I don’t remember how I came about discovering Ramases, but memories that flash from time to time seem to peg it as when I first moved to London UK from Vancouver in 2007. I believe this was on a mix I discovered and then downloaded out of interest, as it featured a more eclectic mix of tracks — from some obscure French disco and then segueing into a track such as the “Fire Leap” from the film The Wicker Man. Overall there were many strange, experimental and otherworldly tracks on this mix, and ended up becoming something I listened to numerous times over rainy Sundays, quiet afternoons that followed late nights and a soundtrack for doing low key things around the flat.
And on this mix was the track “Molecular Delusions” — a meditative, spiritual and psychedelic chant from the 1971 album Space Hymns by Ramases that got me more curious about the artist. And the story of this artist is a bit of a strange one indeed. It started when a man from Northern England named Barrington Frost met a woman called Dorothy Laflin in a restaurant in Felixstowe UK sometime in the 1960s. It seemed that fate had meant for them to be together as they then married and moved to London. At some point after that, in the near future, Frost saw a reflection of what he thought was a spaceman in a window on a street and then decided to shave his head. And then following that Laflin (now with the surname Frost) had discovered a book on Egyptian history in a bookstore that had a cover with an illustration of a woman from that era that looked like Dorothy, and then with a fact listed in this book that Ramases was the first pharoah to shave his head — which Barrington had done recently. Something clicked with the newlywed couple that it was fate, and then began the transformation of the couple into re-incarnates of these ancient Egyptian dieties, and in turn re-naming themselves Ramases (Barrington) and Selket (Dororthy).
After changing the direction of the their musical endeavours into this thread of mysticism under the name Ramases & Selket in the late 1960s, it was on 1971’s classic Space Hymns using the name Ramases that became the main release these artists were known for in the decades to come, bringing together a mix of classic folk music, druidian chants and psychedelic rock which addressed the topics of spirituality, outer space, reincarnation and the infinite beyond.
There’s a longer version of this tale which can be read on this somewhat recent article written about the back story of Space Hymns on the UK music website The Ransom Note.
But the main reason this track “Molecular Delusions” has come back to my consciousness as of late was because as I was thinking about tracks that have mistakes in them or things they forgot to edit out. One main example of this I’ve come across lately — which prompted this entry — is the beginning of Pink Floyd‘s “Wish You Were Here” from the their 1975 album of the same name where singer/guitarist David Gilmour coughs and sniffles, which is heard audibly in the track. Apparently the legend goes that hearing this back Gilmour decided to quit smoking.
Obviously with genres like punk there’s this sort of thing all of the time, mainly due to seat-of-the-pants recording sessions done in short time periods and more and more just to get the live of the floor sound and perhaps that actual humans are thrashing through these songs.
“Molecular Delusions”, which is the second song on side B of Space Hymns, is mainly a repeated chant in a calming minor key balanced out with a lead vocal obviously taking influence from a more eastern style of singing. There’s many vocal tracks layered into a dense wall that alludes to religious choirs of cultures past.
I’ve listened to this track numerous times in headphones and years ago late one night while doing so, you can actually hear one of the backing vocalists say “Fuck!” during on one repetition of this looping chant. You can hear this clearly around the 1m10s mark of the track posted here, and more prominently so if you’re listening to the track in headphones.
It caught me off guard at first, giving me that spiky feeling that one might get hearing some satanic mantra hidden in the music, but apparently this muttered expletive was simply there because the backing vocalist missed his cue. I felt like I had discovered some dirt under the layers of mystic, looped chanting of this track.
There’s a bit more of a detailed back story on this “mistake” that can be read here.
Despite being a rare and obscure record in the general realm of psychedelic music, it does have its sizeable number of dedicated fans, including Swedish actor Peter Stormare (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Minority Report, The Zero Theorem, Fanny and Alexander and countless other Hollywood hits) who presents this video for the Ramases Complete Recordings release that he put together back in 2014 on his own StormVox label.