The Silver Panthers of Luna

Lathe Cut 12"

A speculative ethnography composed by Ben Blohowiak from archival recordings of the Black Panthers and their comrades with recordings by Timothy Leary and others from the Psychedelic elite of the 60s and 70s. This is the first part of a trilogy, followed by Let There Be Peace on Mars Again and Longaevi of The West. Hear the record on Bandcamp.

CREDITS

Composition by Ben Blohowiak
Cover by Mat Keel
Printing by Myths Drift
Lathe Cut by Funky Frankenstein
Limited edition of 50 copies.
YWC002-2022

Released September 1, 2022

LINER NOTES

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

--------

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