Favorite instrumentals

[JK]

My favourite Mark Volman track is in fact the surf instrumental "Fiberglass Jungle", when The Turtles were The Crossfires and Mark and Howard played saxes.

Thank you for the music -- and the humour. Rest in peace, sir.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYQ5pJpUlPo

https://www.45cat.com/biography/the-crossfires

[JK]

I've been playing side one of Santana's Abraxas a lot recently. The last track on that side is a real gem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr7z-ikOSR4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Neshabur

[Julia]

I've been playing side one of Santana's Abraxas a lot recently. The last track on that side is a real gem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr7z-ikOSR4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Neshabur

What a name, Abraxas! Was he a Gnostic too?

[JK]

I've been playing side one of Santana's Abraxas a lot recently. The last track on that side is a real gem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr7z-ikOSR4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Neshabur

What a name, Abraxas! Was he a Gnostic too?

You mean Carlos Santana? I've never seen it mentioned. He's known to have been a follower of the Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy.

According to the album's wiki, its title "originates from a line in Hermann Hesse's 1919 book Demian, quoted on the album's back cover: 'We stood before it and began to freeze inside from the exertion. We questioned the painting, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it: We called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it Abraxas…'"

And then there's this: https://www.hallels.com/articles/17518/20170604/carlos-santana-talks-about-how-christian-faith-saved-him-after-seven-suicide-attempts.htm

There's also this discussion at Reddit, which probably doesn't tell you much you don't know already:

https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/10kibwy/whatwho_exactly_is_abraxas/

I see you've defined Abraxas at least twice in your wonderful blog essays on Gnosticism...

[JK]

The UK band Iona had a magnificent run of live performances in NL in the 1990s. "A'Machair" was the track I heard first (we visited the magic isle of Iona in 2017):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ1TkZLBzKg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iona_(band)