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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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ONE EXTRA POST FOR ALL OF YA

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.

LES SPLENDID-S/T, LP, 197?, FRANCE

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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ISKRA-ALLEMANSRATT, LP, 1977, SWEDEN

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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BASILE AND ZE PECH'NOUZ GROUPE-MA CHARETTE EST MALADE; MON CHEVAL EST CASSE, 7" EP, 1968, FRANCE

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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KEIJO/KEIJO & FRIENDS-UNFOLDING EMPTINESS/DECOMPOSING DAWN AND DEW, 2XCDR, 2004, FINLAND

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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THE NYKELS-ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE IN LONDON CAN NOT BE WRONG...FUCK THE SYSTEM!, CD, 1996, SWEDEN

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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CLAUS VAN BEBBER/PHILIP JECK-VINY'L'ISTEN, CD, GERMANY/UK, 2002

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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ROGER MILLER-OH, LP, 1988, USA

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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BJORN J:SON LINDH-BIKE VOYAGE 2, LP, 1978, SWEDEN

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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YELL-O-YELL-HELLO HELL, LP, 1984, GREECE

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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PAIVANSADE-TAMMINAUHAT/TULIPESA-TAPES, CDR, 2004, FINLAND

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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P.P. ZAHL-ALLE TUREN OFFEN, LP, 1978, AUSTRIA

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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