EMMANUEL DILHAC-ENTRE OMBRE ET LUMIERE, LP, 1979, FRANCE

One of the cornerstone documents of French outsider musical thought also happens to be amongst the countercultural documents most lost to humanity, this LP being the sole copy that I've seen after all these years with my head buried in fringe collector esoterica. Though this dates from the late 70's, every detail here smacks of an earlier era of French rock radicalism, Dilhac's ground-leveling post May of '68 angle of approach frequently positioning the genre dissolve here much closer to the aesthetics of Futura label artists like Jef Gilson, Jean Guerin, Chene Noir or Mahogany Brain though for every shitstorm of avant strangeness that transpires (howling at the moon Living Theater cum AAO Kommune-style insanity, declamatory spieling and percussive clatter ala Francesco Curra or Giorgio Battistelli), there's an equal measure of sumptuous songcraft and artful arrangements, with everything from delicately shaded jazz moves ala the AAOC's backings for Brigitte Fontaine to emphatic folk glazed by halo-ing electronic susurrations.

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STICKEN-IN-CHINESE, LP, 1985, GERMANY

Some sadly overlooked Can-indebted post punk beauty here folks! Sticken-In's stark but fucked instrumental palette seems to take a leaf from both their mentor's collaborations with Japanese vocalist Phew and from Damo's vocalese, resulting in lots of harmonically/structurally sophisticated concepts being advanced here, with other tips 'o the hat in the direction of of Gang Of Four via scribble/scratch guitars and P.I.L. via dubwise production maneuvers of a downcast demeanor.

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GREETJE BIJMA KWINTET-DARK MOVES, LP, 1987, NETHERLANDS

From Moniek Toebosch to Jaap Blonk, Holland has a tradition of producing outrageous avant vocalists. Bijma, whose past work has been in conjunction with luminaries like Louis Andriessen, Jasper Van't Hof and The Willem Breuker Kollektief can easily go head to head with any of these nutters in the glottal torture department and can be heard doing just that on the Five Voices-Direct Sound CD recorded in conjunction with Carles Santos, David Moss, Anna Homler and Shelley Hirsch that I posted way back when. It's the last name checked artist that Bijma most warrants comparison with though, both sharing a campily playful approach that's highly theatrical and full of giddily over the top coo-to-a-caterwaul stylizations, their ditzy cartoonishness dancing a fandango on the precipice of shtick but never falling over into it and both prone to casting their vocal experiments in often far more tonal settings than many of their contemporaries. In this case, Bijma can be found playing wacky cabaret chanteuse over strains of gypsy jazz, imitating a dialogue between Yoko Ono's fly and David Moss' frog in some cod asiatic fantasia, and even veering into more traditional scat modes opposite massed kalimbas.

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V/A-DAS ABENDPROGRAMM, LP, 1982, VARIOUS

A stellar post punk comp of material recorded at the Rock Against Junk concert during September '81 in Berlin, perhaps most notable (well, in my orbit anyway) for its inclusion of otherwise unavailable material from the truly godly Honeymoon Killers (the Belgian art poppers, not the NY dismalists) and their sister group, Aksak Maboul, here sauntering through eight minutes of suavely stylish beatbox quirk that grows slowly more top heavy with strangeness as it unfolds. Elsewhere, U.K. post punks Theatre Of Hate proffer some reasonably happening Joy Division stylings, Die Gesunden Kommen pack a sizeable punch with supercharged synth pop blare, terse Dutch art wavers Schlaflose Nachte shimmy through some mutant funk and Einsturzende Neubauten do Einsturzende Neubauten as only Einsturzende Neubauten does.

Track listing:

Theatre Of Hate-Incinarator

Theatre Of Hate-The Original Sin

Einsturzende Neubauten-Krieg In Den Stadten

Einsturzende Neubauten-Kollaps

The Honeymoon Killers & Aksak Maboul-Back To Australia Part 1

The Honeymoon Killers & Aksak Maboul-Back To Australia Part 2

Die Gesunden Kommen-Leutnant Miller

Schlaflose Nachte-Recall

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MIKRON 64-SYS 49152, CD EP, 1999, GERMANY

The ubiquity of the abominable auto-tune effect on modern shlock pop production has really done a bang up job of cheapening the appearance of all it's esteemed antecedents, from 70's vocoders to the computer speech screwiness of late 90's electronica ala Nobukazu Takemura and the like, but I won't let that stand in the way of posting this treasure, an object lesson in how to do robot pop right and one of German electronica's true hidden gems. The attentive may already be hepped to the work of this Hamburg based eccentric, as I posted their Etwas Zeit 12" (a track that also reappears here) way back in June of '07. This however remains their peak statement, with Kraftwerk-ian man machine motion filtered though an 80's 8-bit video game soundtrack aesthetic and tempered by a pastel children's show sugariness that's very specific and totally addictive. I defy you to not get at least one of these retrofuturist kitsch anthems stuck in your brain after hearing this.

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EXCLUSIVE SHITS AND GIGGLES TRACK ON THE NEW WIRE TAPPER 22 COMPILATION

Just a small heads up to let all of you know that an exclusive new Shits And Giggles (Ariel Pink + Vas Deferens Organization) track titled "Ripcord" is featured on the Wire Tapper 22 compilation CD that comes free with the newly released October issue of The Wire.

DAISUCK & PROSTITUTE-死ぬまで踊りつづけて,LP, 1981, JAPAN

A rare noise rock hairball retrieved from the deepest recesses of Japan's early 80's no-wave influenced subculture. Expect balls-out blasts of nihilist splatter, baleful slabs of detuned churn, flying shards of hog slaughter sax, and, buried somewhere within there, hints of actual craftsmanship (sshhh!...don't tell...). If this wasn't the blueprint for John Zorn's Painkiller a decade later, I'll eat my hat.

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GEE MR. TRACY-HARMONY!, RHAPSODY!, DESTINY!, LP, 1986, UK

Electropop by, for and largely about drunks. As curious conceits go, it's right in there. The execution is a topper, though. High camp when it's not carnival-esque, the music tweedles and toots through a palette of sunshiny technicolor goof that sounds like Essential Bop on happy pills over assorted dinky beatboxes, eyebrows terminally arched.  Roughly affixed to this are assorted shades of boozy bluster, invariably executed at max volume. It's a combination simultaneously idiotic and lovable and major thanks must go out here to blog friend Chris for providing this treasure, their second and final album and a follow-up to Jim's post of their debut long ago. 

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MAGAZZINI CRIMINALI-CROLLO NERVOSO, LP, 1980, ITALY

Though they've never been properly credited for it, these terminally obscure Italian nutters were the first to execute an album length work of explicit plunderphonics. Having said that, you'd be hard pressed to find an album more inscrutable in both concept and execution, Magazzini Criminali here treating extended passages of Eno instrumentals from Another Green World along with The Beatles, ethnic recordings and a raft of other appropriated audio as just so many square feet of interchangeable aural wallpaper on which to splash extended passages of overlapping histrionic yammer on concepts of earth shaking gravity like, er...papaya juice concentrate and dancing in Ghana. It's maddening, baffling and oddly amusing by turns and to be honest, I still haven't the slightest fucking clue what to ultimately make of this thing myself. Come to your own conclusions.
Note: Many thanks to the commentator who straightened me out about the correct artist at hand here. Turns out that for years I'd been mis-identifying this LP as being by Crollo Nervoso, rather than it being the debut LP by Magazzini Criminali (the cover and spine are of little aid here). Now that it's been clarified, all the pieces are finally beginning to come together in my head. It turns out that their follow-up LP "Notte Senza Fine" was posted some time back on the Enatiodrome blog Here and that they're some sort of theatrical troupe turned musical ala Chene Noir, which would account for the conceptual dimension I was grappling with above.
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GRUPPO D'ALTERNATIVA-IPOTESI, LP, 1972, ITALY

Since the link has been down for some time elsewhere in the blogosphere, I'm picking up the torch for this lovely slice of Italian prog invention. Exemplary of several key tendencies in the Italian prog scene of the period, you could locate Gruppo D'Alternativa's multifaceted approach somewhere between the 21st Century Schizoid derivations practiced by the likes of Osanna or Cervello and the post-Canterbury jazz rock entanglements of Picchio Dal Pozzo.

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PSI VOJACI-LEITMOTIV, LP, 1991, CZECHOSLOVAKIA

'Tis a bit hard to get to grips with the aesthetic thrust of these Czech art rockers. There's a definite kinship with the boisterous minor key tumult thats characterized the former Czechoslovakia's best avant efforts from The Plastic People Of The Universe through to Uz Jsme Doma, but Psi Vojaci's temperment only allows for such waywardness to go just so far before events are tastefully reigned in by passages both more mellowly groovy and ruminatively pensive then their peers would allow for. Broken piano pound lurch and near-commerical tendencies are only an arm's length away from one another here and the proximity is both a bit of a head-scratcher and even a frustration at times, though even the most straightforward bits here eventually become entangled in tendrils of incipient strangeness that creep in from the periphery. This one's definitely proving to be a grower for me.

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C. NEWMAN & JANET SMITH-S/T, LP, 1985, UK

Deliberately awkward art brut nuttiness with an equally awkward moniker (Janet Smith is the band, not an individual) issued on the Recommended Records-associated Review imprint and oweing a sizable debt to Ivor Cutler, but realized with the inspired ungainliness of a lobotomized David Thomas covering Barnes & Barnes' Fishheads or Wildman Fisher emulating Robert Wyatt, all undergirded by whimsical little Comelade-like themes for xylophone, organ, sax, clarinet and electric piano.

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SUTTERLIN-BANDSCHEIBE, LP, 2004 (RECORDED: 1982), GERMANY

Tremendous archival minimal synthy Neue Deutsche Welle action issued by the formidable Kernkrach imprint, its sequenced cartoonish bleep bloop and key theme glee cut from the same candy coated cloth that swaddles the more well known likes of Der Plan, Pyrolator, Die Gesunden and Die Partei.

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BATANG FRISCO-S/T, LP, 1986, USA

Requested a while back, the uneven but sometimes fascinating melange concocted by this moody Bay Area crew fused languidly reverberant and drifty pop strategies to pensively tense Iron Curtain-like minimal synthy structures. Don't be put off by the late date for this sorta thing. Some of this is quite fine...

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ILLACHIME QUARTET-S/T, CD, 2003, ITALY

Thanks to blog friend Vincenzo for this amazing piece, the highly ambitious and challenging privately released debut from an Italian outfit who'd latterly go on to work with such luminaries as Rhys Chatham, Graham Lewis and Mark Stewart on their 2007 follow-up “I'm Normal, My Heart Still Works”. Fronted by the duo of Fabrizio Elevtico and Gianluca Paladino, the former with ivory tower credentials, the latter coming from a rock background, the alloy of their combined instincts resulting in something vast, sprawling and fused by a through-line in melancholia. The end product is something pretty unique, though to my ears it seems to take a page from both the strain of Italian improv rock that comes in off the R.I.O. tip ala La 1919 and the terse high drama of This Heat, but with an added overlay of both desiccated and purgatorial Hwyl Nofio atmospherics and spectral threadings of modern classical composition.

***************NEW LINK POSTED SEPTEMBER 2012***************

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ZELIENOPLE-GHOST SHIP/MARY CELESTE, CDR, 2005, USA

Choice 5:00 AM drone voids from this Chicago unit who've gained a measure of underground notoriety with a string of releases on imprints like Digitalis, Time-Lag, Type and Root Strata. This one (their third, I believe) was briefly available on Antony Milton's Pseudoarcana label and it's among their finest, with gorgeously reverb-drugged amniotic expanses rich in velvety harmonic swarms, distended string scrape and vibrating metals oozing and overlapping before finally coalescing during its final third into the ghostly remnants of song form.

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