Rotary Connection • Peace (Cadet Concept, 1968)

Far be it for me to be a Scrooge - more likely I am the ghost of Christmas yet to come... Yesterday I had mentioned this album, and in the spirit of giving I am here to share what has to be the worlds only Psychedelic Soul Christmas LP.

The Rotary Connection was the brain child of Marshal Chess - to be a sort of hip 5th Dimension. Like most studio bands the personal is interchangeable, the only two mainstays in their 6 album out put were Mini Ripperton and Cadet arranger Charles Stepeny. For what ever reason the band never really excelled nationally, remaining a mid west region secret.

If Spector is regarded as the Richard Wagner of rock, then Stepney was the poor relation from the Chicago south side. While never straying too far from R & B, the arraignments of Peace fit comfortably with Hendrix influenced guitar heroics and and classical music. Floating above what could have been a horrible stew of ideas is Mini Ripperton's stunning voice. I played this album for some friends last year and they had thought her wailing on Silent Night was that of a theremin.

After one's ears get over the amazing production and playing you hear the lyrics, and that's where the one two punch connects. These are socially concerned topics, not your standard banal Merry Christmas tomes. Peace from war, poverty, consumer greed, and getting high to add extra color to the holidays is what the lyrics ask for. As much as I love Peace, I will concede that the production was probably too slick for the kids and the words too shocking for the squares. Both camps missed out, showing how alike they were after all...

Friends, I will let the illustration above left by Osmond Pittmann from 1899 say it for me.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Silent Night (instrumental).

The Beatles • Christmas Time Is Here Again! (Lyntone, 1967)

Seasons greetings! I may have been silent for a while, but do not fear for I have not abandoned this little endeavor. While I am still regretfully without a new place to practice my terrestrial skills, in this down time I have broadened my ears, and will soon share the bounty.

There are many Christmas records out there that always seem to get a spin no matter how atrocious they are.Band Aid's Do They know Its Christmas Time, or ELP's Father Christmas are two fine examples. And as has been proven time and time again the ones that smack of true genius get left behind. I had originally planed to share one of my absolute favorites; Peace by the Rotary Connection, but since Christmas is soon upon us, and inspiration has detoured me I will post one of my other top ten's - The Beatles 1967 Fan Club record.

I must confess - I am not a big fan of The Beatles. Without going in to my general disdain (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah) for them, I do have a liking for the 1966 to 1968 recordings. Most of all the Christmas messages from that time period. As the psychedelic age flourished, these recording amount to the equivalent of avant guard out takes; non sequitor radio plays, electronic music, cut ups, and all other forms of stoned humor. As other pop bands from that era fell on their faces trying to emulate The Beatles, for The Beatles it came as second nature. What is Sargent Pepper but a normalizing of Stockhausen, and admitting this grudgingly who pulled it off the best?

1967's recording finds them in God like unity, foreshadowing Monty Python's Flying Circus British absurdest humor - Lennon and Harrison as two ladies on a game show, or Ringo giving what is probably another Paul is dead clue; "Hello, hello? Operator, I've been cut off! It's an emergency! Cue dramatic orchestra strike, followed by the lyrics "O.U.T. spells out..." This recording practically drips LSD. All of this is caped off with a Peter Blake like home made cover by John and Ringo, with back cover art by Julian Lennon.

The remaining two Christmas singles would more reflect Luc Ferrari type audio verity, and while interesting do show the irreparable split that had come; Paul playing a Christmas song, John and Yoko walking around their estate, Ringo plugging his latest film, or George giving his time on the single to Tiny Tim. In light of these tracks, what was the big deal with Revolution #9?

Please click on the review title for selected track: Christmas Time Is Here Again!

The Mothers of invention • We're Only In It For The Money (Verve, 1968)

How different would my terrestrial teen age ears have been without the Mothers? They were the gateway for me to the world of "other"; music concrete, 20Th century classical, tape music, etc.

When I was first turned on to the Mothers of invention, and this album in particular, it was in Easter 1987. A friend and I had by chance encounter made the instant friendship with these two for lack of a better word freaks. His name was David, and regretfully the girlfriends name escapes me. He and her were older than my companion and I by a good 10 years. I'm not sure how I came to talk to them, but by the end of the day we all had become fast friends. Perhaps this is testimony to teenage naivety, or two 30 somethings desperate to relive the innocence of the first Be In held 20 years earlier, but all for of us stood out like sore thumbs in the tail end of Reagan's 1980's so a kinship was struck.

We all went back to David's apartment, who's location I don't recall, but it was the proverbial crash pad of someone with money. Darkly painted walls, well placed modernist lithographs hung on them, attempts to keep furnishings with the style of the railroad apartment. This place was everything a teenage mind feverish to escape the then still 50's suburbia of eastern Queens.

To say we didn't get stoned would be a lie. Nothing heavy, but we smoked pot and to my friend and I relatively unused lungs it certainly worked like it should. That night in an expansive state I heard three records that would forever spoil music for me. The first was second Silver Apples record - "Contact", The Electric Prunes "I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night), and The Mothers of invention's "We're Only In It For The Money". Nothing on the radio sounded like this. Screw the Beatles, they were overthrown from the opening seconds of You And I's airplane sound. By the time The Mother's LP was placed, my mind was sufficiently opened to all sort of sonic possibilities. While the preceding records all sounded fantastic and would dictate what music I would prefer from that night after, the edge was given to Zappa's lyrics. Falling somewhere between insightful and singable, he was completely saying a clear screw this to conformity - even if that conformity at the time was being practiced by Hippies. So amazed by that record, I requested to my hosts to play the record again...they we're more that happy to oblige.

Like all good altered states it ends and come the morning we all bid goodbye. While my friend and I saw them around a few times after here and there, the magic as all spent in that one evening...

So what to make of We're Only In It For The Money now? Even after a ill conceived CD remix by Zappa in 1986, and subsequent return of the (relatively) original mix later, none of the punch has been lost. The social commentary is sharp as ever, and the mixture of garage band and Music Concrete / 20Th century classical is jaw dropping. There is a cohesive whole to the LP that few before and after have had. Sargent Pepper is avant lite compared to this. I'm sure the Beatles heard of Stockhausen, they may have even had one of his recording's lying around in their homes, but Zappa lived and breathed the music. And as such, when it came to using unusual sounds, there isn't a taming town to their capabilities.

As the sonics is amazing, so is the packaging. Turning Sargent Peppers graphics inside out - literally, Zappa had created the ultimate fuck you. The Pop Art harmony of Peter Blake is given a swift kick to the balls by Carl Shenkel. Where the Beatles are surrounded by their idols (how egotistical can you get?), Zappa and Shenkel create a Dadaist nightmare crowd of anti hero's (Nosferatu, Jack Ruby), Freaks (members of United Mutations, and a young Don Vliet), machinery, and Jimi Hendrix...he doesn't play on the record, but appears as a honorary Mother.
Using the Sargent Pepper's inside photo as template for the cover, in either a move that skewers The Rolling Stones drag photo shoot for Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby. Standing In The Shadows? or calling the Fab Four a bunch of ladies, there sits the Mothers snarling and uneasy. A bunch of old guys in a teen age rock and roll band, now in dresses and wigs.

Staring out in Mona Lisa deadpan is Jimmy Carl Black (as stated on the record: "Hi boys and girls, I'm Jimmy Carl Black, and I'm the Indian of the group. heeh hehh heh"), who passed away this week at the age of 70.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Who Needs The Peace Corps?

11/04/08 - an election, 11/05/08 - a birthday

So the United States has a new President...it is hard to get my mind wrapped around that idea...the nightmare that was not unlike the barely nameable cosmic horrors that came to plague the small Vermont farming community of Appleton has come to an end. Surely you'll recall? For the sake of time those who don't remember the case will get the shorthand version; large sentient invertebrates living in local wells, allowed entry here by Jeb Malford's aligning certain properties just right in the hopes of saving his farm, locals becoming sick, the public disintegration of one Nelly O' Toole (age 7) at the towns school Christmas play, general upheaval leading to their dispelling and concurrently a surge in church membership...to the best of my knowledge they things are still residing in the town wells. You never really get rid of them completely. There they sit, having sacrificed the weak of their sect content in the knowledge that human attention spans are short. It will just be a matter of time before the great work begins again, and they can bring down their masters from the stars.

It is with this insight that I must say this warning. Liberals see Utopias. Utopias that will exist forever once reason is reached. Neo Cons on the other hand see Empire, and understand seasons.

Beside the election, another event far more personal is that of my birthday. Without going into much grousing about how the aging process is disappointing, where did the time go, where are my keys, etc. I bring you one of my favorite songs about growing old and refusing to go along with the idea.

Please click on the blog entry for selected track: Jefferson Airplane - Lather.

Nico • The Marble Index (Elektra, 1969)

I had reason to return recently to the Burrough of my birth. A long time associate has taken ill and is in the hospital. Traveling to the Crab Nebulae is easier, even if it does require a bone marrow replacement upon re-entry. But not complaining (at least not to my associate) I went...
As he lie in repose I could not help but marvel anew at the revaluation I had upon seeing a family member in the same state - everyone looks so small laying in a hospital bed. It's as if the body prepares for the final act of disappearance...

My associates distress is a mere infection of the leg and he'll be out in no time, so there isn't any need for worry. yet his recovery almost cheats the idea of a medical facility. While it is true they bring life into this world, spend enough time on Earth and they eventually become a repair shop. The flesh falters - life, eventually it'll kill you...

After my visit I had taken opportunity to walk around Downtown Flushing...How much has changed, and sadly not for the better. Where once eldritch buildings stood reflecting an amalgam of styles - Victorian through Art Deco, now everything has pretty much become just another shopping district where every building a glass box better to show off the merchandise residing inside. How sad that the RKO Kieth's sits a rusting mass. If a building could be said to be in a coma and kept on life support, this is it. With not enough potently commerce from it's rehabilitation, there it lies in state. The once grand marque now skeletal, glinting in the Autumn afternoon, as a anti beacon at the end of Main Street.

When one finds themselves in this mood of despairing nostalgia mixed with marvel what does one do? Well, since it's downtown Flushing you go get a roast pork bun, only to find that even that the place you bought them from is gone too...

Little did I remember what I had on my iPod that day. On the train ride in I was listening to various 45's and the Tea Company LP, by the time I reached the Hospital the last song was done playing; Make Love Not War with it's liberal cribbing from Help!. When I had left my associate the first notes I hear come through the earphones are that of a heavy piano chord, followed by airy celesta tones. The Marble Index's brief prelude was playing, clearing all that came before it.

The eight songs that follow occupy a unique space. On Nico's second album she abandons the folk rock approach of her first (Chelsea Girl). That album always sounded like a lesser extension of The Velvet Underground & Nico. And why not? Half of the songs there were written by either Reed or Cale, and the Velvets minus Mo Tucker often supply backing. On the Marble Index it's as if Chelsea Girl never existed, or could have even been done by the same person. The songs are all written by Nico and it is like she's invoking a Psychedelic Dark Ages. While Judy Collins or Odetta were updating sea shanties, Nico was delving deeper to Europe's past looking for melodies from the Black Plague.

Over Nico's simple harmonium sea saw style of playing, John Cale layers on musical accompaniment that at times are at odds to the quiet songs. On Lawns Of Dawn, the song is a example of Catatonia - repetitious lyrics that make little sense when repeated out loud are bathed in all forms of studio trickery. The quiet Celestia, deep tremolo bass, something that sounds like a slowed down Crows caw, slightly rhythmic slapping all swirl around her, sucking you down the Rabbit's hole. For a record recorded during 1968 and released almost a year later, nothing sounded even close, there just isn't any president. There were a few downer records released before it; Jefferson Airplane's Crown of Creation, HP Lovecraft's II, or even Pearls Before Swine's Balaclava, but almost as if out of nowhere is The Marble Index. It would take the 1980's Goth movement to utilize the sounds trail blazed by Nico and Cale, the melding of Slavic song form with Fluxis playing.

But before it can all be surmised as just proto art music for future generations of depressed teenagers, there is a deceptively simple song called Frozen Warnings. Nico's voice, surprisingly
strong when singing her own compositions is accompanied by layers of Cale's treated viola and organ. Building along the lines of minimalism, going from low C to high, it becomes a moment of clear beauty and respite in a often rewardingly harsh listening environment.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Lawns Of Dawns

Rudy Ray Moore • 1927 - 2008

Get the hearse warmed up, there's one more for the bone yard...
I first became aware of Moore sometime in the mid 1990's. Then - like now, I was going through a bout of unemployment. In that loafing time I was fortunate to have free time and access to a VCR through a then associate.
Kim's Video had just opened a branch at the former site of the Saint Mark's Baths. The 3rd floor of that former Bacchanal indoor pool was given to video rentals. At this point of the 1990's the gates of obscuria were creaking open. I often equate this to convergence of two events; CD production was becoming cheep, and almost everyone had a computer. Information was beginning to be freely shared. As so often when ancient knowledge is played with there are some down sides - fungoid entities with indefinite body shape are invoked resulting in their attempting to reclaim the Earth, or diseases that normally would only cause blindness in lampreys is modified to attack foreign peoples, such malfeasance is tempting.

It was in this proverbial Library of Alexandria that while paroozing through the Blaxploitation video isle loaded with titles I had only heard of, my eyes came upon one that made my mind stop in it's paces; "The Human Tornado".
Pulling out the box I had no reason to read the blurb on the back. The grainy photocopied cover with passable artwork was all I needed to know. There depicted was a stiffly drawn middle aged black man his fist caught in mid air swing, bad guys and their cars strewn in the air, buildings breaking apart, my eyes were on fire! It then dawned on me...this was the often spoken with absolute reverie...Dolemite...

I immediately paid the rental fee and brought it back to my then associate Mrs. D. We sat in jaw dropping awe as Dolemite Kunk-Fu'd in his tacky polyester pants, read dialog as if he just learned it that morning, destroying all logic going from scripted sentence to rap, and had no shame in exposing his person naked while in bed with a woman half his age. This one love making scene brings the roof down...literally...along with the walls and the floor.
This was heaven - true Mrs. D and I had seen Soul Cinema before, but there was nothing like this. Adding to that what were the odds that this was playing anywhere outside of Newark or Watts.

About the time of this discovery, Moore seemed to be having a career revival. There were small roles in low budget movies, ie: Bapps, and a return to live dates on the East Coast. By then when he was remembered there was the usual lip service that he was the God Father of rap. Absolute hogwash...Moore's humor while at it's base is blue, concurrently it was free of meanspiritedness, something that raps practitioners are proud of.

On one of Moores east coast dates he plaid Maxwells in Hoboken. How could I not go? As often the case seeing a legend coming out of retirement one is shocked as to how old the famous become. And there he was, on Maxwells small stage performing like someone's dirty Grandfather, admitting to his age (or at least around it), still sharp as in youth. Every raunchy line intact - no doddering around, no fumbling. Best of all he eschewed the urge to update his act. Jokes had clear beginning's, middles, and ends. It was all Borscht Belt via the Chitin' Circuit. Like so many other smaller performers he had a merchandise table set up. Besides posters and CD's there was the Official Rudy Ray Moore Back Scratcher, with extra reach...for your nuts...

The second time I had seen him was at the Lakeside Lounge, located on the Lower East Side - and regretfully in the year or so from the Maxwells gig the ever insatiable hipsters had elected him the must know of the moment. There was little if any give and take with the audience. Buy now he was regarded as an animatronic museum piece. His performance was still as sharp as before, but the crowd wanted the wild man of the 70's movies, and when presented with Moore sans Kung Fu and multiple camera shots, lost interest. There was a intermission leading to a second set, and growing weary of the room I elected to just catch him the next time he came to town. I don't believe he ever played here again...

So Rudy, as you leave this sometimes humorless mortal coil and travel stellar I bid you farewell. Confident that you will suffer no "Rat soup eating Motherfuckers" anymore.

Please click on the obituary title for selected track: The party goes on, part 2 - Crack me some nuts / Grow by the minute

Beaver & Krause • In A Wild Sanctuary (Warner Brothers, 1970)

It's a quiet Sunday. Outside the air is occasionally punctured by the cries of a child playing...odd though, no one else seems to be joining in...I'm reading the paper online, amazed how long the Presidential  campaign has lasted...it seems so 2007...and while this day lazily moves from one side of the sky to the other, playing in the background is Beaver & Krause's In A Wild Sanctuary.  This is what I was attempting to listen to when the next door neighbors went about their dally routine...I guess on Sunday they play pretend behave for the Lord.

Beaver & Krause will be readily known to those who read album liner notes. 

In the late 60's any record that had a Moog on it most likely was played by either Paul Beaver or Bernie Krause.  For a quick reference play Star Collector by The Monkees and you'll have the concise Beaver & Krause play book. But where other players using the Moog were interested in either mimicking regular instruments or creating far out sounds without any restraint, B&K had a sort of organic approach. There is a warmth to their choice of timbre, which came most likely from their excursions in field recording. This is used to great effect on Walking Green Algae Blues. Sounds of animals in residence at the San Francisco Zoo are treated and used as backdrop to a slow Chicago Blues riff. I normally detest when blues riffs are used, it just seems so easy. Yet the reason why it works here is the laconic of the playing allows the nature sounds to take center place.

There is a theme prevalent to In A Wild Sanctuary; contrast and similarity. Side one is devoted to electronics. The opening track the only one with a back beat, from there on its floating music that never gets soft. A happy balance is struck between melody and sound. Stately church like hymns are wrapped in  spacey electronics. By the time side two comes in with a cheeky take on Thus Spake Zarathustra, heralding the new focus; electro acoustic sound and rhythm. The electronics work now behind a band (like that mentioned in Walking Green Algae Blues), or are abandoned all together.  There is a somewhat suspicious sounding field recording done in Peoples Park. It's just a little too clean, but if it really is a live take done on the outside then B&K's studio prowess were quite formidable.  Just about finishing up side two is a spoken word piece over a bed of proto industrial music, people saying the word war with all forms of contempt and incredulity. The final track is back to the electronics of the first side, but this time with a brief contemplative tone poem. After all, someone said war, you know those things aren't fun...

Please click on the review title for selected track: So Long As The Waters Flow

NON • children of the black sun (Mute Corporation, 2002)

Lifting up a rock one day, I was fascinated anew to see how various forms of arachnid live so closely  huddled together...keeping cool in the feted dampness...coming home, and hearing the South of the Border ommp pah pah music obscenely bleeding through my walls, I realized that another type of collective was near...and lucky me, I didn't have to bend over to reach that rock...

So what does one do when their neighbors cultural low IQ makes it self known? Surely you just can't sit idly by...wishing to escape, and thinking of the lovely dark matter void that is space, I put on Beaver & Krause's "In A Wild Sanctuary". For as much as I love that recording, it just wasn't doing the trick. The electronic tones were way to ethereal to overcome my next door idiots...what does one do...

While standing in front of my CD collection, my minds eye brought up images of Triumph Of The Will. I had it, NON! If there was ever music for a non specific Reich, this was it. 

Most of NONs output is abrasive tape loop music, with sources coming from the most innocent of places; Girl Group records, Children records and the like. It seems that after his collaborations with Douglas P., Boyd Rice has started to get more musical. The result is a Teutonic mood music. Pick any movement that has matching uniform and architecture, and Boyd is now supplying the score. It's a locked grove take on Wagner. Slowly played instruments mixed to sonic homaging quoting the best of any opera -  the death scenes. 

After the opening tack with it's lilting harp, it becomes a showcase for heavy echo and reverb. In this sludge you have a hard time distinguishing the violins from distorted guitars, or even the marital french horns. So engrossing is this music that I can barely tell if my next door dunces are continuing their day laborers holiday...by the time Fountain of Fortune drifts in, with it's bed of treated choir loop and burning sound (or is that water?) I can barely tell...but then again, my minds a million miles away, and I'm sitting on the front porch of either a bunker or plantation...I really can't tell...but it's oh so peaceful here in the deep south of Bavaria...

Please click on the review title for selected track: Black Sun       

sunn 0))) • 3: Flight Of The Behemoth (Southern Lord, 2002)

Pure unmitigated nihilism...low frequency drones layered on its self, band members dressed as cartoon Heavy Metal monks. This is the Dream House over run with thoughtful knuckleheads, this is the beauty of Sunn 0)))...everything here smacks of intellectual put on. As the old saying goes, is you can't laugh at yourself, someone will do it for you. They escape the trappings of attempting to be the heaviest band on earth by taking the art route. 

Heavy Metal when striped of it's inept vocals is often not too far from drone. Perhaps there are more changes involved and it's played a little faster, but that most likely is because the musicians are coming from pop sensibilities. By now, thanks to the Internet, anyone with a little free time can track down the nearly hidden work of Charlemagne Palestine. Marry that sound to a bunch of guys who love Sabbath, Venom, St. Vitus, et al, and you have Sun 0))). Added to the assault is noise master dilettante Merzbow for remixing of two tracks.  

There is a lineage to the post rock bands of the 1990's, Jessamine or Experimental Audio Research come to mind, with the use of over amplification and artful sludge. But here the proceedings aren't as polite, and it's wrapped in cheep polyester Satan's robes.

Please click on the review title for sample track: Death Becomes You     

Alan Sorrenti • Aria (Harvest, 1972)

Haunted toy shops...most annoying of places...Jack In The Box's saying over and over again "I'm going to kill you"...the reason for this annoyance is once the logistics become clear, unless they are going to rip themselves out of the box and sprout little legs where the spring should be, nothing is going to happen...I remember this one establishment in West Virginia, I believe it was in Doddridge County. It seems the Skin Walkers infested all the inanimate objects, as they are want to do. Betsy Wetsies were heard to moan "Fuck me Daddy" to real fathers, fully embarrassed, brows damp with sweat, trying to steer their daughters past the plastic Lolita's. 

While in this store, I came face to face with a Noddy doll doing his best Arthur Brown. Shrieking away, proclaiming he was the God of Hell fire...well that's what I thought he was saying...after all he was speaking in some spirit world tongue...come to think about it, he could have been doing a mean Alan Sorrenti impersonation...

Sorrenti's first album "Aria" on initial listen could be easily dismissed as a pale Kingdom Come, or Van Der Graff Generator. You would only be partially wrong. There's no electric guitar in sight and the songs employing long form, but short of flashy playing.  The most shine given is supplied by Jean Luc-Ponty guest appearance. On the title track Sorrenti is in company to Arthur Brown's cackle and the sneer of Peter Hammil. But because Alan's voice doesn't have the full theatrics of Kingdom Come behind him, it seems almost lost in the mix. This also may be due to my not understanding of Italian. I'm sure that something dramatic is being sung. The music while not as heavy as the cover graphics suggest, does often turn on a dime, going from pastoral playing to cosmic bombast. 

The second side is broken up by relatively shorter numbers. Somehow, it's from these songs that a single was selected. I would love to hear how these were pared down to fit a 45. Like side one, everything is in a state of flux.  

As I wrote earlier that off hand he could be dismissed as a pale imitator, but that would be unkind.  There is a high strangeness factor that elevates this to note worthy. The whole album, and certainly the title track gives the feeling of a opera, but without the heavy handedness that usually happens when rock is welded to classical. 

Please click on the review title for selected track: La Mia Mente

Dead Can Dance • The Serpent's Egg (4AD, 1988)

What to do, what to do...a man with free time is a dangerous thing...all sorts of odd notions can be acted upon...using this (regretfully) open time, I found my self at http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/

Fascinating read,that website. It amazes me how stupid humanities mind can be...the evidence is there...but then again, if the United States is unlucky, we'll pretty soon have our first woman President convincing us that the earth is only six thousand years old...

So with a mind full of mysteries, my tastes this afternoon brought me to the Dead Can Dance's masterpiece; The Serpent's Egg. In the history of Goth Rock, nothing sounded like this. Where other bands attempted to emulate the sound of non specific eon old rituals using cheesy synths and drum machines (I don't recall hearing Roland 800's during the wild hunt), the DCD perfectly invoke the mood. Perhaps it is by this point they were using strings and brass, and more importantly, the compositional talent to not be a 101 String Orchestra version of Joy Division. Where most 4AD and alike bands thought that playing in a minor key was all you needed to sound heavy, the DCD had scope to draw on Popol Vuh and Ennio Morricone.
The air of catharsis hangs heavily on the album. You are always somewhere between dawn and dusk. Either the funeral has begun, or the corpse has come home to comfort the aggrieved. This state is the most exquisite of horrors. Thinking back to the Mars Anomalies site it is just a mater of time before people get the idea that something is happening up there, that there is life on Mars. What will happen when everyone figures this out? Will there be planet wide panic since God has lied and there were others beside us, or resolution. The pressure is off since we're not that special after all...

Please click on the review title for selected track: Severance

Moondog • Moondog and his Friends (Epic, 1953)

The Doctor is free...for the moment...and what a wonderful opportunity to wax poetic on one of New York's transient sons; Moondog. 

   Standing on the corner of 54th and 6th avenue dressed in Viking regalia, he was the oddballs oddball. An imposing blind standing with spear in hand as if to refute the 1950's workaday world. He lived on the streets for 20 of his 30 years spent in New York, but Moondog was just more than a visual oddity, he was a street musician of incredible compositional skills. Playing percussion on home made instruments, he welded the Native American drumming he heard as a child with European rounds creating something fresh.

   La Monte Young is often credited with being the father of minimalism, if that's the case then Moondog was the milkman. Both Phillip Glass and Steven Reich have sited him as a direct influence and it shows. The intricate percussion pieces of Right and Glass's repetitive keyboard figures are far close to Moondog than Young's one long note approach, yet Moondog was against minimalism.

   Recording as early as 1943 on his own private label, by 1953 he had come to release his first mainstream recording: Moondog and his Friends". At this point he was beyond a mere only in New York entity, but a well respected composer, who just happened to like living on his own terms.  The "and Friends" Lp showcases both sides of Moondog, the percussive workouts and rounds, interspersed with philosophy lessons. While on side two points to future compositions; Suites for classical strings with a underscoring of rhythmic klip klop drumming. All the while keeping things short. Rarely does a composition of his break the 10 minute mark, keeping the classical rooted in pop.

  

Please click on the review title for selected track: Suite no. 2 - First Movement in 7/4

Terry Riley • Persian Surgery Dervishes (Shanti, 1972)

There are some stars that while invisible to the naked eye, pull strings of influence still. The Dogon tribesmen for centuries swear by the (somewhat faulty) information that the Space Ark Captain Nommo gave them, and keep their hopes of a celestial world beyond this unwavering. Other stars blaze brightly in the night sky then for all it's intensity burn out, leaving vague memories, and radioactivity as a calling card. Terry Riley by the early 1970's had reached the height of his above ground carrier. He was name checked by Pete Townsend in the song Baba O' Riley, and used in it's opening bars a truncated Rainbow In Curved Air. The Soft Machine were starting to adopt the same Rainbow style of playing, and the majority of Krautrock was certainly an off spring. Perhaps Riley's popularity could be that he's the only Minimalist that understands the need for a middle eight...

   By the time the Persian Surgery Dervishes appeared in 1972 he was just about to pull the plug on his popularity, and go to India to study. Nothing he would do afterward would sound so thick or funky. Over two LP sides taken from two live performances a year apart the piece moves from musical mode to mode. One moment it's Middle Ages fugue like, slipping in bits of R & B slight of hand, only to give way to rapid fire cascades of pure Minimalism filtered through raga. The real time tape loop pulses in a way that points to a future musical style that (regretfully) he has been tied to, Techno... 

   What makes the first performance so amazing is the use of an emotion that is rarely if ever evident in Riley's work, that of menace. There is a determined presence in the playing that was foreshadowed on The Church Of Anthrax record obvious here. The endless cascading of notes never gives one time for rest, I can not stress the cold menace here. If techno is to far a stretch for you too grasp, then the next comparison would be John Carpenter, only played much better.

    Record two presents a more textured reading of the piece. Using the style of an evening raga, there is funerary air to it. Here the piece wanders, the same melody sections are used, but this time it seems that Riley is choosing what comes next.  Quiet contemplation arises between the long drawn out organ tones. The tape loop even seems to have less notes. 

   Released on the tiny label Shanti in France, this was never an easy record to find. After the first pressing, the Shanti gallery had a flood and the master tapes were damaged, resulting in no reprints. In the early 1990's a CD issue came out from Italy. This was taken from a well worn copy, with the usual pops and clicks of vinyl. Normally I wouldn't mind. There is a warmth to vinyl that CD's just haven't gotten down yet. The real shame here is the mastering. Everything is muddy. Not having heard the original, it's had to say if that's from the Shanti issue. I'm also not too sure how much I believe the lost tapes story. A few years back Sun Ra had his record from Shanti reissued and they sounded fine.

   All the sound issues aside, it's good to have this document still around showing the depth and mastery of Terry Riley before he imploded back to willed obscurity.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Persian Surgery Dervishes (performance one, part one)

Nurse With Wound / Organum • A Missing Sense / Rasa (United Dairies, 1985)

"Music to clear a room by" is how a colleague once put it. This is coming from he who is a proud owner of that record which has a rotoscoped demon baby on it's cover...Black Sabbath, ugh...and with Dio no less...

To go into the ever growing history of Nurse With Wound would be an act of futility. Organum presents the same challenge. Both are less bands than artists embracing the tenet Pop Art; brand name over identity. Nurse With Wound is really Steven Stapleton, and respectively Organum is David Jackman.

Side one is perhaps the only cover that I know of anything by Robert Ashley. Using Automatic Writing as it's base (the mumbled words, quiet organ tones), Stapleton then adds the typical NWW sound on top; abrasive scrapings, bursts of white noise, low tuba notes, and all manor of studio trickery. This piece was originally a private tape Stapleton made for himself to listen to while tripping. Automatic Writing was the only other music he could listen to in that state without feeling paranoid.

A Missing Sense has that late night feeling where ambient sounds are amplified once they are no longer competing for space. A dog barking in the distance has more dramatic implications once the din of cars, cell phone conversations, or even just the low level hum of daytime activity ceases. The listening instructions are that the piece is to be played at a very low volume. In comparison, but clearly from another dimension, Brain Eno's Discreet Music has the same request. But where Eno has you watching the afternoon drift along, A Missing Sense is not unlike that state of paranoia that Stapleton wished to escape from. Voices that are barely legible seem to come from all sides. The air is never calm, little cells of events erupt without any resolution. It's as if the negative space around us has been reviled to be full activity, unknown to the naked ear.

Organum's Rasa fills all of side two, having heaviness of a Tibetan ritual. Long drones, some sort of metallic clanging, and a whispered vocalise come at you immediately. There is no buildup here, all sense of western musical notion is dispelled. The moment the piece starts, it's all various drones; some drones are shorter, some longer. The metallics play what would be considered a solo, but even then the notion of a pre determined random even to have a conclusion must be dispersed. If this description sounds very La Monte Young, it's because it does. There is some aahhhhing in the background that comes close to Drift Study, you would think there is a sampling of the Shandar record going on.

Like almost all early Nurse With Wound releases at some point in the 1990's they were reconfigured. Some long out of print record had a few of it's tracks placed next to something also from a long out of print record and this configuration was given a new name. When A Missing Sense was reissued, the Organam piece was gone, but you got two other NWW rarities in it's place. Roughly about the same time, Jackman had started to reissue compilations (getting as far as volume two) that worked on the completion through obscurity theory. Rasa, uncredited as to it's original source was placed on Volume One.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Rasa 

Richard Wright • 1943 - 2008

Define the obvious...
it's easy - and the same could be said of the reverse. Tucked between the overt and the obscure are the things that are taken for granted. Long after I'm gone, and this blog becomes one more dead URL, musicologists of all stripes will still be arguing who was the best guitar player, composer, conductor, producer, etc. But should they delve further, will they ask who was the best psychedelic keyboard player...I understand that"best" is subjective. Everyone's favorite is the best, that's why you prefer them. Yet think for a moment, who really even qualifies as a psychedelic keyboardist?...

I had to think for a while, and even then I only came up with a hand full; Sun Ra, Terry Riley, and Dave Michaels certainly were on that list, and sitting in an ever changing pecking order was Wright.

If Pink Floyd had a defining sound outside of Syd Barret's non repeatable guitar chords - then Richard Wright's keys were the perfect foil, adding texture and drone to hold it all together. After Barrett's departure, the sound of the band was moving towards a more melancholic atmosphere and Wright had come to define that sound. If anyone should ever ask you who this Wright was, please ignore the urge to play "Great Gig In The Sky", and play instead Mother Fore from the Atom Heart Mother Suite, or even the whole of Echoes. The spidery opening piano note processed through the Leslie speaker, the Stax church organ, to the pieces mournful coda, all that was him. This is not to suggest that he outshone the other band members - it's quite the contrary. Where most musicians have a disastrous habit of over playing (paging Mr. Emerson), Wright seemed to stay in the background, but all the while possessing an ability to draw attention. Leaving the listener the choice to wander in and out of the music. Later albums by Pink Floyd were less sonically adventurous but Wright's playing was still one of incredible timing and restraint.

Please click on the obituary title for selected track: Sysyphus Parts 4 and 5

10/22/08 Addendum: I had Sysyphus as the review track, but for what ever reason I am now able to upload what I had originally wanted; Love theme version 4. This is from the ill fated Pink Floyd soundtrack for Zabriski Point, and it showcases Wrights playing beautifully.

the FUGS • the FUGS (ESP-DISK, 1966)

We are a country of heathens...well, we always were...but now we have become the something worse; clucking our tongue at the sight of genitalia, and jerking off with a free hand. How did we become so joyless? Wasn't there a period of general hilarity only some 30 odd years ago?

One of those relics is the second album by The Fugs. Titled simply the FUGS the advancement from the first record is evident. Losing the Holy Modal Rounders Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver were now becoming, with the aid of some ESPdisk's better side men a formidable entity, one that was not afraid to show it's collective intelligentsia coated in pure greasy teenage pimple cream. Songs about Group Gropes and Doin' Allright ("I get more pussy than a Spade") sit along the political aggression of Kill For Peace, and the gentile sadness of Morning Morning. This song shows the same direction that The Velvets would take a year later with Sunday Morning, but where Reed's poetry is based on simple street wise rhyming schemes, Sanders and Kupferberg use the meter of classical Greek poetry. Both band came from the fertile cesspool that was the Lower East Side in the 1960's. Some how even though they were locals, they couldn't have any more been from two different worlds. The Velvets being sexually ambivalent with an scoring of violence, and the Fugs goofy (with out being hippy dippy) and decidedly straight.

Lyrically a reference point that modern readers can use is the (loathsome) Bloodhound Gang. But thank God that the Fugs had a brain. One that could point out the hypocrisy of "normal" society and the lurid mind that the Counter Culture would swear they left behind.

The last track gives a glimpse at what would be the pinnacle of the Fugs recording carrier; "It crawled into my hand, honest", done for Reprise in 1968. Virgin Forrest is a Naked Lunchesque suite of seemingly random yet interconnected routines. Sound effects give way to Ovidian proclamations of sex. Before you can get worked up from the command to Aphrodite to take the penis, Tarzan breaks the mood explaining basic fucking to a noisy jungle, in appreciation come a chorus of turkey squawks. At some point the Photo Falling, Word Falling, Breakthrough In The Grey Room is quoted and the mind is clearly destroyed. In requiem delicate melody is rolled in, and logically a rousing hymn of Death Stay Thy Phantoms closes the cut up. Proving once and for all this world is hilarious, but man, it has to be taken seriously...

Fleshing out the CD reissue on Fugs Records are two live tracks recorded in 1967 and three from the aborted album for Atlantic. The live tracks are so-so and are nice to have for historic value. The same could not be said for the unreleased material, beside the reworking of Carpe Diem from the first record, and the embryonic take of Wide Wide River, is the unreleased Nameless Voices Crying For Kindness that's amazing in it's deceptiveness.

It's practically a discourse on the self, it's place in the universe, and purpose. To keep things from getting too dry, there's some references to fucking and it's all scored to a Doors back beat...Socrates enters the Hollywood Bowl stage, behind him the band, dressed in paisley togas tune up...he leans over the lip of the stage zeroing in on a honeydew of a teenybopper asking the nubile girl seated in the front row "How are ya? Where'd yah go to skewll? Do you know where the seat of man's soul is located ?" She faints dead away, her mind and pussy wet...both moist with ideas and possibilities...

Please click on the review title for selected track: Kill For Peace

Created by Bruce Haack • The Electric Lucifer (Columbia, 1970)

There are some holly grails a mere mention will send an obsessive nut packing his bag, to mythic plateaus where it's said in hushed whisper there are man eating trees. Or under the ground, looking for tombs, only to be rewarded with finding a room strewn with junk and artifact alike. Such is the makeup of this doctor, but my objects are to be found not in the Artic deserts but flea markets, combing through crates that smell of stale basement and forgotten purchases.

It was at a then local flea market where under the broiling summer heat of 1988 I stumbled across this oddity. Sandwiched between Boston Pops and Eagles records was this Milton Glaser like cover. It showed Jesus as green skinned Imp, his sides flanked by mock demons. The title alone was worth more than a passing curiosity: The Electric Lucifer"...At that point of the late 80's most older people were tossing out the contents of their youth. Beside the endless stream of CSN&Y, Derrick and the Dominoes and the like, Switched On style records were showing up. I had been burned enough times that I was getting wary of records that featured the Moog. Checking the back cover and it's nearly impenetrable liner notes, I discovered no cover songs. Good sign number 1. From what I could make out from the liner notes, the album was attempting to paint Lucifer as his first incarnation - The Light Bearer. Fortuitous omen number 2.

The tipping factor? It was a white label promo cover, with boxes suggesting to DJ's what tracks to play...and none of them has been checked...

As I wrote earlier, I'm not a fan of Switched On LP's. For the most part they become a listening affair punctuated with observations along the lines of "Look! The lead line in Winchester Cathedral is being played with multi timbre", or "so that's not a bass"? I prefer electronic records where something new is being tried, and that's exactly what I got.

Straight off the bat with the first cut of the album opens with this carnival spook house song, clownishly cavorting in. The singing voice vocodered to almost unrecognizably. Images of Betty Boop trapped in a haunted Bakelite radio, besieged by demonic cathodes.

From here the LP straddles the fence of serious electronics and a children's record. Infectious melodies are broken up by blasts of heavy echo and sine waves. And why wouldn't this all sound like a Freak Out for the Sesame Street set? Unknown to me at the time, Haack made a living doing children's records. Years later those LP's were reissued and they have the same quality as Electric Lucifer. The main message is think for your self, rebel from constraints, do your own thing. All the things Anton LeVey suggested, even with the same Sunday Funnies take on the Horned One.

My then room mate (I have mentioned him before, he's the one who got the hot foot while sleeping) came in to my room wide eyed and smiling. "What is this"?! It fell out of the realm of what I knew, I didn't know. At that point in history, ESPdisk sides while somewhat obscure were pretty easy to obtain, and concurrently Nonesuch electronic records had elements of adopting some rock music but never came close to this. This was pop music for a brightly colored Will To Power future. The room mate and I marveled at the cover with it's promo slick, could this really have been released on a major label?

As the LP played on, a uncredited male voice doing his best Jim Morrison psychedelic croon, adding another layer of accessibility. I guess Satan was really trying his best to convert the teeny boppers...

Like most records of the late 60's and early 70's, the Vietnam war had to be addressed. Used as a template for art, here it's simply called "War". Perhaps the heaviest track, it starts as a break neck Walter Carlos fugue, and then for further comedic affect the focus shifts to a lopsided military march, punctuated with machine gun fire. Eventually the Musique Concret is stopped short. A child intones "I don't wanna play any more", then fades out as a mournful dirge / lullaby.

Even with the Switched on Bach move used in the above track, there really isn't any reference point for what your hearing. Just like Trout Mask Replica is of it's time but from an alternate universe, Electric Lucifer has that same feel. At one point a track called Super Nova condenses A Rainbow In Curved Air to five minutes, but even then it seems like it's coming from left field.

With such an auspicious introduction to the mainstream what could follow? Haack had already been a guest on quiz shows, debuting his latest home made Synths that plays a persons electro magnetic aura to the delight of the studio audiences. He'd composed pop songs for Theresa Brewer, did music for commercials, and incidental music for theater. The world with it's newly turned on ears would fall at his feet...no...he sunk back into undeserved obscurity.

Bruce died in 1988 (ironically the year I found this, one of my favorite records). In between the year of The Electric Lucifer and his death, to pay the bills he made more children's records, along with two more parts to Electric Lucifer. The history is a little sketchy as to where the second part (called Book Two) released posthumously a few years back falls. There seems to have been two Book Two.

By now, the children's records have a harsher edge to them, and the Book Two is down right bitter and angry. The cartoon music is still the bedrock, but the words are now from the point of a leering Pit Boss.

And perhaps rightfully so...Reagan and Bush I were invoking the other end of the dark forces; strength without a hint of compassion. Children's minds in school were not being engaged, but merely numbed with repetition. The smart ones to the office, the dumb ones to the front lines, and the odd? Marginalized...

The Omni Group has reissued Electric Lucifer with a alternate tale of the opening track, and half hour interview with Haack on Canadian Radio promoting the LP. Here he goes on at length for his love for rock music, especially The Beatles and The Moody Blues.

Do your mind and soul a favor and go by this CD. Perhaps it'll remind you of a time when evil meant just rebellion, and good was not an excuse for a totalitarian movement.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Program Me

Sun Ra And His Solararkestra • Other Planes Of There (Saturn, 1965, 1966, or 1967)

Is that the past I am viewing from the spaceships porthole? The inhabitants of the planet we have landed on are upright crab-men. Clothed in Neanderthal loin cloths, they are armed with laser shooting spears...you'll forgive me, I was looking through some old photos I had taken...wonderful times the 1990's...

There are places in the galaxy where the primitive and modern rest side by side. How often have I heard the drunken party guest mutter "Ape with a microwave", only to be reassured by the host that it was just a general observation. I shouldn't take it personally...

Sun Ra understood these contradictions. Listening to the title track of Other Planes of There ones ear has to quickly reassemble it's inner calendar. While the album as a whole is a study in contrast, it's the opening that embodies the concept.

Opening with a blast of dark chords , not unlike modern 20Th century classical, quickly it shifts to lopsided jazz consisting of sharp piano chords and reeds. Meandering in this mode for a while we are gradually taken to some sort of ancient Melody. Oboe painting a picture of the Serengeti. Not content to stay too long there, Ra's piano starts rumbling low end notes bringing us back to modern times. Content to shift from focus to focus, like most Ra compositions it ends when he's run out of notes.

Side two uses the same floor plan, only breaking the focus up into separate pieces. Quietly skittering in on sparse snare drums, tapping out a rhythm that seems more like a lead line, Sound Spectra/Spec Sket is then married to hunting call horns bathed in reverb. From there the maelstrom of side one resumes.

Next comes the tack Sketch. Duping the listener with what would seem like a normal swing style played by the piano, it's John Gilmore's sax that ups the oddball factor. What is the more Fortian moment here? The presentation of swing as a primitive movement, or Gilmore solo that sounds like he's playing along to a radio broadcast heard through the wall of the next room? The sonic slight of hand is the reverb. Used a cloaking device, it starts to muddy the sax to the point where the treatment becomes an instrument in it's self. Then jarringly shut off, the sax appears almost out of nowhere.

Sandwiched between the Sketch and the mammoth album closer Spiral Galaxy, is the aptly titled Pleasure. Languidly drifting in a sea of bowed bass and light piano, we are given another example of a sax solo that plays around the tune rather than join in.

By albums end, Spiral Galaxy show us that the tempo of the Heavens can be marked in 3/4 time. An ancient sounding military precision is kept here, framing a fussy sounding woodwind section - not unlike a tornado visible on the horizon. Jabs of shrill oboe crackling over piano.

Reverb is heavily placed on the woodwind segments, only to be quickly withdrawn for the other instruments to come through. All the while the 3/4 is being kept, but with small additional beats, shifting the focus. Just as it seems that it's winding down, some new squall of sound arises and your off again. Eventually it does end, but not in grotesque crescendo but with the tapping of some percussion. You've arrived safely back to the present time. Ra and Arkestra have taken you through various time shifts, and you barely moved an inch.

Like most Sun Ra recordings, it's a little hard to pin down the where and whens. While this session was recorded in 1964/65, it may not have seen print until 1966, or 1967. By then Ra had moved the Arkestra further in to space, employing the Moog as his main instrument. So a piano based record seems even further antiquated.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Sound Spectra / Spec Sket

The Advancement • The Advancement (Philips, 1969)

The Doctor is sick...not only a fine book by Anthony Burgess, but a personal observation...remember faithful readers; if it's hot outside, eating pushcart chicken might not be such a good idea.....

So here I am, cooped up at home with not much to do. No way am I venturing out to see any colleges or patients. Then what better way to pass the time, then wax poetic about this fantastic LP...

The Advancement were the cream of two combs; Lou Kabok and Hal Gordon from Garbo Szabos band, and Lynn Blessing from Bill Plummers Cosmic Brotherhood. Rounding out the Advancement are a a few other players of note: Colin Bailey, Richie Thompson, Art Johnson, and David Kinzie. These members are a sort of B Wrecking Crew.

Jazz in the mid to late 60's was akin to a rudderless ship. There was no clear idea as where to go. The rock crowd was now accepting of longer song form. Odd meters and noise had been appropriated. What once seemed musically non conformist was now coming out of the tiny speakers of any teenager's stereo. But like any American art movement it did what it did best...amalgamate...

Beatles covers would sit next to reworking of Bop standards with new names. Records were packaged in the latest colors. Whole Jazz departments at major record labels were saved by having photos of the band members wearing Nehru Jackets...Predictably the results were often awful. Note for note readings of Robbie Krieger guitar solos, drained of all their inventiveness, were tacked onto the umpteenth reading of Light My Fire...but every once in a while something like The Advancement would come out. For something that was released in the dark days of 60's Jazz, there isn't a cover tune on the whole LP. At most, two tracks come a little too close to plagiarism; Fall Out is practically a Doors track, only without Morrison belching his way through the vocals. The other, Hobo Express, is reworking of Van Dyke Parks reading of Donovan's Colors.

Elsewhere on the LP the mood is generally laid back, and would not sound out of place in a Hollywood psychedelic movie. The opening track "Juliet", brought to mind immediately AIP's The Dunwitch Horror. It's wistful air undercut with melancholy... and in counter balance, Stone Folk is a sort of hip Gregorian chant, The guitar solo panned from speaker to speaker.

The playing is nimble throughout. Everyone is in their element. No embarrassing moments of playing the new sound without understanding it.

Fallout has added this to their continuing list of excellent reissues. Once again, it's another recording taken from an LP, but the sound is clear. Kudos also to them for taking care in packaging the music with it's moody cover intact.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Stone Folk

Cosmic Eye • Dream Sequence (EMI, 1972)

I remember once, when I was a young intern, after a night of chemical studies that I had stayed up so late that I saw the sun rise. Realizing that it was way past my bedtime, I bid my fellow students (ironically) a good evening and drifted home. After arriving home, I climbed the stairs and went to bed at 8 o' clock. A few minutes later my eyes popped open I saw that the clock hands had barely moved a inch...what a disappointment, my blasted insomnia had returned, and here I was in a false state of being awake. All I wanted was some rest. There the morning sun crept in the sky, another Summer day about to begin...and then it hit me, it wasn't 8:15 AM, but PM...I had slept twelve hours, and it only felt like five minutes...

Cosmic Eye's album has that same affect. I had somehow found this album, or at least a track, on line. This persons blog was full of Bollywood and Sitarpoitation tracks. For the life of me I can't recall how I got there. As I heard Sequence 9, I was struck how similar it was to George Harrison's Wonderwall Soundtrack. It was from that likeness, that I had conjectured the music had to be from the 60's.

As luck would have it, I found a CD of the album at Kim's St. Marks. Not too cheaply I might add, but that one track with it's running time of under two minutes was so intriguing. Like I had said, it reminded me of Wonderwall, with it's juxtapositions of jazz and Indian music.

Playing it immediately when I got home, the music was so intense I could do nothing else. I was listening to music that was in collage form, a melancholic Procol Harum like tune would give way to a restrained free jazz work out, from there that in turn that blended a spy music like theme with traditional Sitar music...How is it other Psych-Heads have not raved about this? And then I looked at the copyright date, disbelieving my eyes...it read 1972...that explained it all. Most Psych fans are forgiving of of certain musical styles coming from other countries at later dates, but not England. If this came from Germany, or even France lets say, high praise would be heaped on it. But it hails from England, when Sitars , flanging, and artistically treated echo, were well past their hip sell by date.

It seems that this album was the brain child of one Alan D'Silva. He was noted for playing jazz in a raga style, but much later than Garbor Szabo. D'Silvas first album is from 1969, and he recorded up until his death in 1976. Yet I cant help but think this was perhaps his first recorded work. In 1969 this would still sound relatively fresh, but by 1972, very much like yesterdays papers.

There's very little information about D'Silva online. I was able to find a pitifully uninformative web site run by his family. They mention there the CD issue, and it being a bootleg of poor quality. I've listened to this CD numerous times, and found nothing wrong with the sound. Unlike most legitimate reissues where you can tell the music was remastered from a vinyl copy, here everything is surprisingly clear. I'm not sure how easy it will be to get this CD, but it's well worth hunting down.

Please click on the review title for selected track: 4

Kawabata Makoto • Jellyfish Rising (Funfundvierzig, 2005)

Just as much as the lateness of the hour affects what I decide to listen to (The Madcap Laughs seems awkward at 3:00 pm, but brilliant at 12:30 am), weather can also play a part. Temperature rises and out goes the Minimalism, or anything with too many notes...so, what to play when everything is a bother? Somehow Jellyfish Rising is an amalgamation of those two styles and fits perfectly.

Here Makoto is in full Gamelan music mode. Shifting tones from the guitar cascade over repetitive figures. It never really goes anywhere, but there is a feeling of sonic rushing around. Think of this as a more gentile version of The Monkey Chant, and you'll have a beginning.

On the occasions I was subjected to The Grateful Dead, or read various band members name dropping composers, I could never figure out what the big deal was. I'm sure Garcia must have had a voracious ear, but it never seemed to inform his fingers. And with Kawabata, it's the complete opposite. He wears his influence on his sleeve. When he's not destroying his guitar a'la numerous guitar Gods, or thumbing his nose at sainted rock albums with Acid Mother's Temple, there is a serious side that comes out. It's in these albums where he shines brightest. Yes, he's playing here like Steven Reich filtered through Jerry Garcia, and the cover is a hideous throw back to New Age album graphics, but the playing so beautifully becomes a oxymoron - simple complexity. The two tracks on the CD never get mired in flashy playing. It's all pulsing and flanging, no real guitar solos. Repetition is the key here, and it's in that you find yourself with room to think. Where albums like this tend to get bland in their desire to be cosmic or even worse, soothing, here there is no down side.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Astral Aurelia Aurita Laavarek

The Alan Lorber Orchestra • The Lotus Palace (Verve, 1967)

A fellow Doctor once passed along some sagely advice: "Set and setting", and this afternoon I found myself in full experience. July is in full swing, the streets are hot but thankfully humidity free, reminding me of old Calcutta. Everywhere you look people are coping with the heat, free from the indignity of sweat stains. It is in this environment I find my self listening to The Lotus Palace. Just a few days before, I was in Springfield MA, surrounded by trees, and for some reason the music didn't fit. I'm not exactly sure why, but the glass and concrete buildings were a perfect visual accompaniment.

Is it because the music that Lorber is presenting reeks of the sophisticated? True he's playing what was the hits of the day, filtered through sitars and Indonesian percussion...you haven't lived until you've heard Up Up And Away done with sitars.

I've never been able to figure out why, but every production by Alan Lorber has this muddy quality. Most of his recorded work is in stereo, but you would be hard pressed to tell. From the varied productions that I have had, everything has that sort of near bootleg recording quality. Was he reusing tape, or bouncing too many tracks? Either way it's the sonic thickness that adds to the charm. Where most producers raise the EQ on tambouras to the point where the drone is bone shattering, he'll make them so muffled that they caress the ear.

The choice of covers among his originals are interesting. Tim Harding's Hang On To A Dream, along with Flute Thing by The Blues Project sit next to a couple of Beatles numbers. As you most likely know, the Beatles were too idiosyncratic to lend to covering, and here Lorber bravely takes on two of the more difficult songs; Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and Within You Without You. It's on the second that he succeeds. Nearly covering the song note for note, it sounds more like a backing track than a hip cash in.

Lorber's originals are in the vein of Aloha Lounge background music, Martin Denny's Mai Tai spiked with STP. Tremolo, heavy reverb...all forms of audio psychedelia are used, stopping short of backwards tape and flanging. Don't want to freak out the Lounge Lizards too much.

The Big Beat reissue (long out of print) includes 3 bonus tracks. The third is a track that would appear to be a pared down take of Purple, from Bobby Calenders LP, here it's called "I Heard The Rain And..." hearing it without Bobby's serpentine vocals, you really get the idea that he was just making the lyrics up on the spot.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Echo Of The Night

Samurai • Samurai (Greenwich, 1971)

In light of the two previous posts, I felt that I had better write about music, lest this becomes an obituary column.

Is there anything more despicable than Jazz Rock? Perhaps Adult Contemporary Western, but for me it's the later that somehow gets under my skin like a case of chem trail Morgellos. These days I find myself listening to bands that insist on using poly rhythms without a clear understanding of how. The results can either be brilliant, like the Hampton Grease Band, or unpleasant like The Web. It is from The Web's demise that Samurai formed. Shone of their terrible vocalist who must have had aspirations to be the next Engelbert Humperdink, the band adopted a Steely Dan / Hot Rats approach. While they don't get anywhere near the complexity of that type playing, the lack of break neck smarty pants musicianship becomes all the more rewarding.

Arrangements are allowed to breathe. The songs don't seemed composed to a state of still born. Best of all, just two tracks break the above five minute barrier. Most bands when they have a lengthy track, seem to forget how to end it. There's usually the pattern of funny time signature, followed by an amateurishly insightful lyric framing solos of epic proportions. Proving that just because you had taken music lessons, that everyone understands how a composition works. It's here that Samurai excel. having come from a pop band aggregation, the idea of song craft is up front. For all of their Prog leanings, you can actually hum a few tunes.

Esoteric Recordings have reissued this, their sole LP, along with the three previous recordings as The Web. Reading in the liner notes that the original vocalist left after the second Web LP, I may at some point buy it. I'd say avoid the first LP, based from the second LP. Yes, his voice is that bad...

Please click on the review title for selected track: Saving It Up For So Long

George Carlin • 1937 - 2008

...and the hits just keep on coming...I was a fan of George Carlin as a young Doctor in my formative years of record collecting. His work, stood up to repeated listening unlike say Cheech and Chong, or even Steve Martin. Where with the aforementioned others it was stoned humor that merely accentuated the state you were in before the record went on, or just a vanity project, Carlin's records were like reading a eye opening Philosophy lesson. Where Hegel or Kant were not known for their humor, and Sartre is the death of any party, he told the truth (granted from a crabby perspective) and was just witty enough to get it under your skin. There it would fester like a alien virus, eating out the lies and crap that lived in the cerebellum. Yes, there were lapses in judgment, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and a short lived sitcom on Fox in the early 90's come readily to mind, but at no point did he ever soften. I couldn't help but think that what you saw was what you got. Salute...

Alton Kelly • 1940 - 2008

Psychedelic poster artistes, a limited breed to begin with, has lost one of it's numbers last week.

Alton Kelly along with Stanley Mouse created some of

the more iconic graphics that lasted well in to the

70's...somehow they always

wound up doing the images for lame bands, ie: The Grateful Dead and Journey. Regretfully the art didn't elevate the music. I wonder if the Dead would have lasted as long as they did without the trippy Gothic skeleton? As we all know, the music rarely if ever came to matching greatness. The Dark Star 45 being an exception...

Please click on the obituary title for selected track: Dark Star (45 rpm version)

The Zodiac • Cosmic Sounds: celestial counterpoint with words and music (Elektra, 1967)

When asked what sign am born under, often I find myself at a loss for explanation. Does the asker mean here on Earth, and even then, what dimensional version of earth. Simple questions are often as vexing as mandible reconstruction...but as society grows more venial, what people are now interested when it comes to personal secrets are how many electric appliances you command, or where on your body are the debt markers are. To think 40 years ago what most interested people was your Sun and Moon signs. An inexact science would get you in a conversation, and soon enough a Mer Goat would be copulating wildly with a Scale. If they were lucky you could have a pair of twins join you, or at least a pair of twin fish...It was in these times, when Cosmic Sounds: celestial counterpoint with words and music came from.

Sonorous spoken word by Cyrus Faryar, who clearly was taking acting lessons from William Shatner, velvetly drapes one of the better marriages of Moog and Psychedelia. This is the music one thinks of when an AIP movie comes to mind. Fuzzy optic shots of nubile ladies, their bodies painted with all forms of archaic symbols, Big Sur's waves crashing behind them.

Don't try to make sense out of what he's saying, on inspection the faux haiku's fall apart, but anything with substance would have weighed down the music.

The compositions are by Mort Garson, who would do other Occult themed electronic music LP's, but they tend to just be him alone and lack the fleshed out sonics of the Cosmic Sounds LP. Providing the mini orchestra here are some of the Wrecking Crew, Gene Estes, Paul Beaver, and on guitar someone (uncredited) who sounds amazingly like Frank Zappa. The guitar solo to Cancer - The Moon Child, is a near match for Zolar Czakl from Uncle Meat. More of that distinctive way of playing shows up on Sagittarius - The Versatile Daredevil.

With all of these ingredients you have the makings of one somehow forgotten classic. There were many zodiac LP's in the sixties and seventies, but this has the ring of being crafted by people who were trying for something new.

Mort Garson died in January 2008, and this LP was reissued in 2002. I hope that in the time between the reissue and his passing, he had got some recognition for broadening the palate of electronic music.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Cancer - The MoonChild