- Purple is a hue that is many things for many people. For New Age devotees, it's the color of the seventh "crown" chakra, denoting the highest level of spirituality. The editors of Vice Magazine snark that it's the color of sexual repression. When it comes to what 'heads stuff their blunts with in hip-hop, purp is the "highest" grade.
As it pertains to this mix collaboration between Hey Convict! and the Bumrocks mp3 site, purple no doubt goes back to an earlier epoch before hip-hop, Vice-collecting hipsters and New Age gurus, back to the days of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." In fact, his "Captain Coconut" (a wicked deep album cut) might get sussed in the fog of this hour-long mix. Or maybe not.
Much like RVNG's previous ambitious dual-format package—JD Twitch from Optimo's 60 Minutes of Fear/ 10 Inches of Fear—the Purple Brain mix (a mix CD and grape-colored 7-inch and, for the most manic of collectors, a hand-sewn purple tam is available from the website) deploys the source material's audio fidelity itself to further its effect. Can everything here really sound this dusty, foggy and displaced? Cuz foggy it is. Even the art (by far the simplest and least busy of the RVNG catalog) still casts a miasma about the proceedings, consisting of heavily-photocopied images distorted to the point of indecipherability.
Befuddlement and disorientation promotes PB's cause: White boy soulster Joe South bumps right into French library music funker Yan Tregger, while everyone from Robert Palmer to Beaver & Krause can hide in plain sight, right next to French prog acts like Electric Sandwich and Gong. Even as the hour-long mix perks up, it never quite shakes off the cobwebs. As befits such haze, it's only when I look up the Purple Brain tracklisting do I realize that the disembodied voice intoning "Siiiiiimple Headphooooone Miiiiiiiind" comes from something on my own shelves: Stereolab's collaboration with Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton. It's the proverbial hand being unseen in front of the face, but coming as it does from deep inside this purple haze, it's not so surprising that lately things just don't seem the same.
Tracklist 01. Isis - Servant Saviour
02. Stereolab & Nurse With Wound - Trippin' with the Birds
03. Jimi Hendrix - Captain Coconut
04. Joe South - A Million Miles Away
05. Yan Tregger - Sea Trumpet
06. Irmin Schmidt & Bruno Spoerri - Toy Planet
07. Bahumutsi Drama Group - To the Comrades (PB Edit)
08. 2-82 - Purple Paraiso
09. Dominik Von Senger - Dlaluk
10. Alan White - Ooooh Baby
11. Robert Palmer - Si Chatouillieux
12. Barry DeVorzon & Perry Botkin Jr. - The Riot (PB Edit)
13. Electric Sandwich - China
14. Beaver & Krause - People's Park
15. Phew - Our Element
16. Fusioon - Rapsodioa Un Violin
17. Gong - Percolations Parts 1 & 2
18. Roland Vincent & Jean-Pierre Lang - Le Feouk
19. Eroc - Der Prophet