The Silver Panthers of Luna LP

This is YWC 002
Released August 2022
Hear it on our BandCamp.

Limited to 50 copies
Lathe cut by Funky Frankenstein
Design by Yes We Cannibal
Cover image printed by Myths Drift

This record is a speculative ethnography composed by Ben Blohowiak from archival recordings of the Black Panthers and their comrades and recordings by Timothy Leary and others from the Psychedelic elite of the 60s and 70s.

The lathe cut format sounds like a record from that era and the package includes a free digital download code.

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In 1970, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love paid the Weathermen to smuggle Timothy Leary out of prison and into the care of Black Panthers in Algeria. Subsequently, Eldridge Cleaver made a statement via radio broadcast in which he renounced the possibility of alliance between the Panthers and Leary and psychedelic drug culture as a whole. This piece came about in an attempt to answer the question of what such an alliance might have otherwise produced.

– Ben Blohowiak, Charlottesville. Summer 2022

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In 2010, when this visionary, cut-up masterpiece was first assembled, revolutionary aspirations for justice had not yet fractured along lines of identity under the fatuous doctrine of intersectionality. Strangely, by synthetically collapsing the provocative analyses of the Black Panther’s storied leadership (all staunch internationalists) with the musings of the most verbose and controversial of the psychedelic advocates (along with a diverse plenitude of other sounds and voices), Blohowiak succeeds in sonically conjuring an instruction manual for what Sun Ra termed our Alter Destiny.

This manual constitutes a diagram for a planet saved from the implosive weight of its many corruptions, a diagram that must be “read” by our ears but approximates quite closely what Manuel DeLanda theorized as the potent role of diagrams in the genesis of new forms. In expanding Deleuze’s concepts of spaces of energetic possibilities and the singularities which shape these spaces, DeLanda emphasizes the catalytic nature of inherent tensions in actualizing virtual forms, that is, in making material what is merely aspirational. As of this writing, NASA has twice scuttled launch plans for the Artemis rocket -- a precursor to an effort to, once again, put Whitey on the Moon (Gil Scott-Heron, 1971).

Maybe we’ll beat them there.
Maybe we already have.

Dr Thomas Stanley Washington DC, Summer 2022