Andy Pye`s Leeds-based Balearic Social Radio launches its vinyl arm with a four-track 12 from Bucharest.

“Caldafar” adds exotic percussion and echoes of ghosts in the bush to a skipping House beat. “Spirala” is cosmic, psychedelic, cinematic electronica. “Ziggurat” sends Wolf Muller vibes and chimes born on a Southeast Asian wind rattling & tumbling around the New Beat of Chayell. “Shivers” uses tribal drumming and dubwise keys to accompany a creepy lesson on transmutation and lycanthropy lifted from Vincent Price`s 1972 “children`s classic”, “Tales Of Witches, Ghosts And Goblins”. An instruction in the concoction and application of the same hallucinogenic, tropane alkaloid containing ointment used to make witches “fly”.

Once, when I was coincidently living in Leeds, there was a summer-long dope drought and in desperation one of my housemates borrowed a book from the medical library on psychoactive plants. A book we all studied and from which we drew up a list. I can clearly remember the looks of disbelief and horror, the intakes of breath, from the well-meaning vegans in the local herbal “Head” shop, who must of assumed we were trying to kill ourselves. Back in the days before ayahuasca package tours, they were rightly shy of manslaughter charges and stayed our requests for Jimson Weed by convincing us that a weight of kava root would be more our bag, placating us with the lie that if you chewed enough of it you would experience a cocaine-like high (Kava is actually a sedative). I guess you can picture the scene, a room full of half-wits munching and asking, “You feel anything yet?” It did make your tongue go numb but I`m not sure if that was a consequence of the root or the hours of mastication.

Take it easy on the opium and henbane if you`re dancing in a wolf skin girdle after midnight.