Seems that in my exhaustion, I inadvertently re-posted an Iskra LP that Jim had already put up on MS long ago, though with the unexpected and happy knock-on effect of replacing a problematic original link. Anyway, that being the case, I've decided to offer one further share (below) for this go 'round to make up for the redundancy.
The cat behind the Les Splendid moniker is one Jean-Claude Pierric, one of France's most prolific library music composers of the era. This particular outing on the Disc L'Agami imprint probably won't prove a monster revelation to anyone that's spent some time exploring this territory, but it's still larded a very specific period charm. Flute laden for its duration, the best bits here will plaster a big dumb grin on the mug of anyone charmed by the likes of The Bigroup, Braen's Machine or Bernard Wystraete/Structure.
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Maintaining our recent course of Swedish underground offerings, here's a fairly crucial one. I'd long ago shared their final LP Fantasies, though their attack by that point had morphed into a sorta whimsical ethno jazz fusion ala later Archimedes Badkar. At the time of my posting that album some three years ago, I'd opined that this earlier and more lauded era of their work was of a lesser order. Truth be told, I'd probably still opt for Fantasies given the choice of any one of their albums, but this more overtly improv driven era of their work now sounds pretty damn remarkable to me, though being in the mood for it helps. If I remember their history correctly, Iskra were doing improvised childrens music workshops around this time, which certainly jibes with the whimsical spirit of some of the instrumental voicings here and their zoological call and response arrangements, particularly evident on the cuts that open and close the first side. This squirrelly approach manifests itself elsewhere in forms ranging from the ceremonial to celebratory, at various times evoking everything from Bengt Berger's Bitter Funeral Beer to Germany's Anima, with everything from Gamelan to New Orleans funeral marching band music coursing through these tracks.
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One of the earliest shots over the bow for both the French underground music scene and one of it's most formidable movers, the Gallic grand old man of the outwardly bound Jean-Pierre Massiera, whose subsequent releases from the late 60's to the early 80's have marked this producer/arranger/conceptualist as one of the cornerstone figures within the history of French musical radicalism; Massiera having been the driving force behind legendary left field acts like Les Maledictus Sound, Horrific Child, Visitors and Venus Gang. This little known unit's sole outing was issued during the same year as his far better known Les Maledictus Sound LP and offers up a similarly dada-detourned incursion into pop psychedelic song arrangement, only with barnyard antics replacing the grand prix and haunted house settings of Les Maledictus Sound, as buzzsaw fuzz beat psych tendencies compete with mooing cows, chansons and episodes of spluttering gibberish.
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Whether as a member of Vapaa, (Kheta) Hotem or under the his solo or ensemble banners, Keijo Virtanen has long been one of the artists we're flown a flag for here on MS and this epic double disc set exhibits his most sense-expanding tendencies. Offering up Virtanen's muse in both solo and group settings, this set initiates with Keijo's solo efforts on Unfolding Emptiness, which unfurl at a lovingly glazed pace, with vibrating filaments of string scrape and pluck slowly coiling their way though a hookah haze of wobbly twinkle and organic subterranean clatter over which technicolor geysers of delicately tweaked synth juice periodically jet. Joined by his brother Sami (whose project Mosaic Antenna I've also shared) and another frequent sparring partner in the form of Juri Joensuu for disc 2, Decomposing Dawn and Dew opts for a decidedly less tranquil stance overall; to wit, it' contains some of the harshest material that I've heard the normally more low key Keijo commit to tape, with threadbare exoskeletons of pluck and scrape escalating into intensive cascades of shearing clatter that border on the post-industrial.
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Here's another lost episode of Swedish underground action courtesy of blog friend Ola Astrand, though this one sweeps past his previous 70's/80's underground shares and brings us up to the following decade. Crude, flailing and piss-takey, the "air quotes" around this one are written in Jamie Reid ransom note font. Musically, the sub-underground currents that this highly obscure unit glance off would have made this crew a shoe-in for a release on Stomach Ache Records back in the day, as deconstructive games and lowbrow genre disruption are hewn from intentionally inept 2 chord punk bashing.
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Viny'l'isten presents the aesthetics of two esteemed avant turntablists, both individually and in conjunction; each exhibiting a keen capacity to open doors to your subconscious by careful manipulations of antiquated vinyl's dust flecked scrying mirror. Jeck's initial solo salvo here piles up effected layers of skipping shellac disc textural grit against which stray dictophone chatter and needle-gunked fragments of 1/4 speed ethnic recordings mark time to vaguely Crawling With Tarts-like effect, while one time Z.D.L. member Van Bebber (whose other experiments with vinyl abuse I've previously posted) uses his alloted solo space here to cycle about in a statically charged orbit before his hairball-caked carousel gradually slides off it's psychically noogie-ing axis into a field of faded media ghostings and gradually finds footing once again on another purgatorial roundelay. These two then come together for a half hours worth of untitled fascination; their surrealist exquisite corpse summoned from the debris of the radiophonic age, with media and musical signifiers piling up in far greater densities than their solo efforts frequently allow for.
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Though most folks surveying this artist's body of work would have you believe otherwise, this home recorded 4-track spectacular is actually the crowning glory in the recorded canon of this iconic guitarist/keyboardist, whose musical contributions have spanned many of the key divides in the history of subcultural audio, from his teen years in the 60's psychedelic outfit Sproton Layer and his post punk work in the the legendary Mission Of Burma to his years in the systemic/post-prog/art rock ensemble Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic. Issued in a hand sprayed sleeve on Forced Exposure's old in-house imprint, the plangently squalling detuned edifices of stacked electric guitars that inhabit many of these tracks either cede to or buttress episodes of phenomenal Chris Knox-by-way-of-Skip-Spence psych pop ingenuity.
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To keep the Swedish underground thread that we've been mapping lately moving right along and as a follow up to my semi-recent post of this flautist's sensational Sissel LP, here's another manifestation of his particular muse; the five year interim between these albums having modified his approach from Sissel's seductively strutting and relaxed funk fusion to a more juiced up attack that's simultaneously slickly streamlined and ethno-shimmyingly seductive, with the best bits here (aside from the wonderfully wonky if atypical lounge jazz of "Boathouse Club") arriving at this sound from an angle reminiscent of late 70's French underground outfits like Clivage and Sonorhc.
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The scowling and yowling sturm und drang kicked up by this disconsolate Greek post punk crew is fairly naked in it's Birthday Party worship. It's also a damn good bit of misanthropic amusement for the right set of ears, with scabrous guitar debris and attitudinal vocals spewed over a monolithically lumbering rhythm section, at times almost reaching an early Swans level of pylon pounding malevolence.
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More charmingly naif detuned ethno improv malarky from the Finnish hinterlands, this luddite crew hewing more to the scuttle-tweedle-tinkle falling-apart-at-the-seams improv-directed end of the spectrum (think Hertta Lussu Assa or Lauhkeat Lampaat), with broken flute and horsehair scrape getting lackadaisically tangled up in the forest floor foliage.
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If you can avoid feeling a mite wrongfooted by the rather stiff and verbose first side here, the sole album from this highly obscure kraut-y sounding Austrian crew has some very real merits, with the flip offering up an engaging side long title track suite with a wide ranging attack that factors in hard rock, sequenced space rock-y bits and somewhat Genesis-like proggy prog bits for an end result that could be compared to Nektar, Grobschitt/Eroc, Muck Groh and Tyll's Sexphonie LP.
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