1. A Sitting On A Gate (4:02)
2. Alice Meets the Knights (1:43)
3. Dance to the Talking Flower (5:47)
4. Dum and Dee (4:48)
5. Her Majesty, Queen Alice (6:28)
6. Jabberwocky (3:41)
7. The Alice Theme (2:52)
8. March of the Chessmen (2:21)
9. Through the Looking Glass (3:34)

All music composed by Peter Howell; in collaboration with John Ferdinando and The Ditchling Players.

Alice through the Looking Glass is a bizarre and mysterious record that I happened upon a few years back on some long-forgotten psychedelic music forum, but have since struggled to find any concrete information pertaining to its original conception (though I'm sure if you look hard enough, you'll find something). As is my understanding, the music on Alice was written and performed by Peter Howell, one of the unsung heroes of the 1960's psyche-folk underground; a man who had previously released albums alongside John Ferdinando (and under the band-names Agincourt and Ithaca), before eventually going on to work for the BBC's Radiophonics Workshop and on programmes like Doctor Who. The music was either used for a local theatre production, or used the audio from a theatre production, but regardless, you can certainly see why Howell would later find his calling in the world of sound recording and audio manipulation, with the music here weaving in and out of - and sometimes overlapping with - the muffled recordings of the performances themselves, in a way that creates a total conceptual symbiosis between both the narrative and the music itself.

Now admittedly, this won't be an album everyone's taste; if the concept and subject matter don't turn you off then the main drawback (of course) is that the album was put together on a budget and certainly sounds like it; with the overall sound of the record sometimes seeming quite muffled and muted due to poor recording equipment and the studio environment in which it was conceived. The limitations of the recording are most apparent during the more experimental audio transitions between the theatrical performance samples and the music itself, with the occasional crackle of distortion or minor mistake in the mixing really standing out a mile; especially when we make the natural comparisons to the skilful recordings and fancy production techniques that we're used to hearing on record. However, for me, this is all part of the album's eccentric charm, and another reason (alongside some of the fine musical compositions) as to why this record is so inspiring and unsung.

I suppose these days bedroom recordings are common place. You only have to spend a few minutes trawling the music profiles on Myspace to find a million bedroom pop acts following their own trip. They may never break the mainstream, like say, Mike Skinner or Patrick Wolf, but they're putting their ideas out there and creating music that exists in its own world. We saw a similar approach in the 1980's, with bedroom indie-pop having a whole style, fan bass and ideology worked out before they'd even set foot in a studio. However, despite the indie-pop or twee-pop aesthetic, most of these bands were actually gunning for chart-success, or at least, critical kudos; with the rare exception being the American singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston, who self-produced and released a number of lo-fi recordings on tape from the safety of his parents basement. Howell was tapping into a similar creative mindset almost twenty years before Johnston came to prominence in the early days of MTV, by creating his work in a self-created recording studio that he'd mocked up in his bedroom (or so I've been led to believe).

The obvious parallel then is the recording producer and "troubled genius" Joe Meek, who recorded a number of high-profile chart acts in a portable recording studio set up in his London flat. Like Meek, this set up allowed Howell to work at his own pace, independently from record labels, managers and promoters. It also gave him the room to create and experiment; making music for the sake of it, rather than to become famous and to make lots of money. So already we're dealing with an album that foreshadows bedroom pop, independent music and the use of samples, with Howell not only designing much of his own recording equipment (allegedly) and playing around with layered production techniques; but he's also able to back up this studio experimentation with some actual, genuine songs... And not just some old cast offs either, these are proper songs on here, in particular the gorgeous opening track A Sitting on a Gate, the ultimate highlight Jabberwocky, and the closing composition, Through the Looking Glass, are all good enough to draw comparisons to many of the more high-profile psychedelic folk acts of the time, with the further integration of this fine musical material being combined with the samples and audio collages to create a piece of work that flows and fits together perfectly.

It's an album that thrives on descriptive words such as pastoral, idyllic, green, rustic, rural and absurd; bringing the bizarre and beguiling world of Lewis Carroll to life in a burst of autumnal reds, browns and greens, before finally exploding into a veritable kaleidoscope of vivid, vibrant colours. Had the record been given a proper release - as apposed to a limited one for the benefit of Howell, the local theatre company (The Ditchling Players) and selected friends and family - it would have no doubt been tied into the (by then) fully-formed psyche-folk scene of acts like Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Forrest, Pearls Before Swine, and related albums by the likes of Donovan, Shirley Collins and Vashti Bunyan. You could also relate it, thematically speaking, to Tom Wait's 2002 album, Alice, which also used the work of Lewis Carroll to explore deeper themes such as death, decay and doomed love... as well as the more obvious similarity of being a record created specifically for a theatrical production (in that particular instance, Robert Wilson's mid 90's avant-garde production, which juxtaposed the life of Lewis Carroll and his uncomfortable relationship with his young muse Alice Liddell, in relation to the writer's best known work).

That said, references to Carroll and his works were not uncommon within the folk rock subculture, with references to The Mad Hatter cropping up my favourite album by The Incredible String Band, The 5000 Spirits (or the Layers of the Onion) (1967), while the figure of The Jabberwocky was documented on Donovan's hodgepodge of a children's album, HMS Donovan (1971), which featured a number of other Lewis Carroll sampling works set against a backdrop of beautifully evocative acoustic guitar arrangements (chiefly, The Walrus and The Carpenter, which also crops up as a reference in the lyrics here). This is all alongside sporadic references to Carroll on the first Tyrannosaurus Rex album, My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... (1968) - which features a Marc Bolan penned, Carrollesque fairytale narrated at the end of the album by legendary DJ John Peel - and various other references made by the iconic Syd Barrett on the celebrated albums The Piper at The Gates of Dawn (1968) and The Madcap Laughs (1970), respectively. So obviously, there was something floating around in the late 60's purple haze; with certain songwriters going back to take influence from the books they'd enjoyed as children and inadvertently finding surreal references to sex, drug use and philosophical re-awakening, all of which could be enjoyed and re-interpreted by the post-hippy, bonged-out mindset (either that, or people were just desperate to riff on Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit... Who knows?).

Some might be disappointed by the predominant use of dialog and audio samples; with tracks such as Alice Meets the Knights and March of the Chessmen being made up almost entirely of samples with no music, while some of the longer tracks weave in and out of the theatrical samples with various thematic motifs. So it's more like a work of musical theatre as opposed to anything approaching a pop album, with the LP beginning normally with a proper pop song; the introductory track A Sitting On A Gate (as fine as anything off The Incredible String Band albums Wee Tam and The Big Huge), before moving onto an atmospheric sound collage in the shape of Alice Meets the Knights, before drifting into the third track, the lengthy Dance to the Talking Flower. Here we have the album's first instrumental track, which has a sound and feel to it that is vaguely reminiscent of the sound that The Flaming Lips were creating on albums like The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002). The build up is immense; ambient but also tuneful; with an interweaving flute and synthesiser motif creating an equal amount of atmosphere and melody.

The sound samples come in halfway though, replete with audience applause and laughter, before the music picks up again and goes off in a different direction. Various other tracks from the record follow a similar progression, with a passage of music merging with the audio samples before then cross-fading back into another music passage; sometimes with vocals or something without. For me it's a fascinating album; a tiny little window into Howell's musical universe circa 1969 and the best kind of unsung album (one made as a favour to friends and for the joy of making music). It's very quaint, sketchy, almost unfinished in sound and perhaps a little bit twee, but personally speaking, the songs here are continually colourful and captivating from beginning to end. From the longer sound collages to the short vignettes, to the actual fully-formed pop tracks; Alice through the Looking Glass is every bit as imaginative, free-flowing, effervescent and absurd as the Carroll work that inspired it. A small-scale forgotten classic that demonstrates the very best qualities of music as an art that is created because you enjoy it, rather that simply for the fact that you're being paid to do it.

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