"The Salford krautrock merchants play The Trip fest next week. Ahead of that, Samuel A Smith took a trip to/in their HQ to catch up with the band:
In the foreword of The Archaic Revival by ethnobotanist and sage of psychedelia Terence McKenna, Tom Robbins writes of "a cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of it's cognitive Kansas."
This is Gnod. The auricular incarnation of McKenna’s strangest philosophies, re-imagined by some pissed off Norse demiurge to be enacted in an amphitheatre made from multi-coloured crystal skulls. The flower children have been forced to violent revolt and what’s left is bizarre, and fucking magnificent.
On a Friday night, ahead of their first night set at the five-day psych odyssey fest The Trip, I’m at Gnod’s Islington Mills base in Salford, the epicentre of Gnod's collective mind, and about to be immersed first hand in a practice session. They have a banquet table of kit - analogue gadgets, pedals, drum machines, all manner of wires and strange twisty bits like some genius teenager's wildest aqueous dream, all set up ready to transport to some peculiar and freakish realm. Lead to a black leather sofa at the back of the room, they hand me a bin bag blind fold. This was something to be experienced without vision…"
Read the rest of the interview here: The Quietus
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