Secret Oyster - Sea Son,LP,1974,Denmark,(NWW list!)

Secret Oyster was really a continuation of Burnin' Red Ivanhoe, who split (for the first time) in 1972 following several disputes over the future direction of the band between Karsten Vogel and the other members. With Secret Oyster's excellent musicians (including Bøhling from Hurdy Gurdy and Knudsen from Coronarias Dans), Vogel had a perfect vehicle to explore new directions in instrumental fusion, partly inspired by Weather Report, but also adding Bøhling's magnificent lead guitar!
Secret Oyster's first album became an artistic and commercial success in Denmark. It also sold well in the rest of Scandinavia and gained some recognition in Germany, Great Britain and the USA. In spite of this, Vinding and Andersen left the group. The appearance of Stæhr caused Burnin' Red Ivanhoe to rise again, now with the same line-up as Secret Oyster (but with a different musical style).“Sea Son” consolidated their popularity, but couldn't match the first album in terms of quality (it was still quite good jazz-rock, though). In 1975, Secret Oyster went on a European tour as support act to Captain Beefheart, but later the same year CBS International opted not to continue to invest in Secret Oyster.
"Vidunderlige Kælling" (1975) was the music to a ballet by Flemming Flint. The compositions (in contrast to those on the previous albums) were more concise and almost free of any improvisation. Secret Oyster handled this task quite well. However, their last album was an ill-fated attempt to make more easily accessible music.
Secret Oyster was one of the few Danish groups mentioned here that gained healthy record sales. Their first album remains an important album in the general history of Danish rock.
Taken from Scented Gardens of the Mind - A guide to the Golden Era of Progressive Rock (1968-1980) in more than 20 European Countries, by Dag Erik Asbjørnsen, Borderline Productions, ISBN 1-899855-12-2
Claus Bøhling - Guitar

Kenneth Knudsen - Keyboards

Karsten Vogel - Sax, Keyboards

Mads Vinding - Bass

Bo Thrige Andersen - Drums

Jess Stæhr - Bass

Ole Streenberg - Drums
Albums:

Secret Oyster 1973 CBS 65769

Sea Son 1974 CBS 80489 (released in the USA as "Furtive Pearl")

Vidunderlige Kælling 1975 CBS 81044

Straight To The Krankenhaus 1976 CBS 81434

This is a lost classic from these relatively unheard of Danish jazz fusion/psychsters. A very tight unit that at times sound like the Mahavishnu Orchestra albeit more laid back, especially the violin on track two "Mind Movie", and the build up on "Pajamamafia" is very Birds of Fire era 'vishnu. The Secret Oyster could also put together some great pieces of music some times very hypnotic as is the case with said mentioned "Mind Movie" with a looping riff over some nice guitar work from Claus Bøling. Soft Machine also come to mind occasionally but the songs the Oyster produce really stand up on their own though the sound would be the same time zone as during 1973-'74 the Soft Machine added a guitarist to their line up, and as much as I like the Soft Machine, I find Sea Son a much more listenable and working experimental album as opposed to Softs or Bundles as these two records were more akin to Jazz/rock fusion more than the earlier Soft Machine work but lacked the bite, raw energy or innocence of the earlier work. Sea Son is certainly a fresh and engrossing album with plenty of raw action. All round The Secret Oyster put together a fine collection of tracks on their second album which then is all the more surprizing that they have remained almost an obscure unit (though signed to the mighty CBS who virtually looked after the majority of jazz and jazz related acts) when at that time during the early to mid seventies the fusion genre took flight and many acts used it very successfully, some arguably with a lesser talent and craft than the Secret Oyster, but such is life. I had come across their name in conversation a few times over the years and the albums kept alluding me and I began to wonder was it just a myth or something. I don't know if these are available on CD but they should be searched out, they are quite collectible on vinyl. Certainly a must and especially for those who are fans of the fusion era. Very rewarding music that deserves attention.

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Art & Language and the Red Crayola -Black Snakes,LP,1983,UK/USA

The Red Crayola was a psychedelic, avant-garde rock band from Houston, Texas, formed by art students at the University of St. Thomas (Texas) in 1966. The band was led by singer/guitarist and visual artist Mayo Thompson, along with drummer Rick Barthelme (brother of novelist Donald Barthelme) and Steve Cunningham. Their work prefigured punk and the no wave scene in 1980s New York City.
Thompson has continued using the name, in its legally-required permutation The Red Krayola, for his musical projects since.
They make noise rock, psychedelia and occasionally folk/country songs and instrumentals in a DIY-punk fashion, an approach that presaged the lo-fi aesthetic of many 1990s US indie rock groups. Negative reviews have come often during The Red Krayola's history. A critic once wrote, "It's a band that has no idea how to play its instruments. In fact, they don't even know what instruments are, or if the guitarist has the ability to remain conscious long enough to play whatever it is a 'note' might be." He added, "This is a band that was paid ten dollars to stop a performance in Berkeley. If Berkeley's not having it, you know you're in for rough sledding."
In 1966 the band signed to International Artists, home label to fellow psych-rockers The 13th Floor Elevators that was run by Lelan Rogers (brother of country musician Kenny Rogers). In 1967 the label released the psychedelic album, Parable of Arable Land, featuring six songs by the original three members interwoven with a cacophony generated by approximately 100 anonymous followers known as The Familiar Ugly who appear on a number of noise tracks called Free-Form Freak-Outs. The album's title track was a tape loop of electronic sounds with musical improvisations layered on top of it, a sound that foreshadowed the Red Crayola's second recording.
The minimalist music album Coconut Hotel was recorded in 1967 but rejected by International Artists for its lack of commercial potential because of its complete departure from the full-sounding guitar/bass/drums/vocals rock sound of the Red Crayola's first album. Coconut Hotel featured such self-described tracks as "Organ Buildup", "Free Guitar" and a series of atonal "One-Second Pieces" for piano, trumpet and percussion. The album did not see release until 1995. During this period, the band performed a concert in Berkeley, California where they attached a contact microphone to a sheet of aluminium foil that was set under a block of melting ice. The Red Crayola also performed with guitarist John Fahey and recorded an entire studio album of music in collaboration with him, but label head Lelan Rogers demanded possession of the tapes and recorded documentation of those sessions has been missing ever since.
The band's second album to see release (and the first to be released with the new "Krayola" spelling) was 1968's God Bless The Red Krayola And All Who Sail With It. God Bless presented a middle ground between Parable of Arable Land and Coconut Hotel, having veered away from the cacophonous psychedelic approach of their first album, but performing short, minimalist songs on electric guitar, bass and drums (interspersed with occasional a cappella harmonies and piano interludes) to achieve some surprisingly melodic results and even more surprisingly off-kilter lyrics. Hints of the as-of-yet unheard music on Coconut Hotel also revealed themselves (the track "Listen To This" is a one-second piece with spoken introduction) and the album as a whole sounds more like the early post-punk of the late 1970s than the Red Krayola's hippie-era contemporaries. The album was not as well received as the band's first release and the Red Krayola's original lineup disbanded.
In 1969, Thompson recorded a solo album called Corky's Debt to His Father for a small label called Texas Revolution. The album, which has come to be regarded by many as the unheralded jewel of the Crayola catalogue, is devoid of Thompson's usual avant-garde indulgences, and consists instead of ten lyrically-dense but warm-hearted pop songs, in various styles - Dylan-inspired blues-rock, Tex-Mex pop-rock with psychedelic touches, and early country rock not dissimilar to the contemporary work of Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Thompson was backed by studio musicians on the album and none of his usual Crayola (or 13th Floor Elevators) cohorts appear.
Mayo Thompson continued to make music, both under his own name and as The Red Krayola. He teamed up with American drummer Jesse Chamberlain and recorded the single 'Wives in Orbit' and the album Soldier Talk both of which could be seen as musical responses to punk rock. His collaborations in the 1970s and 1980s read like a roll call of the avant-garde and experimental artists and musicians of the era. The Red Krayola teamed up with the Conceptual Art collective Art & Language for three LPs: 1976's Corrected Slogans, 1981's Kangaroo? (also featuring The Raincoats' Gina Birch, Lora Logic and Swell Maps' Epic Soundtracks) and 1983's Black Snakes. Thompson joined Pere Ubu for a period in the early 1980s, performing on several releases, and provided soundtrack music for Derek Jarman. Throughout this time he was prolific as a producer for many other seminal experimental and alternative rock acts, including The Fall (1980's Grotesque (After the Gramme)), The Raincoats, Scritti Politti, Blue Orchids, Cabaret Voltaire, Stiff Little Fingers, Kleenex, The Chills and Primal Scream.
The 1990s found The Red Krayola with a new audience, who came to the group via musicians associated with Chicago's Post Rock scene and in particular the Drag City label, who had joined the band's ever-shifting line-up for a number of releases including the LPs Hazel (1996) and Fingerpainting (1999). These were, amongst others, Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs of Gastr del Sol, the post-Conceptual visual artist Stephen Prina, German painter Albert Oehlen, George Hurley (formerly of The Minutemen and fIREHOSE), Tom Watson of Slovenly, and John McEntire of Tortoise. In 2006 the group issued an album, Introduction and an EP, Red Gold.
In 1995, Drag City released 1967's Coconut Hotel LP and in 1998 issued The Red Crayola Live 1967 with material from the Angry Arts Festival and Berkeley Folk Music Festival including their live collaboration with John Fahey.
Thompson is active as an art critic and currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in California, where he teaches at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design.
British Space Rock group Spacemen 3 recorded a version of "Transparent Radiation" from the Red Crayola's Parable of Arable Land, and the same album's lead track "Hurricane Fighter Plane" was covered by UK deathrock group Alien Sex Fiend in 1986 and by Scottish act Future Pilot AKA in 1996.
From Wikipedia
Although no introduction was needed for this influential band i had typically to place one here.This is a rare LP from 1983,released through Rec Rec in 1983 and rereleased in 1997 from Drag City (both now out of print).Coming out just after Kangaroo this LP is blending the great schizophrenic Mayo Thompson post punkish improvisation assisted by members of Essential Logic and as far as i remember Swell Maps ,mixing post punk ,jazz and psych hints.

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STUTTER-BROKEN SNAKES, LP, 1990, USA

Beyond asserting at the outset that this crucial and almost entirely overlooked art damaged mindbomb is situated squarely between Mutant Sounds approved holy grails of the outwardly bound like The Decayes and The History Of Unheard Music, it's probably best to just let this crew lay out the specifics themselves, since they do such a bang up job of it:

"Stutter started as an improvisational music collective based out of Louisville, Kentucky USA in the nihilistic days of late 1970's punk / industrial music and DIY aesthetics . influences included electro-acoustic, progressive, free jazz improvisation, electronic, psychedelic, musique concret, new music, 'krautrock' and industrial noise, as readily as Fluxus, Dada and Futurist sound art experiments and performance art . many of the founding band members had first collaborated in Louisville's underground arts collective ARF [ Artist Resistance Front ]

Studio and live performances bore out a strong rhythmical composition peppered with Beat-influenced, stream-of-consciousness lyricism, itself tagged with ready wit and complex wordplay . traditional 'rock' instrumentation was subverted through the use of tape loops, early turntablism efforts, non-musicianship, and oblique strategies . performances were often punctuated with improvisational movement, video projections, and avant guarde visual stagings."

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DAVID FULTON-LIKE CHIGNIK, LP, 1986, USA

Bloody amazing and completely forgotten, this Downtown NY guitarist/electronic artist issued a string of three related gems on the German Dossier imprint (the next two forthcoming shortly) during a compressed block of time in the late 80's, popped up on a few Elliott Sharp discs in the 90's and then seemed to disappear completely. This first part of the series (the follow up to Fulton's debut opposite Sharp on the album Hara) featured contributions from the orbit of improvisors and out-rockers associated with Sharp's Carbon ensemble and Zoar imprint, including Sharp himself alongside drummer Robert Previte, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz and bassist David Hofstra, all providing the grist for Fulton's Fairlight mill, the component parts being elastically warped and hibachi chopped into expressive mosaics somewhere between the corrosive clangorousness of Carbon and the whimsically discombobulated warpage of The History Of Unheard Music and The Freshly Wrapped Candies.

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THE HISTORY OF UNHEARD MUSIC-DROP IT, LP, 1987, USA

Mindbending weirdity from this New York crew that operated at a strange juncture between post-Residents wacky songform deformation and the Downtown NY cabaret-on-acid improv stylizations of Shelly Hirsch and David Weinstein's collaborations (with Hirsch actually appearing on three cuts here), made all the more curious due to the creative misapplications of slicked up DX-7 tonalities and Fairlight CMI primitive sampladelic tech thats lends the proceedings a vaguely Art Of Noise-y undertow which sounds absolutely alien in the context of such wayward compositional impulses. Absolutely stunning, commanding work.

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THE HISTORY OF UNHEARD MUSIC-CHAPTER ONE, 12" EP, 1984, USA

Following yesterday's post of their jawdropping second release, here's THOUM's also quite excellent debut 12" EP. The lopsided fairlight fucked grooves that underpin these quizzical arrangements offer hints of the wonky ends their sensibility would ultimately be taken to with "Drop It", but here on their debut, the ingenious warpings of more overtly Downtown NY signifiers align this most closely with the work of fellow New York experimental composer David Fulton.

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PETER CATHAM-A MAN'S MOUTH, LP, 1987, USA

Epic private press art damage from this terminally overlooked left field L.A. character. This was Catham's one LP after a string of tapes and delineates a specific and very special zone of song form detournement, triangulating a stance here that's one part post-Residential pop hermeticism of in the rarified vein of Steaming Coils, The Freshly Wrapped Candies and The History Of Unheard Music, one part narrative-intensive minimal synthiness ala John Bender and Douglas Bregger and one part deconstructed sprechtstimme spew and rhythm box splutter ala Craig Burk. This is singularly fried and ingenious work that truly begs for a rediscovery.

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DON KING-ONE-TWO PUNCH, 12" EP, 1985, USA

With a lineup featuring Arto Lindsay from DNA and Mark Cunningham from Mars, you'd expect a record like this would have a substantially higher profile but such is not the case for the woefully overlooked Don King, whose dramatic, punchy brass driven sound yokes Jules Baptiste/
Ordinaries-like post punk horn charting to a chassis equal parts Elliott Sharp/Carbon-style urban jungle disjointed rhythmic churn and History Of Unheard Music-like lopsided mutant funk.

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