Corduroy Psychedelia

Interesting piece at Split Infinities on a band that is getting talked about at the moment but written before all the are-they-or-aren't-they buzz 

"Amid the mid-morning lull between morning cartoons and the much preferable after-school block, sick-at-home American schoolchildren of the late 20th century had one reliable standby to keep them company while their parents were at work: PBS, the United States’ Public Broadcasting Service. For us in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, PBS was broadcast on channel eight—and the amber glow of an uprighted infinity symbol on the Zenith signaled the opening of a narrow passage: a reprieve from illness, from the cacophony of regular TV, and from the low static of domestic anxiety. What would become a personal, if not a faintly secretive, convalescent ritual, I would later discover was an experience quietly shared by many of us.

For those of us abandoned to our sick beds, afternoon hours spent with the dial locked on PBS piled up: Sesame Street.... Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company, Vegetable Soup, 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, stodgy imported BBC programming, reheated documentary series from the early 70s like Civilisation (1969) and The Ascent of Man (1973), campy prepubescent passion plays fit for school assemblies, and avant-garde short films repurposed as children’s entertainment. Among the latter, none better exemplifies the category than “Geometry of Circles” (1979)—animator Cathryn Aison’s hypnotic series of shifting, rainbow-colored geometric forms set to a pulsing minimalist score by Philip Glass, originally commissioned for Sesame Street as a vehicle for teaching spatial logic." 

"... The atmosphere of PBS’s 70s and 80s heyday had its material correlate in corduroy’s contemporaneous rise. Worn soft with use and democratic in appeal—cutting across class, age, and social register without representing any of them—corduroy was the fabric of the reading rug, of fort building, puddle stomping, and world exploring. PBS offered a similarly unglamorous intimacy, an experience that sat close to the skin"

If the concept of "PBS Unconscious" doesn't clue you in then maybe these pix will