In the mid-to-late 1960s, the Kitsilano district of Vancouver was home to a thriving community of musicians, artists and freaks every bit as whacked-out as the more famous Haight Ashbury down the coast in San Francisco. A prime mover on this scene was poet bill bissett, who had gained a modicum of notoriety writing and performing concrete poetry in the style of Bob Cobbing and d.a. levy (with whom he shared an aversion to capital letters). In 1968, bissett and a rag-tag band going by the name of Th Mandan Massacre (named in honour of the eponymous Native American tribe of the Great Plains) blagged a day in the University of British Columbia's electronic music lab and cut a chaotic session to four Ampeg tape machines. The result, Awake In Th Red Desert, is a heavily psychedelicised spoken-word album with ragged accompaniment of flutes, bongos and occasional guitar, which luxuriates in the relaxed afternoon freak-out vibe of the handful of the similarly ramshackle gems The Godz cut for ESP-Disk’ around the same time. An extra layer of what-the-heck is added by thick layers of wibble and whoosh provided by the suspiciously named Wayne Carr wrestling with a primitive Buchla synthesiser. It's a trip, baby.