STEAMING COILS-NEVER CREAK, LP, 1987, USA

Were it not for my requiring his express consent to begin posting these items, Steaming Coils would have been the very first thing I'd have chosen to post on MS, encapsulating as it does the ethos of Mutant Sounds more purely (to my mind) than almost anything else extant. Woefully overlooked both in it's day and strangely, ever since, Steaming Coils was the spectacularly demented product of the precocious teenage minds of Brad Laner (later of Savage Republic/ Medicine/ Electric Company and an old musical collaborator of my band Vas Deferens Organization), David Chrisman, Spencer Savage (aka Grashstaht Schtant) and L.A. Free Music Society mages Rick Potts and Joseph Hammer, with Savage, Potts and Hammer parting company after the era of their first LP, to be replaced by a variable roster of L.A. fringe musical talent. I've long maintained over various posts that the as-yet-unnamed mystery school that existed mid 70's to late 80's of artists who took their license to go completely mad from an immersion in the arcane universes of Beefheart and The Residents are responsible for some of the most brilliantly bent music ever created. It's a milieu that's been explored at some depth by everyone from The Blitzoids to Bomis Prendin to Shoulder Of Mutton A to The Decayes to Buxinrut, but no one has ever come close to the unholy madness that Steaming Coils would locate at this fruitful nexus. Their genius was to pinpoint and smoke out a sublime node of psych pop beauty in the interstices of such lunacy, something they take to throat-lump-inducing ends on the album's closing cover of The Monkees' Porpoise Song. That they've been relegated to obscurity for so long borders on the criminal, even more so for the fact that Steaming Coils for me represents the high water mark of the entire L.A.F.M.S. canon. This, the first salvo of a comprehensive program of posts I'll be undertaking in the coming days will hopefully go some ways toward remedying that. This post will be followed by their subsequent two LP's and, finally, a massive 8 disc post of unreleased archival material, all of which has generously been offered up by Messr. Laner to Mutant Sounds from the original master tapes.


***************NEW LINK POSTED OCTOBER 2012***************

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