Paisley Babylon has been in a quiet and mostly secluded existence since around 1996. I have no real idea who is listening, or how, or even why…but I do have solid evidence that there are Paisley Babylon people out there and I am grateful for that.

The reason Paisley Babylon exists is in part thanks to a desire to explore altered/othered states of consciousness. At the time Paisley Babylon was formed, I was serving in the U.S. military as broadcaster and had no ability to partake of the chemicals people normally use to find these altered states…I had to get my hallucinations the HARD way.

So I started mixing up Zen ideas and John Cage notions with 90s zine culture, The Great Rock-n-Roll Swindle, Fluxus, Burroughs, and other influences. The results have been bumping into themselves and everybody else for the entire time since the mid 90s.

I owe a great deal to the Texas psychedelicexperimental scene between Austin, Houston, and San Antonio, Texas. Paisley Babylon got its’ start in San Antonio and there were a lot of like-minded fellow travelers there. It feels like that entire scene decentralized and kind of drifted away since then….but I know there are other space explorers looking for the same mind-blowing experiences in varying sizes and duration.

Paisley Babylon is about strange journeys along the near-future landscape created by the unholy love children of H.P. Lovecraft, Phillip K. Dick, and William Gibson. The Marquis de Sade as viewed by Jess Franco, projected onto the walls of a mausoleum just before the event that ushers in the post-apocalypse.

We post this here because it’s hoped that this is the first in a long series of “band-as-art-project” posts…something that might serve as an explanation or organizing principle or…something else that clears off some of the fog surrounding all this,,,

-Joe Wallace