lot with a little.

Mike Fiorito: 45:26

Yeah, and Tom Shultz was an innovator and he created, he invented things. So when he became a kind of inventor of devices and technology, and I love the fact that he did it in his house, and you see a picture of the control board and what he built. There was something incredible about his story.

AP Strange: 45:53

Right. Yeah. It's like one of the first real like home studio.

Mike Fiorito: 45:57

Yeah. Yeah. MIT guy, you know?

AP Strange: 46:01

Yeah, yeah. Well, that vocal note turning into an electronic note reminds me of again Pink Floyd with the Animals album. I think it's the song Sheep. I think it's called Sheep. That just keeps happening where Gilmore's voice just seamlessly fades into a synthesizer sound.

AP Strange: 46:25

Yes. And it is so cool.

Mike Fiorito: 46:27

Right and it just becomes kind of wind, you know? And yeah, I love those effects and put through like a Leslie speaker. So they would take these effects put through a Leslie speaker, which would sort of just spin it and

AP Strange: 46:47

Yeah, for listeners, Leslie speakers would actually rotate within the cabinet. So you get this effect where almost kind of fades in and out, not really. Usually they'd be attached to a Hammond B three organ. So if you ever heard like the really cool Hammond sound Mhmm. A really cool organ sound, that's that's that's the Leslie speakers.

AP Strange: 47:10

Yeah. So the roto speaker, I guess.

Mike Fiorito: 47:15

Yeah. And I loved getting into all the technology and talking about and frankly learning about what the technologies were and describing it in as much detail without trying to be boring and trying to return back to the poetry of the moments, but wanting to investigate the technologies and what the things were called. And that was part of the joy of the discovery and writing it really because I knew certain things, but I learned more as I investigated.

AP Strange: 47:49

Yeah. Well, that just made me think this is little off topic, but there was a blues musician that I saw at one point, Professor Harp, I don't know if you're familiar with him at all, but

Mike Fiorito: 48:02

Sounds familiar.

AP Strange: 48:03

He he would play harmonica through through a, Leslie speaker. It was so cool.

Mike Fiorito: 48:12

Yeah. It's like a train. It's like a train mixed with Skylab or something.

AP Strange: 48:19

Right. Yeah. But you're right. If you're a musician or just a music production nerd, could get really bogged down with some of the technical stuff. And I'm not even a big like technical guy musically.

AP Strange: 48:34

I never was. Just you know, but I do love learning these little tricks and learning how when you know what the equipment is and what was available, it gives you an appreciation for what they're able to pull off, but you don't get bogged down with that because you're talking more about the intended effect and you know, in some cases the inspiration and often what can only be described, I guess, as a visionary experience with the music.

Mike Fiorito: 49:08

Because you could have all the technology at your disposal, but you don't create anything. You don't create a journey. You don't create something new that grabs the ear. So it's never really about, it's just another vehicle. I think these, the composers I chose were explorers.

Mike Fiorito: 49:33

Yeah. And they were seeking and there's the seeking that when it's done right, people are taking, taking along that journey. You know, you're you're bidding, you know, to come hither and go on that that ride.

AP Strange: 49:51

Right. Right. And some of this music I had to go look into myself just cause I hadn't really ever investigated it and a good example of that was Steve Halpern. Because I mean, new age music does tend to have kind of a stigma to it I think with musicians and and people in general tend to think of it as kind of like new agey kind of boring music. Why would I listen to that?

AP Strange: 50:21

Maybe I'll listen to that when I'm getting a massage or something like that or doing yoga. And and you do address that in the book, but then you kinda get into Steve Halpern and his work, not just with binaural beats, but stuff that was, so he says actually channeled from aliens. I don't know if you wanna get into that story at all, but

Mike Fiorito: 50:44

when I was spoke

AP Strange: 50:45

directly with him for the book.

Mike Fiorito: 50:47

Yes, we were communicating. A lot of times it was over email. Right. Actually when sent him UFO Symphonic, I was introduced to him. And he then he offered the story to me, but it's in inner peace.

Mike Fiorito: 51:08

So it was already published. It was already kind of out there. But what I thought that was interesting that that's where his inspiration came from. And what I often find interesting is when you talk to people, so when I'm discussing this subject, the question I came to them, did you ever have an experience that was inexplicable that's associated with music or sound? And the answers I got were as disparate, incredibly disparate.

Mike Fiorito: 51:45

Know, there were a few that were duplicative. One thing that I thought just to go back to new age is that new age, it gets derided. I talk about that in the book. And there probably is a lot of crap too, you know, like any, any genre that's really hitting it. And it was very successful.

Mike Fiorito: 52:08

People bought these CDs, they bought the albums, they wanted to, for, to be relaxed to whatever it was, they, people really connected with new age. But it was also very experimental. So there's a lot of experimental music that came out of that and people who started in New Age or they got on the bandwagon, they did a New Age album, and then they went into other directions. So it was this great laboratory for people because people were buying the albums. So artists had a popular setting, had a place to be experimental and inventive and so much great stuff came out of that.

Mike Fiorito: 53:02

I talked about the album with Whale Song and became Whale Song became that album so hugely. I think it didn't sell. I think it came with a National Geographic or something. The album came with a magazine.

AP Strange: 53:17

I'm pretty sure I had that on cassette tape years ago.

Mike Fiorito: 53:20

And it like, but prior to that, it was like, I think the word whale comes from the word monster or in the Bible, the word whale is associated with monster and people often add this notion, even in Moby Dick, that whale is a monster. And this, that album, it sort of humanized, right? It made whales even though we never really understand what they're saying, but it's this doleful weeping and it's echoed the range of human emotion.

AP Strange: 54:04

Yeah, very loudly too. I mean, I think they're considered the loudest mammals on earth since they're underwater, we don't know about it, which is kind of a really crazy thing to think about. It's like they're singing the loudest song in the on the earth and most of us never hear it. Right.

Mike Fiorito: 54:23

And it travels very far. That sound travels underwater very far. But that idea of what is it, you know, what is it that they're saying? And, you know, is it this, to me, there's a language in music, and it's throughout all music and perhaps even sound. There's something very rich in that discovery of it.

Mike Fiorito: 54:48

You can take it, as we said, I think before you hit record, you can go super far with that, you can go very far or you can take it to a limit. But what was interesting about Steven is that he says he was making ambient music before Brian Eno.

AP Strange: 55:08

That

Mike Fiorito: 55:08

was interesting too, that he was making sounds predated what Eno did. I don't think you can really say they're not duplicating each other. I don't think so. Right. But, you know, maybe at the early stages, there was he was doing some interesting things and he goes to a radio show and he's going to be interviewed.

Mike Fiorito: 55:34

The interviewer puts on music as if to say, you know, this is Steven Halperin's music. And then he goes, you know, that's Brian Eno.

AP Strange: 55:43

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 55:44

And then he goes, well, he was on last week. Oh, I'm sorry. I meant to put on your and he tried to address that with Brian Eno, he says, but Brian Eno basically escaped, know, he avoided having Yeah, all the

AP Strange: 56:03

because you cover Eno in the book as well, little bit at least.

Mike Fiorito: 56:06

And just to the idea, what Steven said is that his music was healing music and that's important for him that it's new age, but it's healing music. But at the time, healing music meant you needed to be healed because you were sick. So there was, you know, it had this hangover of being music for sick people. And, but he's still doing that today. He's still making interesting music.

Mike Fiorito: 56:41

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I'll put on Halpern and just put the phone, you know, near my pillow and just listen to music because he has for all kinds of purposes. So there's music for sleep, music for meditation, music to feel more divinatory. So it's the different megahertz have different associations with state of mind.

AP Strange: 57:08

Yeah. Yeah. And it's wild stuff. I I thought it was really interesting though that it's like, he had these associations with Andrea Poharich and Greta Woodru and and the Olga to group of ET intelligences, that he essentially was like channeled the Eastern Peace album with that, right? So Yeah.

AP Strange: 57:39

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 57:41

And that's and I took the excerpt because I said, could you tell me that story? He said, just use the excerpt from the album. Right. You know, take the He

AP Strange: 57:50

didn't tell it back then, but I guess when they re released it, he included it in the liner notes. Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 57:56

Right. He basically came out at some point and said, I've had experiences, and I haven't talked about it because I didn't want to be called crazy. Yeah. So, but, you know, that's strewn throughout the book here and there. Was it Rick Wakeman that saw a UFO?

Mike Fiorito: 58:19

Was it Rick Chris Wakeman or Chris Squire. And it's with our dear friend who the book is dedicated to Earl Grey, Earl Grey Anderson. He had this experience he knew, I guess it was Chris Squire he knew. Chris Squire told him about an encounter that he had. And he saw a UFO kind of 20 feet over his head, this illuminated bright object.

Mike Fiorito: 58:50

And then Chris asked Earl, where do you think they came from? Earl said, From the future. And then Chris Squire said, I gotta write this down. Let me find something. Yeah, it's interesting that think Whitley Strieber asked me, is there music that can are there sounds or music that could call a UFO?

Mike Fiorito: 59:20

And I said, I don't think things work like that. I mean, it's not like a dog whistle. I mean, I've heard people talk about this whistle thing sound that just doesn't seem to make sense with the way the phenomena behaves, which is it's not logical and it doesn't operate in that fashion. It's something that happens when it does and it's very hard to replicate.

AP Strange: 59:54

Well, it's like a moment on stage that through pure happenstance, like the improvisation was really good that night, you know, or like something that you couldn't have predicted, like an audience interaction or something.

Mike Fiorito: 01:00:09

It's a manifestation. May occur through a traumatic experience or it just breaks in through the door for whatever reason. So there's no one formula. And also sometimes sound or music can take you to exotic places. And I hate to use those terms because it's not like it's it's not out there, it's it's here.

Mike Fiorito: 01:00:34

It's just a different dimension of here. Or sometimes there's music in these experiences. There's symphonic explosions of beautiful symphonic sounds. People have that experience, but not always. Sometimes it's pure silence.

Mike Fiorito: 01:00:53

There's not one way to do this thing. It's multifaceted. But to come back to music is a language. It predates. It's pre lingual.

Mike Fiorito: 01:01:03

It goes deep into our brain, it touches emotions and areas of our being that we're mostly not aware of. And there's a rich potential, I think, to make that connection, that discovery. For me, music has that. It's like a contact modality.

AP Strange: 01:01:28

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 01:01:29

Contact with what? You know, I say, I don't know. I'm not sure.

AP Strange: 01:01:33

Yeah. And then communicate something that maybe words couldn't, you know, I've often thought about that with, you know, being with a background in guitar, always trying to cop licks from, like, Jimi Hendrix or something and sometimes Jimmy will bend a note impossibly far and then he bends it just a little bit more, and you're just like, okay, that means something. Like, what that did to me emotionally, like the the synapses that fired as a result of that one little half step more bend is communicating something to me that nobody could ever communicate in words.

Mike Fiorito: 01:02:16

Yeah, there's a saying all art conspires to the condition of music. And you could just get this. It's like an abduction of feeling. Yeah. Something can, a person can materialize, someone you knew or an experience or feeling.

Mike Fiorito: 01:02:37

But it's not just that, it goes so much deeper. To me, it's this of hieroglyphic language that is the deeper you look, the deeper it goes.

AP Strange: 01:02:49

Yeah, and it's at once universal and also deeply personal.

Mike Fiorito: 01:02:54

Right. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:02:59

Well, is all very fascinating stuff. Feel like it's the kind of thing that you can end up kind of talking in circles about. Sure. Yeah. But but the way you write it out, especially in this book, I I enjoyed UFO Symphonic quite a bit.

AP Strange: 01:03:16

In this one, I think I like even more just because you had a really nice balance of the way that you you you portioned it out, you know, with different artists and the the tarot thing that I had mentioned, but also your own personal experiences, not just with the music, but with like kind of altered states. Before we wrap things up, I didn't know if you wanted to, talk about about any of your personal experiences because there was one, I think it was like, well, guess you could classify it as a near death experience. Mhmm. Or yeah, if you wanted to talk about that at all because it gets to that absurd factor that you were talking about.

Mike Fiorito: 01:04:03

Yeah, it's funny because when it happened and often is the case when these things happen, we don't know what happened. So I had a, I went to get an injection for a heart, like an MRI type of thing. And they gave me this injection. And then I started to faint. And I fell down, I basically collapsed on the gurney.

Mike Fiorito: 01:04:32

And what I remember is my brain, it was like the pulleys, the wheels were kind of disconnected and it was harsh. It was this kind of like the, that Pink Floyd song you were just, you know, talking about this, where you're going into this, terrifying state.

AP Strange: 01:04:52

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 01:04:53

And then I had, visions and encounter and conversation with a kind of a being that was messing with my head. Yeah. And, we're having this kind of Carlos Castaneda like conversation. And at some point, and I'm trying to remember, at some point, they they start to put the resuscitator on me.

AP Strange: 01:05:25

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 01:05:26

And I remember, so I heard now, am I dying? I don't know. People say they hear things when they're in that state And they see things as if from outside. I'm not the first to have that experience. And they said my heart had stopped.

Mike Fiorito: 01:05:46

But the attendees, the attendants didn't tell me that.

AP Strange: 01:05:50

I

Mike Fiorito: 01:05:50

said afterwards when I came to, it was a terrifying experience. I mean, I felt going into the vortex. Right. And I said, what happened? I said, your heart slowed down.

Mike Fiorito: 01:06:02

And I said, I heard you say my heart stopped. He said, your heart stopped. He wouldn't tell me that. So, I was in this netherworld where and it and as you see in the book, there are many descriptions where I go into an altered state, there's there is sometimes there's music associated. And it is very important and central to the book that music gives us access to these altered states.

Mike Fiorito: 01:06:33

These other dimensions that are here, they don't seem to be always available to us, but in melt away the when we melt away the ego and this kind of strict enclosure go somewhere. The, you know, and that inner space is outer space and they're kind of wrapped up into each other. Oh, right. Was a, you know, it it took, I would say that that experience, I've always thought about it, but since I've gotten into this subject matter, I thought about it differently.

AP Strange: 01:07:09

Yeah, because you could think of it as a near death experience or, you know, like a trauma vision of some kind or, or, or even an abduction, like an alien abduction. Could claim it that way.

Mike Fiorito: 01:07:21

And they all seem to be kind of have the same language.

AP Strange: 01:07:24

Right.

Mike Fiorito: 01:07:25

You know, so that was sort of why I put it in the book. They all seem to mirror each other in terms of the trajectory and what a person experiences, what they may encounter.

AP Strange: 01:07:36

Yeah, I think it was that experience, but there was a being that seemed kind of like an alien, but and he had a Brooklyn accent. Yeah. Which I just love that because that was the absurdity factor. Right. You're like, why would somebody make that up?

Mike Fiorito: 01:07:50

Right. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:07:51

Like, the alien is voiced by Mel Blanc doing, like, what it is like when he when he turns characters. Right. Like, where are you saying that?

Mike Fiorito: 01:08:00

But, you know, the interesting thing is it's it's when we look at it, it looks back at us. Yeah. In some way that seems familiar. Maybe our mind needs to put it that way so we can comprehend it so we can put it in context. Otherwise, it's too amorphous and we just can't see it or can't not see it.

Mike Fiorito: 01:08:27

We have to materialize it in some way. Yeah. So that we can perceive it in a comprehensible way.

AP Strange: 01:08:34

Right, yeah. It's almost like you're singing a duet with the phenomenon and harmonizing, yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 01:08:43

Right, right.

AP Strange: 01:08:44

Yeah.

Mike Fiorito: 01:08:44

You take the high part, I'm gonna, you know. Right. You take the poll part, I'll take the John Paul. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:08:56

Well, it's really good stuff, and for listeners, I highly recommend the book. The book is coming out in April, April 11, I guess.

Mike Fiorito: 01:09:06

Yeah, April 11. And but it's available for preorder now. And if you go to you can go to my website, mikefiorito.com, or anywhere books are sold. It's put out by Loyola University and, it's available now. And, I'd love to hear what you think, people that pick it up and read it.

Mike Fiorito: 01:09:27

And, I will soon have copies on hand as well, I would say in the next few weeks.

AP Strange: 01:09:33

Okay, wonderful. And if people want to follow along and keep up with you, is there any social media that we can direct them to or should they just go to the website?

Mike Fiorito: 01:09:43

Yeah, I'd say you can find me on Instagram, on Facebook. The website has all those details as well. But thank you, AP. It's always fun and great to chat with you and it's a journey in and of itself, but I really appreciate you taking the time to read the book, which you obviously did in detail. So thank you.

Mike Fiorito: 01:10:06

I really appreciate that.

AP Strange: 01:10:08

Yeah. Well, like I said, it was a pleasure for me and I burned through it pretty quickly. I guess you're gonna have to write another one now.

Mike Fiorito: 01:10:18

I'm already working on it. At it. I'm like a guy, you know, working at the steel factory.

AP Strange: 01:10:25

Yep. Well, I I had meant to ask because this that was your sixth book?

Mike Fiorito: 01:10:31

I'd I'd something like that. Sixth, So I'm I'm busy at this thing and it's just I just really love the process and enjoy it. I'm working on a Bluegrass book now, but it very much has to do with the sacred kind of origins of that music, and it's in progress.

AP Strange: 01:10:52

Well, sounds great too. All right, cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Mike.

Mike Fiorito: 01:10:59

AP, be well. Have a great night. Thank you, and thanks all for listening and staying with us.