Gerard Manset • La Mort D'Orion (EMI/Pathe/Zenon, 1970)

Another decade long trip around the sun I have just completed. In comparison to other things that this universe holds, that is a small time parlor trick.

While this involuntary action can illicit melancholy there is nothing one can do. You get older, along with everything else...

My ears have been soothed but the River Styx operetta that is La Mort D'Orion. In my previous post I gushed praise in Pearls Before Swine's Balaklava. That record record filled my younger years with hope that there was something else out there then the general music for knuckle heads and suburban idiots. How much of the 90's was spent in combat mode - G n' R at the ready? Now granted most of the items in this blog would never get played on a juke box (small aside; one time I found my self in a Queens biker bar located on Union Turnpike and put on Tomorrow Never Knows.I watched to my joy and amazement as the burly bar tender did a 60's shimmy go go dance to the pounding of Ringo Stars drumming). So where would this type of music get played? In darkened basements, downer parties, solo explorations of the cosmos and it's accompanying neither-worlds. How I wish I had known of Gerard Manset's recordings, what a perfect weapon it would have been back then against the hordes.

Not unlike the above mentioned Pearls Before Swine, the second record is the stunner. His first already had a quality that was odd for a projected pop star - snotty dismissive vocals not unlike Lou Reed in the 70's, sound effects, song forms that owe more to classical with no discernible middle eight. When coupled with coming out during the May 1968 riots, his debut sold next to nothing.

While history is littered with bands and performers that one wonders what it...and regardless of his idiosyncratic style and bad timing, he was given a second chance. How lucky he and we both are. Who knew that one man could translate out the map of decedent moroseness worthy of Hysman at his finest. This is the soundtrack to La Bas. Weariness permeates the musical proceedings, but at no point has Manset lost his virility. The orchestrations also by Manset are never fruity, but bold accents that bring this into a new territory that John Cale would explore in the Falklands Suite nearly twenty years later. I have mentioned the two of three monoliths of The Velvet Underground, and it is in way to say that Manset is lesser in their shadow. He is every part their contemporary, if not the secret genetic melding of Msr's Reed and Cale. It can happen you know, there was a genetic laboratory in Florida that was working on a ape human hybrid. Not for any practical purposes mind you, but the grant money had to be spent by fiscal years end.

Apparently the La Mort D'Orion was a hit in France, and praise must be given to Mansets moves after its wake. There were a minimum of interviews, no concerts, no plans for an English translation, even the followup singles' picture sleeve used the same black cover motif but it was a reworking of one the parent albums songs. Yet Manset became a star in France, selling records and becoming of an institution of solitude. Further testimony to his fame, the cartoonist Bilal did a whole work based on the album.

Regretfully Gerard Manset would never sail again the same psychotropic ocean. While every album has that same man alone feel, and he augments with his own orchestrations, gone were the tape collage segments and use of other voices. The records following La Mort D'Orion are still apocalyptic, but just slightly less so.

The original LP was published on EMI, but I am yet to see an original copy. It is very doubtful that it was ever released in America. There was a CD reissue sometime in the late 90's or early 00's, but this has gone out of print. What is available now is a gray area release by a suspect Korean label WPS. The sound quality is clear and must have come from the reissue. Thanks must be given to the person who did the mastering, for the sound is of high quality.

Please click on review title for La Mort D'Orion: La Mort D'Orion

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band • Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969)

I completely missed the anniversary. Earlier this month, 40 years ago Frank Zappa summoned the Captain and his Magic Band to his home studio for a preview of their assembled album. Dressed in Sunday best (after all, it was Easter) intently they listened. The Captain was overjoyed, the Band relived. Perhaps now they would be free of his artistic and physical cruelty. A year of living in absolute poverty and under near cult like circumstances had payed off. Little could they imagine that in the years to come, in reverent awe, people would still speak of this work.
For as wild as free jazz was, and that by 1968/1969 it was perfectly OK to sit and play your bongos in the dirt, nothing sounded like this. Keeping to the credo of mutations, with their awkwardly placed limbs causing a shambling gate, causing fear and revulsion to all they encounter, the music has the same frightening assault on the senses. To the untrained ear the music sounds wrong. Clashing time signatures - every instrument sounds in conflict. The Captains wounded animal howling vocals laying lyrics that are products of schizophrenia yet are deeply insightful. Ironically they seem to be concerned about how mean humans can be to each other. This is just too much for dull minds...
There have been scores of musicians that have attempted to incorporate the Magic Band sound, but it just hasn't worked. What makes the playing here so unique is the amount of control that is cleverly disguised. To the untrained, this just seems like a sonic free for all. If it was it just wouldn't have worked.
Little hints of regular rhythm here and there, but the melding of free jazz and delta blues seems to obscure anything below the surface. But if you stick with it you'll get it, just throw out the preconceived notion of what comprises a song. This is the sound of nature. Anima does not compose straight lines, and that rule applies here. A melody may only need to play 7 bars even though the song is 24 long, but it works. Any more and there would be excess, and in reflection of the times when album tracks were getting longer and longer the songs are economical. Can you imagine any other band getting 28 pieces on a double album?
1969 was the watershed year for 60's wretchedness - Woodstock, the accession of the Grateful Dead come readily to mind, but thankfully we have from that year an album that transcended music and became art.

Please click on the review title for the track: Hair Pie I / untitled / dialog / Hobo Chang Ba. These were taped at the Trout Mask House when the album was to be recorded there as a "Ethnic Field Recording". While they lack Vliet's vocals, his absence shows how complex and almost Rites Of Spring like the music is.

Sun Dial • Other Way Out (Tangerine, 1990)

What are the elements of Deja Vu? It was once isolated to a fine gauze not unlike ectoplasm but some how less definite. As my colleagues and I finally were able to get the filament to materialize in the sterile confines of the glass tank, a cleaning person opened a window in the research facilities hallway and that very motion came a vague hint of a draft. With that seemingly insignificant action, the element was some how able to be whisked away and we were left with the feeling that we had seen this before, but couldn't tell why...

Sun Dial's Other Way Out album has that same quality. While released in 1990, with eyes closed you would swear that you were listening to a contemporary of early Pink Floyd or Czar. Didn't this band play U.F.O., why do I think I saw them open for The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown? I think I even have the concert poster around here some where, it was an Osiris production...

Their act of confounding time travel must be applauded. It was fashionable to embrace psychedelia then in idea, but the secrets of the kingdom was still slumbering. For as many portals were sighted, very few would open enough to let two people though at a time. Some how this three piece band was able to. The whole album reeks of a lived in past. Guitars are thick and intelligently distorted, real drums pound with conviction, straight forward bass playing, fazed vocals, and exotic flutes and percussion abound.

Knowing a good thing and being incredibly prolific in their first year of existence, head Sun Dial Guitarist Gary Raymond released a number of compilation tracks and reissued Other Way Out with different covers and track listings. Here is where things get confusing. No mention is made of what tracks were from the above mentioned compilations. As of 2006 Other Way Out is on its fourth reissue, now a double CD with the second disc containing outtakes and compilation tracks. The well know version of the album released on UFO Compact Discs was a relative contemporary of the Tangerine issue but had different mixes of the songs.

Either version is a stunning debut that very few pull off, and the lauding offered at the time was well earned. About the time of release, they made a short tour of the United States with The Fur and Skin Trading Club and I was lucky enough to see them. This would be I believe their only tour, and if they toured again in this configuration. Subsequent Sun Dial recording would have only Raymond as a mainstay and the quality of records suffers. His side project Quad continued the same lysergic quality that has made Other Way Out a perennial favorite among connoisseurs, but regretfully the Quad recordings were limited issues and are now hard to come by. Hopefully he will one day release them on CD.

Until then we still have these recordings to sit back and let the intangible element known as Deja Vu to caress your ears.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Plains Of Nazca take one

Kenneth Anger (2.3.37 - )

February 3rd marks the 82nd birthday of Kenneth Anger. If for some odd reason you don't know that name, how you have survived through this journal is beyond me...that said, Fantoma has released in the past year or so two DVDs collecting his films. Go watch.

Much has been written about how he almost single handily started the music video, or that this was the first gay cinema to receive a wide audience, and his connection to The Rolling Stones / Led Zeppelin / Charles Manson, etc. All of that is true, but if you can watch the works with out the post modern malady of explaining everything, you will be rewardingly immersed in a world of frightful symmetry - Jungian ideas flying toward your subconscious with strobe light precision, and the self shrouded mysteries of Magick tantalizingly revealed.

For someone with a vast reputation he has surprisingly a small catalog. There are rumors of other titles, but either they are part of Anger's own myth making or they do exist and will be shown after his passing. I am never sure which to believe. But what is available is enough to keep me coming back. With each viewing I find new visual layers not perceived from the last time. These are films shot on limited budget yet they are amazing in their opulence. For a few minutes - his longest work runs roughly 38 minutes, the outside world falls away and you are transported to the time of Busby Berkley and the smell of opium...it is for these feats of Magick, I say Salute!

Blue Öyster Cult • Secret Treaties (Columbia, 1974)

When a mathematically inclined woodland creature admonishes you for your absence, you get writing...

Last night I was wandering around in the near frigid weather with a good friend, N. No Aswang is he, but not unlike the dreaded creature who disembowels it's self from it's lower torso to hunt, N's brain during the evening leaving the constraints of the day behind and is equally free to roam. As we wandered from place to place, he informed me in his inimitable way that perception is 9/10th of everything, and that his original perception of me was someone who is brooding, even slightly mean. But of course he has come to see the error in judgment. Yes, I have a perpetual furrowed brow, but it is just from contemplating how to perform some social operation better...

The same could be said of Blue Oyster Cult. Almost everyone is aware of the later hit singles - Don't Fear The Reaper, Godzilla, or even their somewhat flaccid peon to starlet Joan Crawford. And regretfully due to their ear crushing volume and less than welcoming imagery, they get lumped in with the lowest of Heavy Metal acts - Black Sabbath, et al. This is the disservice of perception. For if one peals away the electric Tod Browning airs, you have one of the more thoughtful loud bands, who by 1974 would unleash a thinking mans Sir Lord Baltimore.

Secret Treaties continues with Richard Meltzer's obscure Science Fiction lyrics from the previous albums, but this time it's welded to histrionic pop hooks and sonic textures. One wonders if there was a conscious effort by the band to adopt the sound of David Bowie, but because they were a bunch of Smarty Pants from Long Island, it comes off as the toughest guys at Creation Convention...Pissed off, the band is looking for Phil Suling, they were suppose to go on after the Red Sonja panel but they have been bumped for the Dr. Strange inkers meet and greet.

There is this wonderful mock villainy at play here, something that the aforementioned Black Sabbath just couldn't pull off. Granted when listening to either 'Sabbath or BOC, everyone most likely is stoned, but with BOC playing on the turntable I doubt the glue sniffers were in the room.

The overt downside to BOC is not being blessed with a band member possessing a great voice. The Jack Bruce school of vocals meets here, but the playing is so lethal and direct you almost welcome it. Without this flaw the band would have been the too imposing, making the music hard to enjoy.

While digging around on line I came across these two fascinating artifacts: BOC in concert with the supporting act Iggy & The Stooges, and then later in 1974 BOC with T.Rex. With the Stooges and T.Rex reaching their nadirs, what those evenings must have been like...

Word must be said to the passing of Ron Ashton. At their worst the Stooges sounded like Yummy Yummy Yummy played by a bunch of high functioning autistics, but at their best - which is often, it's true nihilistic joy. And there was Ashton's guitar giving a quick lesson on the difference between simple and simplistic.


Please click on the review title for selected track: Flaming Telepaths.