EMIL RICHARDS-NEW SOUND ELEMENT "STONES", LP, 1966, USA

Booted a little while back in an edition paired with Hal Blaine's wild "Psychedelic Percussion" this drop dead staggering proto-electronica classic from a fellow session drummer in circulation around the same time as Blaine comes on in a technicolor blaze of absurdist electronic merriment and just doesn't let up. Tom Dissivelt, Perrey & Kingsley, David Vorhaus and Mort Garson are the best frames of reference here, with Dissavelt's classic "Electronic Music" LP under the Electrosoniks moniker being the most accurate touchstone for the wildly percolating and cartoonish tuned percussion and electronic popcorn zipping around the stereo field here. Utterly and completely essential.
Note: link removed as this has now been reissued by The Omni Recording Corporation. Check it out here

ORCHESTRA NJERVUDAROV-CON LE ORECCHIE DI EROS, LP, 1979, ITALY

This stunning and very obscure Italian avant-gardish prog wonder carries whiffs of all sorts of vital left field musical strains. There's a strong simpatico here with Czech dissident rock of the period ala The Plastic People and MCH Band. Several other things come to mind here as well, from the odd combination of angularity and airiness here that touches on the sound of the French Zeuhl band Uppsala, to things more reflective of musical attitudes in their home country, with some of the moves here distinctly mirroring the developments of their Italian contemporaries in Picchio Dal Pozzo, (particularly their later and more R.I.O.-ish material), though with all the endless whirligig intricacy of the arrangements here, this stuff really does also come remarkably close a times to the sound of 90's Japanese avant proggers Tipographica. An essential piece of the puzzle in sorting out the radical legacy of Italian rock of that era.

*******NEW LINK*******

Get it via Rapidshare Here

THE LAND OF GUILT & BLARNEY-MUGGED BY LIFE, TAPE, 1992 + CRUEL, TAPE, 2000 + UNUSUAL, TAPE, 2000, USA

The work of two stalwarts of the 80's/90's experimental cassette network, The Land Of Guilt & Blarney was the brainchild of uber-networker, Audiofile label head and Nomuzic leader Carl Howard in collaboration with one Louis Boone, now sadly deceased and whose legacy this multiple album share of theirs is intended to celebrate.

Cruel and Unusual came out as tapes circa 2000 and were latterly issued as CDR's alongside their first early 90's recordings, Mugged By LIfe. There's a flood of material here to take in, much of it very fine indeed, with some distinct overtones of both Steve Thomsen and later Randy Greif in evidence here, and which is probably best tackled chronologically in order to get inside their approach to sound crafting. I'll leave it to Carl himself to spell out the particulars from here:

Somewhere at the intersection of experimental electronic music, jazz, space rock and industrial music lay THE LAND OF GUILT AND BLARNEY - recordings by rotating members of a house in Jersey City, NJ before its alleged real estate renaissance, and just before the onset of 9/11 when the United States officially became a breeding ground for cultural and corporate fascism. All members had been in and out of the country's premier space rock band ALIEN PLANETSCAPES, and all were heavily informed by musicians ranging from DEVO to Sun Ra, from Miles to Coltrane, from The Nice to XTC, from Genesis to Yes, and from Hawkwind to Gong... and back again.

Its regular members included Carl "NOMUZIC" Howard and Louis "Professor Electron" Boone who were also manstays in the space rock vehicle BORN TO GO, known for their onstage twin displays of syntheisizer pyrotechnics at bargain basement prices. Reginald Taylor was an additional LG&B regular, and guests included LG Mair, Jr., Blaise Siwula, Kenny Brown, and Renard Hines. Even Alan Rider of the 1980s UK underground cassette label Adventures In Reality guested on one track.

"Mugged By Life" was recorded in 1992 when the members lived in a ramshackle and spectacularly tumble-down Victorian home in an area of Jersey City heavily impacted by both poverty and the prevailing crack epidemic. It is commemorated in the track "This Mold House" and made great use of a disastrously broken down upright piano in its living room. Many of LG&B's track titles are scarcely-coded references to Sun Ra, to Charles Mingus, to DEVO, to the participants themselves, or to popular U.S. political conspiracy theories. "Cruel" and "Unusual" were recorded concurrently in 2000 in a different house with a different feel and a different karma. Both Boone and Howard were members of BORN TO GO at this time. LG&B performed live twice, but the recordings of these shows were of less than presentable quality.

Carl Howard has been the publisher of ARTITUDE Magazine; helmed the audiofile Tapes cassette and CDR label from 1984 to 1999; and has hosted the weekly program "Space Patrol!" at http://luxuriamusic.com since 2003. Louis Boone passed away in April 2010 of causes likely related to diabetes. The three CDs by LofG&B are offered in tribute to his memory, and to the memory of Douglass Walker of Alien Planetscapes, who passed away in 2006.

Carl Howard
April 2011

*****NEW LINKS*****

Get Mugged By Life via Rapidshare Here

Get Cruel via Rapidshare Here

Get Unusual via Rapidshare Here

TAKAHASHI MIZUTANI-SOLO WORKS 1970, CDR, 200? (RECORDED: 1970), JAPAN

Thrown onto the ebay market during the first deluge of bootleg activity surrounding the legendary and revered Les Rallizes Desnudes, this disc of LRD leader MIzutani's solo efforts was part of a 10 CDR set of LRD material, the rest of whose contents I've neither the time nor energy to compare with the endlessly booted and reissued LRD market but which are certain to be circulating elsewhere. This appears to be the earliest solo material of his making the rounds and it really is nice stuff, both for in-the-know acolytes of LRD and for those as-yet-unhepped, with west coast psych-indebted acid folk teased out into long, spare and languid drifts. Soporific and beatific bits like these have always been set adrift amidst the inky black and ferocious post-Velvets and proto-Fushitsusha noise psych spew LRD are more legendary for, but daisy chained all together, they offer a very different and rewarding emotional gravity than LRD's infernal inferno.

*******NEW LINK*******

Get it via Rapidshare Here

LA PENTOLA DI PAPIN-ZERO-7, LP, 1977, ITALY

Damn fine if sorta typical Italian proggy prog, with some beautifully squalling acid fuzz guitar that wanders into liquid-y Gilmour-addled Floydian-isms and a distinct akin to their contemporaries in P.F.M. These guys weren't re-inventing the wheel, but there's no denying the enjoyability of this piece for those with their fingers and frontal lobes in the psych/prog pudding.

*******NEW LINK*******

Get it via Rapidshare Here

ZIN-SAY!-AS A FACE, LP, 1987, JAPAN

Cockamamie musical conceits are at a premium on this long lost album by this exceptionally obscure (even by Japanese underground standards) fringe unit, with the barely there ebb of incidental urban location recordings that initiates this oddity being but one in a long series of dissociative audio non sequiturs and rug-pulls. This deliberate wrong footing continues apace; their cheeky structural dislocations of commericial schlock signifiers ranging from twee synth pop to hard rock blather placing them somewhere between Virgin Vs and Picky Picnic, though it's contaminated by a shrieking Eye-like vocal attack and cross cut by apropos-of-nothing disruptions of dada or silence, right down to the baffling inclusion of a block of said silence toward the end of side B (their cover of Cage's 4:33, perhaps?) and a bonus flexi disc that consists mostly of silence, with a bit of yakking at the fore and aft.

*******NEW LINK*******

Get it via Rapidshare Here

V/A-WEST PSYCHEDELIA 2, LP, 1988, JAPAN

while the first volume of Alchemy Records' 80's "psychedelic" roundup under the banner of A Begginer's Guide To West Psychedelia failed to tingle my tangle (and which earned Alchemy the quotations around the word psychedelic due to their sometimes indiscriminate application of the term), this second go-round is well worth a peek-in, though identifying some of this as psychedelia is still a bit of a semantical stretch. There's also rather more above-the-marquee talent on hand here to drum up interest, including multiple Boredoms offshoots (Unlimited freak Out Or Die, Omoide Hatoba), though it's the appealingly dumbo psych bluster from Makoto Kawabata and Asahito Nanjo's Leningrad Blues Machine, Gong Derby's amusingly befouled free jazz-meets-Boredoms spew and a slow burning expanse of minimalist psych trance rock from Idiot 'O Clock (easily their finest hour) that are the real reasons to be lending this compendium your ears.

Track listing:

1. Unlimited Freak Out Or Die-Space Disco
2. Folk Tales-Who Can It Be Now
3. Mannish Tone-Catcher In The Rye
4. Leningrad Blues Machine-(title in Japanese characters)
5. Gong Derby-(title in Japanese characters)
6. OXZ-Baby Again
7. Omoide Hatoba-Kichigai
8. Idiot O'Clock-(title in Japanese characters)

*******NEW LINK*******

Get it via Rapidshare Here

MICHEL REDOLFI-JUNGLE, CD, 1997, FRANCE

One of the titans of French electronic music, Redolfi is perhaps best known for his series of underwater concerts, which were documented on albums by INA-GRM and Hat-Hut. This spectacularly evocative release unfurls like a sustained hallucination, with electroacoustic-like timbres and treatments applied in ways that run at a bit of right angle to the psychologically dislocated and plastic sound objects deployed in most electroacoustic praxis by using these flickering electronic chimeras and treatments to explicitly evoke a jungle's atmosphere, albeit in surprising and surrealist ways.

*******NEW LINK*******

Get it via Rapidshare Here

JEAN-MICHEL LORGERE-HOMERE INSTRUMENTAL SERIE NO. 2, LP, 197?, FRANCE

Here's some prime funky/synthy library cheese to wallow around in, with Lorgere's approach to this genre fusing the deliciously porn-y moves of Claude Perraudin with some ace strutting Latin/Brazilian vibes ala Tonio Rubio, Watel Branco or Ben and the Platino Group and some sideline treks into fluffier and flute-ier passages.

*******NEW LINK*******

Get it via Rapidshare Here