THU., MARCH 22, 2007
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Cusco’s Lullaby In Dreamland
by Robert Phoenix
During the mid-to-late '90s, Art Bell wasn’t just the king of late-night radio, he was its grand magus. Bell had transformed himself from a conservative, overnight version of Rush Limbaugh and into the airwaves' high priest of the occult, the paranormal and the conspiratorial.
Bell did his nationally syndicated "Coast to Coast AM" show out of his home studio in Pahrump, Nevada, not far from the Groom Lake facility commonly known as Area 51, or what insiders call Dreamland. He reserved Sunday nights for his forays into the edgy and unknown, dedicated to the X-Files crowd; those nights, the show was named after the aforementioned “Dreamland.”
Hawking everything from crank radios (no pun intended) to smoked salmon while exploring the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, the Philadelphia Experiment, the Great Pyramid, etc., Bell and his broadcast company learned quite quickly that the fringe material brought in both listeners and advertising revenue. Very soon, "Coast to Coast AM" was completely dedicated to "Dreamland" material, seven nights a week.
There was a slight American Gothic quality to Bell, like a cross between a character from HBO’s Carnivale and an archetypal announcer from the golden era of radio, channeling both the possibility and angst that courses through dreamers and insomniacs alike. He even penned a top-selling book during this period, titled The Quickening. While his powers were near their peak, as an unexpected comet with a bi-furcated tail (Hale-Bopp) came blazing towards the planet, Bell also helped German new age artists Michael Holm and Kristian Schultze, collectively known as Cusco, break through to millions of people.
Bell would play Cusco constantly as his bumper music, coming in and out of breaks. It caused so much of a buzz that, according to Matt Marshall, Cusco’s producer and founder of Higher Octave (Cusco’s label) and now head of Cyber Set, an electronic/new age label based in San Francisco, Higher Octave sold close to 50,000 Cusco CDs based solely on Bell’s use of their music.
However, the Bell effect cannot be underestimated. His audience was often on the edge of their pillows listening to the likes of psychic Gordon-Michael Scallion translate his visions of America after the coming Great Deluge, or former Army remote viewer Ed Dames (one of Bell’s favorite guests) relay his revelations about the surface of Mars, and a future Earth inhabited by aliens. Then there were Bell's woozy and wild interviews and the offbeat calls of eccentric listeners that supplied their own surreal twist. Add a little sleep deprivation and the music of Cusco became the sound of their odysseys in Dreamland.
Audiences were prime and primed for an exotic soundtrack that acted as a backdrop for their nightly rollercoaster rides into the unknown regions of Bell’s late night mystery school. But what it was that appealed to Bell’s minions, even Marshall is hard-pressed to answer. Trying to capture lightning twice, he set out on a very expensive advertising campaign with Bell and his network to promote other Higher Octave artists such as former Starship guitarist Craig Chaquico, Acoustic Alchemy, Ottmar Leibert and others, but to little avail. It was clear that the love affair was strictly between Bell’s audience and the two Germans, with little room for anything else on Higher Octave’s fine label of new age/adult alternative fare.
In many ways, Cusco's music is similar to Martin Denny’s cocktail and lounge romps of the late '50s and early '60s, a frothy pastiche of exotica felt through the listeners' approximation of what something wild, romantic and in Cusco’s case, mystical should sound like.
Both Inner Journeys and Ancient Journeys-A Vision of the New World are great examples of the Cusco aesthetic. Panpipe, sitar and shanai patches on a synth approximate the musical sounds of ancient cultures and distant lands while obedient drum machines march to the rhythms programmed by Holm and Schultze. In a sample-heavy era, Cusco stays far away from cut-and-paste snippets and loops, preferring to actually sound like the indigenous music they are fusing with light jazz, funk and rock, resulting in something that's both odd and quaint.
While the likes of William Orbit and Enigma were morphing new age onto the dance floor, Cusco were — and still are — quite comfortable sounding like they prefer playing, as opposed to producing, even if it means that their unmistakable imprimatur is firmly rooted in the previous century rather than the current one. They are adepts of analog, somewhere in the mix of musical mysticism and the soaring chords of synths imitating other instruments.
And what of Bell? What became of the right-winger turned what some might say wing-nutter? That bifurcated comet, the one with the tail, was the object of not only Ed Dames' remote viewings, but also those of Courtney Brown, a professor from Emory College. It was Brown’s otherworldly and cosmic depictions of Hale-Bopp, heard on Bell’s broadcast, that allegedly became the clarion call to the Heaven’s Gate cult to prepare for their ascension, ultimately leading to their group suicide. Bell would later go through a series of his own personal tragedies, and while he is still involved with the program to a certain extent, it’s mostly in the hands of former investigative reporter George Noory and Whitley Strieber, author of the infamous 1987 alien-abduction chronicle, Communion.
Perhaps the quickening came too fast or not soon enough, but the strains of Cusco remain as a reminder of Bell’s late-night reign as the psychopomp of a restless, nocturnal nation.
Bell did his nationally syndicated "Coast to Coast AM" show out of his home studio in Pahrump, Nevada, not far from the Groom Lake facility commonly known as Area 51, or what insiders call Dreamland. He reserved Sunday nights for his forays into the edgy and unknown, dedicated to the X-Files crowd; those nights, the show was named after the aforementioned “Dreamland.”
Hawking everything from crank radios (no pun intended) to smoked salmon while exploring the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, the Philadelphia Experiment, the Great Pyramid, etc., Bell and his broadcast company learned quite quickly that the fringe material brought in both listeners and advertising revenue. Very soon, "Coast to Coast AM" was completely dedicated to "Dreamland" material, seven nights a week.
There was a slight American Gothic quality to Bell, like a cross between a character from HBO’s Carnivale and an archetypal announcer from the golden era of radio, channeling both the possibility and angst that courses through dreamers and insomniacs alike. He even penned a top-selling book during this period, titled The Quickening. While his powers were near their peak, as an unexpected comet with a bi-furcated tail (Hale-Bopp) came blazing towards the planet, Bell also helped German new age artists Michael Holm and Kristian Schultze, collectively known as Cusco, break through to millions of people.
Bell would play Cusco constantly as his bumper music, coming in and out of breaks. It caused so much of a buzz that, according to Matt Marshall, Cusco’s producer and founder of Higher Octave (Cusco’s label) and now head of Cyber Set, an electronic/new age label based in San Francisco, Higher Octave sold close to 50,000 Cusco CDs based solely on Bell’s use of their music.
However, the Bell effect cannot be underestimated. His audience was often on the edge of their pillows listening to the likes of psychic Gordon-Michael Scallion translate his visions of America after the coming Great Deluge, or former Army remote viewer Ed Dames (one of Bell’s favorite guests) relay his revelations about the surface of Mars, and a future Earth inhabited by aliens. Then there were Bell's woozy and wild interviews and the offbeat calls of eccentric listeners that supplied their own surreal twist. Add a little sleep deprivation and the music of Cusco became the sound of their odysseys in Dreamland.
Audiences were prime and primed for an exotic soundtrack that acted as a backdrop for their nightly rollercoaster rides into the unknown regions of Bell’s late night mystery school. But what it was that appealed to Bell’s minions, even Marshall is hard-pressed to answer. Trying to capture lightning twice, he set out on a very expensive advertising campaign with Bell and his network to promote other Higher Octave artists such as former Starship guitarist Craig Chaquico, Acoustic Alchemy, Ottmar Leibert and others, but to little avail. It was clear that the love affair was strictly between Bell’s audience and the two Germans, with little room for anything else on Higher Octave’s fine label of new age/adult alternative fare.
In many ways, Cusco's music is similar to Martin Denny’s cocktail and lounge romps of the late '50s and early '60s, a frothy pastiche of exotica felt through the listeners' approximation of what something wild, romantic and in Cusco’s case, mystical should sound like.
Both Inner Journeys and Ancient Journeys-A Vision of the New World are great examples of the Cusco aesthetic. Panpipe, sitar and shanai patches on a synth approximate the musical sounds of ancient cultures and distant lands while obedient drum machines march to the rhythms programmed by Holm and Schultze. In a sample-heavy era, Cusco stays far away from cut-and-paste snippets and loops, preferring to actually sound like the indigenous music they are fusing with light jazz, funk and rock, resulting in something that's both odd and quaint.
While the likes of William Orbit and Enigma were morphing new age onto the dance floor, Cusco were — and still are — quite comfortable sounding like they prefer playing, as opposed to producing, even if it means that their unmistakable imprimatur is firmly rooted in the previous century rather than the current one. They are adepts of analog, somewhere in the mix of musical mysticism and the soaring chords of synths imitating other instruments.
And what of Bell? What became of the right-winger turned what some might say wing-nutter? That bifurcated comet, the one with the tail, was the object of not only Ed Dames' remote viewings, but also those of Courtney Brown, a professor from Emory College. It was Brown’s otherworldly and cosmic depictions of Hale-Bopp, heard on Bell’s broadcast, that allegedly became the clarion call to the Heaven’s Gate cult to prepare for their ascension, ultimately leading to their group suicide. Bell would later go through a series of his own personal tragedies, and while he is still involved with the program to a certain extent, it’s mostly in the hands of former investigative reporter George Noory and Whitley Strieber, author of the infamous 1987 alien-abduction chronicle, Communion.
Perhaps the quickening came too fast or not soon enough, but the strains of Cusco remain as a reminder of Bell’s late-night reign as the psychopomp of a restless, nocturnal nation.
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