Thursday, January 25, 2007

Horrific Child - L'etrange mr. whinster, LP , 1976, France(NWW list!)

The Horrific Child album is, to me at least, the jewel embedded in the forehead of the golden idol that is the NWW List. Part rock album, part experimental album, part imaginary horror soundtrack, L'étrange Monsieur Whinster is a psychedelic pop audio show, flowing naturally from one surprising sequence to the next. Horrific Child was the creation of one Jean-Pierre Massiera, also the composer behind the Les Maledictus Sound project from 1968. Les Maledictus Sound were an inventive, high-brow concoction of Easy Tempo-style instrumental mod big band music, with heavy brass, plucky bass and fuzzbeat guitar. Horrific Child is certainly the logical stylistic next step from that record, evidence of the composer's having survived several years beyond the psychedelic era. A section from side 2 of L'étrange Monsieur Whinster was released in 1999 as a bonus track on the CD reissue of the Les Maledictus Sound album. Originally released on the Eurodisc label in 1976.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, your blog is one of the best, if not the best in my opinion and for my taste ... thank you ...

Josef

musicgnome said...

I am, quite simply, at a loss for words.

Absolutely dumbfounded, awed and eternally grateful.

Anonymous said...

Great blog. Thanks for rare album Moral

ROb.

Anonymous said...

Great selections....great blog!!!!
cheers
x

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this record, very interesting.
I'm sure that the womans voice about 3mins 10secs into the second track was sampled by Tortoise on the song 'restless waters' (japan bonus track for MNLWND). Oh and thanks again for exposing us to this rarity.

P.S. your blog is an absolute goldmine! (reason enough to get a premium rapidshare account!)

Anonymous said...

This one is a really dark affair, deeply disturbing (that's a compliment).

For those who don't understand french, on the last track, "H.I.A." (which means more or less "Accumulated Horror Beyond Description"), the narrator is reading a passage of Lautréamont in which Maldoror describes from the inside what he feels as his decomposing body is being eaten by worms, crabs, dogs and other animals, all crude anatomic details included...

The music is quite dark too, with a kind of psychedelic horror B-movie atmosphere. But even if you listen to it with an ironic distance, you can't escape its malefic power... Just like the book.

One more treasure from the NWW list, and one more great post on Mutant Sounds.

Brain Damage

Anonymous said...

many, many thanks for your blog...

Anonymous said...

Many thanks!!!!

sexykino said...

Thank you for keeping these underground euro-sounds alive! Happy All Hallows!

complicatedcrustation said...

Might I be crazy to say that the guitar harmonics on side 1 were used in one of the tracks on the early Backwards Tape by COIL, I think Heaven's Blade. They jumped out as familiar to me. This LP is out on nice vinyl from Finder's Keepers, get one, it sounds amazing.