Manapsara

condition (record/cover): EX / EX

An early Sub Rosa LP, and one of the label's most specifically conceived releases. Manapsara was the American duo of Bradley Koehler and Christopher Hartman; the project's sole LP is a soundtrack (in the literal rather than cinematic sense) to William S. Burroughs's 1985 novel Queer, the prose companion to Junky written in the early Fifties but held back for thirty years.

Recorded and mixed in November 1988 at Alpha & Omega Studios in San Francisco, and produced by Brian Raffi with Manapsara. The back cover bears the notice "All material under the protection of Burroughs Communications," which places the release within the sphere of Burroughs's own estate management rather than as an unlicensed adaptation. The sound-world blends ritualistic early-electronic sequencing, tape-processed voice, and long-form sample-bed construction, pitched between musique concrète and new-beat dance music in a way that makes immediate sense for a Burroughs source.

The album's two major sections are organised around "Yage," the hallucinogenic preparation central to the second half of Queer and to Burroughs's Amazonian Yagé correspondence with Allen Ginsberg. Sub Rosa (Brussels, run by Guy Marc Hinant and Fred Walheer) pressed the LP with the label's usual attention to design, and the matrix etchings were done by Foon Mastering. A genuinely unusual concept record from the high-water mark of late-Eighties experimental cassette-to-vinyl transition.