Who is this wacky nutjob?

So a couple of years back when I started getting into the music of Antiloop, there was one song that used a sound bite of someone who sounded like the author of a nutty book on music and its magical properties. The sound sample was short, and he spoke in a slow, deliberate manner, like he was chillin’ on quaaludes or valium or something. The sound bite, found in"Theme of Antiloop (B&B Remix)" on Antiloop’s 2000 greatest hits album, was simply this:

It was strange and mystic enough to fit right in with the Trance music philosophy, and I paid it little mind. However, I recently acquired the CD single for Re:Evolution by The Shamen, released in 1993. The first track, “Re:Evolution (Shamen Vocal Mix Edit)” contains this same guy, with the same slow and deliberate monologue with often halting speech and weird emphasis on certain dentives – kinda like the Man In Black from the Half Life games, in a winding monologue around which the song wraps itself. This monologue is what I felt painted him as a bit of a wacky nutjob, and it goes on about some wildly drug-induced view of the nature of time, the art of shamanism, and how it’s all tied together by the use of psychedelic “plants” and music. The monologue goes thusly:

So who is this loon?

Terrence McKenna.

T e r e n c e M c K e n n a L a n d

Oh God, I accidentally read part of one of his books once, given to me earnestly as a scientific treatise on the influence of psychedelics on evolution, and possible symbiotic evolution of psychotropic plants and humanity.

It started off promisingly, but I confess I cast it aside roughly when I got to chapter two and the guy started prattling on about being talked to by the spirits of interplanetary dolphins.

Thanks. I didn’t think it was some in-house studio mouthpiece rambling on just for the song – especially because bits of his monologues have been in more than one song – I just had no idea who the guy was or what he must have done to achieve enough notoriety to be either the subject of, or a sound bite for, songs by popular music groups.

I suppose maybe if I was having a really good trip on some top-shelf Acid I might be able to dig this guy’s vibe, but as a sober and drug-free individual, just the long monologue reproduced above was enough to make me think this guy must have spent the vast majority of his time stoned on some really good shit, because no sober individual could possibly hope to make sense of it. Hell, it couldn’t possibly make sense to a stoned individual either, but I suppose the main benefit of such drugs are that things don’t have to make sense – they just are, man.