Ptolemaic Terrascope #24

I’ve sort of dipped in and out of Phil McMullen and Nick Saloman’s Ptolemaic Terrascope world over many years, but I’ve come to see their efforts at creating a psychedelic music oracle and broadsheet as a highly successful one, no more so than this mid-career effort from November 1997, Ptolemaic Terrascope #24. I guess the way I sorta contextualize the magazine is as an underground but widely-distributed fanzine treading somewhere at a midpoint between Bucketfull of Brains and the later Galactic Zoo Dossier; more intelligent than either and slightly more geared toward a collector mentality.

Ptolemaic Terrascope often included vinyl and CDs, and this one, which has a 4-song vinyl comp EP, excitedly announces that future issues will include compact discs. Fuck yeah! It also announces the 1998 Terrastock 2 festival taking place in San Francisco, the city which has been my hometown for 34 years except for the mere two years I was away in grad school in Seattle, which, alas, coincided with this festival. I came home to SF for spring break and this has just happened and all the cool heads were abuzz about it; you are welcome to gaze at the lineup I’d just missed by a day or two.

The biggest draw in this issue is a Karl Precoda interview, a rarity if there ever was one. He won’t talk about The Dream Syndicate, but this discussion was held right as that excellent first Last Days of May CD was coming out, and I really love that thing and its follow-up and don’t get why they still seem to be almost completely unheard. It’s terrific to see a reluctant Precoda eventually settle graciously into his interview and talk technique, dub music, his guitars and more. There’s also a Guided By Voices interview. Robert Pollard has just turned 40 and defensively expounds a bit on his advancing age, saying “I still think I’ve got a few years left”. I’ll say he did.

Other features are on The Electric Prunes; The Misunderstood, later subjects of an exhaustive Ugly Things exhumation; a Ghost side project called Cosmic Invention; and a cool piece on Pelt (Mike Gangloff, Jack Rose and Patrick Best) – an excellent overview of a band I missed at the time, confusing them with the UK’s Felt whom I didn’t like. In the reviews section, we’ve got some absurdly tiny type that even twentysomethings might complain about – not that any of those were reading Ptolemaic Terrascope #24, right? – and it meshes reviews of stuff like Santana – Live at the Fillmore with a passel of freak-rock albums on the New World of Sound label such as Plague Lounge, a teenage pre-Comets on Fire band whom I once saw open for Monoshock.

That reviews section is a good encapsulation of the sort of musical melange this ostensible psych fanzine was trying to pull together: heavy rock, freakbeat, far-out pop, strange noise, garage rock, and anything with even a twinge of drug use, real or imagined. Advertisers are all over the map, from the most minimalist of noise labels to the most maximalist (if super-underground) of loud rocknroll/punk labels. Seems that issues of this magazine aren’t too tough to procure online if one is so inclined, but me, I’ve just got this and one other and could probably find room somewhere for another few.