Liam O’Gallagher – Ode to Gravity

Californian artist Liam O’Gallagher was born in 1917 in Oakland the tenth of eleven children. Inspired by Aldous Huxley he decided to follow an artistic career and studied with Hans Hofmann in Greenwich Village in 1946. O’Gallagher returned to California to pursue an artistic career in Ojai and teach art at the Happy Valley School there. His mystical and socio-political views were greatly influenced by the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, whom he met in those days. O’Gallagher and his partner Robert Rheem moved to San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s, where their studio developed into a meeting place for writers and thinkers associated with the Beat generation, such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure and Alan Watts. Looking for ways to expand consciousness O’Gallagher experimented with LSD and psilocybin and applied the cut-up method in his poetry and audio works in the 1960s, while in the early 1970s he turned his attention to bringing about social change and awareness through human interaction and meditation. O’Gallagher and Rheem moved to Santa Barbara in the mid-1980s, where he passed away in 2007.

Liam O’Gallagher’s Ode to Gravity is the second joint release on cassette by Slowscan and Counter Culture Chronicles. The cassette, designed by André Koolmees, contains three audio works (“mutant fantasies”) by O’Gallagher that were broadcast by KQED, San Francisco’s public TV station, on 28 July 1971:

2021 is a reply to video artist Philip Gietzen’s question whether science fiction will be “science fact” in 2021. It was used as the soundtrack to a video by Gietzen, which premiered at the Philo T. Farnsworth Memorial event at the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco in June 1971. Super/Software is a cut-up text which appeared in O’Gallagher’s The Blue Planet Notebooks published in 1972 by the San Francisco underground magazine Organ. Past/Future Time is a cut-up which includes material from a record found in the elevator of 205 West 57th Street, San Francisco.
(From KQED’s TV guide)