3 comments
Posted in , , , ,

Hiromasa Suzuki - Rock Joint Biwa (1972)


One of Hiromasa Suzuki's great Rock Joint sets from the early 70s – the textural, spacey Rock Joint Biwa from 1972 – with slow building heft and dexterous peformances throughout! Freewheeling, unpredictably proggy jazz from a ferociously creative period – with Suzuki's piano again working nicely with some absolutely blazing electric guitars, dizzying drums, killer bass grooves and more. Includes "Ame No Iwayado", "Ashiharashiko", "Kamuyamatoiwarehiko", "Watatsumi No Irokonomiya", "Yamatoshi Uruwashi" and more. © 1996-2012, Dusty Groove, Inc.

Similar to T Yokota's Primitive Community album, we are at the meeting place of rock and jazz. Except the all-instrumental Furukotofumi has a completely different sound than Yokota's bunch. Definitely not a mystical experience as Primitive Community is, yet there are some fascinating Japanese indigenous moments to behold - primarily used as interludes between songs. I'd say the scales are more tipped towards the jazz side here, but make no mistake, this clearly is psychedelic rock influenced throughout. Some fantastic electric guitar work, including at least one blazing acid solo (and mixed with a biwa no less) amongst other excellent amped up shredders. A definite early fusion vibe permeates as well, no doubt informed by the UK groups like Nucleus or Soft Machine. Rhodes, piano, violin and organ also get their turn in the solo spotlight. Even a little Bacharach-ian lounger, with some wonderful horn and string charts, soap opera organ and a nice toned down guitar rip. The highlight is the pounding drum, biwa and psychedelic wah wah guitar piece followed by the groovy horn charts, sax solo - and get this - all phased out ala Dieter Dirks in the Kosmische Kourier studio. There's a lot here to digest.



As you can see from the back cover, this "Fulukotofumi" name came from a mis-romanization on the LP itself. There is no "l" sound in Japanese, it's always a hard/trilled "r". They sound the same to the Japanese ear, so they often make that mistake when translating things. Whoever got the LP and submitted it to Pokora obviously could only read that bit of text on the jacket, so Pokora printed it like that in one of his books and the incorrect name spread around. The actual name as I printed it above means "Suite: Furukotofumi". The Furukotofumi is also known as the Kojiki, or the "record of ancient matters". It's the oldest known book in Japan (from around 600 or 700 AD) and is full of creation myths, poems and songs, etc. This album has the concept of fusing the spirit of Japanese mythology (primarily through the use of biwa as lead instrument) with jazz and "new rock" (as they liked to call it in Japan back then), so that's why the Kojiki is used as source material. It was released as one of those Victor 4-channel discs that were popular in Japan for a brief period, and was actually supposed to be the first of a series of these concept albums. Unfortunately, only one more was released. It came out in 1973 and is called "Rock Joint Sitar - Kumikyoku Silk Road". As you might guess, this one has the concept of fusing new music with ancient Indian and central Asian sounds, with sitar replacing the biwa. It features many of the same musicians as the first LP."
1 comment
Posted in , , ,

The Wild Classical Music Ensemble - Musics in the Margin Vol. 4 (2009)


The Wild Classical Music Ensemble to belgijski  projekt muzyczny zapoczątkowany w 2007 roku przez Damiena Magnette oraz czwórkę niepełnosprawnych intelektualnie muzyków: Linh Pham, Johana Geenens, Rudy'ego Callant i Kima Verbeke. Wbrew pozorom ich twórczość nie jest kolejnym nudnym projektem społeczno-kulturalnym, przynosi za to potężną dawkę muzycznej ekspresji w klimatach punkowo-noise'owej improwizacji.


The wild classical music ensemble is a musical project launched by the association vzw.with in november 2007. Thanks to vzw.with, Damien Magnette, sound artist and drummer had the chance to meet Linh Pham, Johan Geenens, Rudy Callant and Kim verbeke, 4 artists with a mental disability. These 4 artists are working in different fine art media, but they also showed a will and talent to make music. 

Originally the band focused on free improvisation, sound and object experimentations tied together with orchestration signs and experimental music notations. Lately they have begun incorporating the punk/rock riffs from guitarist Kim Verbeke, broadening their sound into a free punk noise rock hybrid. After a several year trip in that formation, they welcomed Sebastien as a new member. He plays home made bass percussions and sings with great energy and inspiration. As a sextet, the band as developped a tighter, stronger energy and sound. 

The Wild Classical Music Ensemble is collaborating time to time with other orchestra. They've worked for instance with Spectra ensemble on a more contemporary music-oriented project. For this very special collaboration between classical musicians and self thaught musicians, the composer has devellopped a video-animated visual partitude.

The band gave concerts in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Switserland and is willing to go further!! (wildclassical)
3 comments
Posted in , ,

Tornádo Lue (1993)



"Tornádo Lue", "Vlky" - jedyne dwa albumy nie istniejącej już słowackiej grupy śpiewającej po czesku - jako pierwsi rockowcy odkryli np. Hrabala. Odjechany punkowy swing lat 90, to na imprezie obudzi nawet zmarłego. Pierwsza płyta, to żywiołowa rejestracja w 100% na żywo (na czterośladowym magnetofonie). Dla preferujących słuchanie są delikatne brzdęki archaicznie brzmiącej gitary, klarnetu i innych dęciaków, a na "Vlkach" - cover barowego "Blue Velvet" i rozmyta, 10-minutowa suita pt. "Luna" do tekstu Sylvii Plath. W porównaniu z debiutanckim albumem, na "Vlkach" jest nieco więcej melancholii. (serpent)

***
Bratislava based alternative rock band with equal parts of cabaret and klezmer mixes up into a delicious cocktail. 

1 comment
Posted in , ,

Lucia Pamela - Into Outer Space With Lucia Pamela (1969)


LUCIA PAMELA (1904 - 2002)

"You can't live life going backwards. You must go forward." - Lucia Pamela

Entertainer, singer, songwriter, radio & TV star, multi-instrumentalist, all-girl orchestra leader, Ziegfeld Follies beauty, Miss St. Louis 1926, and lunar explorer LUCIA PAMELA Angelo passed away in Los Angeles on Thursday July 25, 2002, of cardiac arrest. She was.98.

In 1969, she recorded her only album, INTO OUTER SPACE WITH LUCIA PAMELA, on the moon. You can look it up. The CD reissue was produced by Key of Z author Irwin Chusid for Arf Arf Records in 1992. Lucia was also profiled in a chapter entitled "Interstellar Overdrive" in Songs in the Key of Z.

Miss Pamela enchanted patrons at St. Louis' Odeon Theater as "Venus in Spookyland," and played Mother Goose at Fresno Storyland. She kept her Christmas tree decorated and glowing all year 'round.

A magical matron, sui generis. Sweet, enigmatic, an inspirational sorceress. She will be missed, always. But her music and art survive, as does her spirit.

Lucia leaves 2 children, 12 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren, and millions of past, present and future fans on numerous planets.

Moon Lady: The long, wondrous life of Lucia Pamela
By Aimee Levitt

The first stop of Pamela's fantastical voyage was the moon. She landed in a place called Moontown, inhabited by moon people who dressed like cowboys. They welcomed her warmly and invited her to an Eskimo wedding. To show her appreciation, Pamela did what came naturally: She picked up her accordion and sang.

Eeny-meeny-miney-mo,
Moontown is a place to go.
Whether it's hot or whether it's cold,
The weather on the moon is the best, I'm told.
On the highways and byways and valleys, it's true,
There's no finer people than the moon people to you!

A page from Pamela's coloring book, which she drew herself
With the help of her new lunar friends, Pamela made a recording of "Moontown" and a dozen other numbers. She played fifteen instruments, including the piano, clarinet, drums, cymbals and what sounds like a theremin. The sound quality was poor, and Pamela's voice occasionally wavered offkey. "The air is different up there, you know," she later explained. Still, the old pro belted out her songs with gusto. It had been 60 years since her stage debut in her hometown of St. Louis, and there wasn't much that could faze her.

After returning to Earth, Pamela released her lunar recordings on Gulfstream Records, a small label in Hollywood, Florida. She called the album Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela. It sold well enough to warrant a re-pressing in 1970. Then it fell into obscurity until 1992, when a New Jersey DJ named Irwin Chusid recognized it as an unheralded classic and included a chapter on Pamela in his book Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music.

It's difficult to describe Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela, though many earthbound music critics have tried. "Imagine an LP of a peyote-soaked klezmer band, recorded with Joe Meek passed out at the console, wavering on your turntable between 31 and 35 rpm," wrote Chusid.

It has "the feel of a warped bebop children's album," Neil Strauss ventured in the New York Times. R. J. Smith wrote in Los Angeles magazine that it sounded "like a Dixieland band carrying boxes of silverware stumbling down a staircase."

At first, listening to the album is a painful experience. Yet there's something endearing about Pamela's raspy voice, her swingy piano-playing and her absolute conviction that she is, indeed, on the moon. "Ooooh, I see elves!" she exclaims impatiently at the beginning of the song "Walking on the Moon." "Let's take a walk on the moon! Come on! Come on! Come oooonn!"

"Her voice sounded like a woman in her second, third or fourth childhood," Chusid observes.

The tune is catchy. After a few choruses, it's difficult not to sing along.

Courtesy Irwin Chusid on behalf of the estate of Lucia Pamela
As I was walking on the moon,
I met a little cow-ow-ow,
And this is what she said to me:
Da-da da-da-da-da da-da,
moo-moo-moo-moo moo-moo moo-moo-moo-moo!!!!
And that's what she said to me!

"I started playing her on the radio," Chusid remembers in a recent interview. "People loved her. There's a lack of inhibition and joie de vivre. It's very sincere and genuine. You don't get the impression that she's trying to sound shocking and avant-garde. There's a sense of adventure."

Chusid and Erik Lindgren re-released a CD version of Into Outer Space on Lindgren's label Arf! Arf! Records out of Middleborough, Massachusetts. A new generation discovered Pamela, and though the album never sold more than 2,000 copies, it became a cult classic.

In the 1970s Pamela drew and released a coloring book intended to be a companion to the album. In addition to the people of Moontown, it includes pictures of the French-speaking residents of neighboring Nutland Village — Messieurs Walnut, Filbert and Cashew — and a man in a dog costume smoking a cigarette. She announced an international coloring contest open to all. "Children aren't the only people who like to color books," she insisted. (Because the contest had no deadline, a winner was never declared. Some suspect Pamela was waiting for entries from as-yet undiscovered parts of the galaxy.)

The British band Stereolab wrote a song about Pamela called "International Colouring Contest." It appears on their 1994 album Mars Audiac Quintet. Vocalist Laetitia Sadier writes in a recent e-mail: "There was something radically optimistic about her, that imagination was strongest of all and would conquer all, which was really inspiring."

A Belgian artist and filmmaker named Danielle Lemaire became so fascinated by Pamela's work and delightfully eccentric spirit that she traveled to Los Angeles in 1998 and spent several days with the singer collecting footage for a documentary about her life.

She later visited the site of Pamela's childhood home on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis but found that it had been demolished. Though Lemaire finally finished her film last year, she hasn't been able to release it because of difficulties getting the rights to use Pamela's work.

Those rights are owned by the Rosenbloom family, which also owns the St. Louis Rams. The late matriarch, Georgia Frontiere, in another odd twist to the legend, was Pamela's daughter.

Courtesy of Erik Lindgren
Sadly, Pamela never had much of a chance to enjoy her status as a cult figure, nor was she able to release the second album she had promised in the liner notes to Into Outer Space. In the early 1980s, says her grandson Kenny Irwin, she suffered a stroke in her house in Fresno, California. "She was in a state," Irwin remembers. "She wasn't Nana Pam anymore."

In 2002, the year Pamela died at 98, playwright Tony Kushner paid tribute to her life in the New York Times Magazine with a short play called "Flip Flop Fly!" Titled after one of her songs, it has since been incorporated into a collection of one-act plays called Tiny Kushner, which has been performed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California.


Kushner portrays Pamela as the embodiment of the can-do American spirit and, in the end, her enthusiasm and optimism are so overpowering that even the war-weary Queen Geraldine of Albania joins her in a song-and-dance number.

No one who knew Lucia Pamela ever doubted that she'd been to the moon. As Marshall Klein, who worked for the Rams for 21 years and now serves as a media consultant to the Rosenbloom family, puts it, "If she said it, I believe it."

In 1908, barely out of toddlerhood, Lucia Pamela Beck made her concert debut in St. Louis. She sang an Indian love song she had written herself. The song appears in altered form on Into Outer Space as "Indian Alphabet Chant." It begins, "A-a-a-a-i-o-aiddy-addy-o-o-o" and proceeds, somewhat erratically, through the entire alphabet.

Her mother, also named Lucia, was a concert pianist and composer and taught her young daughter how to play. Their house in the old West End neighborhood had two pianos, remembers Pamela's son Ken Irwin, who is now 80 years old and lives in Palm Springs, California. "There was a grand piano and a huge rosewood Steinway. They used to play two-piano concertos." Pamela gave her first recital with the Philadelphia Philharmonic when she was seven years old.

A year later she met Ignacy Paderewski, the pianist, composer and future prime minister of Poland, who, she wrote in the liner notes of Into Outer Space, "was so amazed and enthused that he went back stage and gave a note...to Lucia's mother....In this note one of the phrases was, 'Your daughter is a natural born pianist, and she will be the finest pianist in the world when she grows up.'" (The liner notes, though written in the third person, are Pamela's own work and the closest thing she had to an autobiography.)

Pamela didn't simply attribute her success to natural musical talent, but to a freak childhood accident. When she was two years old, she told Chusid, she reached for a cookie that was sitting on a hot stove, and all her fingers melted together. Her doctor "used a knife to slice my melted hands into ten fingers," Pamela recalled. "He didn't give me any thumbs, so it made me a better piano player."

Pamela's father died before she reached her teens, and her mother supported the five children by teaching music and publishing a newspaper, The Public School News, in the basement of their house on Hamilton Avenue. Pamela helped out by going on tour with a fellow pianist named Charles Kunkel who she claimed was "the first cousin of the great Beethoven." Kunkel died one night in the middle of a performance. Pamela finished the concert alone. "Charles would have wanted it that way," she told Chusid.

After Kunkel's demise, Pamela attended Soldan High School on Union Boulevard. She applied to study at the Beethoven Conservatory of Music and Voice but was rejected. "The people in charge of the conservatory in Germany, after hearing her play and sing, told her mother she was already so much advanced there was not much they could do to teach her," she wrote.

So Pamela went home to St. Louis, where she studied music at Washington University and earned extra money recording paper rolls for player pianos. Eventually, she abandoned classical music and taught herself to play the accordion. "Jazz was kind of exciting and more fun to play than Beethoven," explains Ken Irwin. "She got a lot of resistance from her mother, the music teacher."

In 1926 Pamela was crowned Miss St. Louis, beating out 2,000 other contestants. News of her victory spread as far as New York City. The Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld invited her to sing in his famous Follies and threw a party in her honor.

"So," she wrote, "the steps on the ladder of success started to go up, up and up for LUCIA PAMELA."



Fact or fiction?

"I'm not sure what is true," Chusid admits. "It's storytelling. And I don't want to know. She had a very overactive imagination. She spoke with a certain confidence of what she was telling me was true. It's possible she'd been telling those stories for so long, they became fact. It was her reality."

When Chusid visited Pamela in 1991, however, she showed him old newspaper clippings from the Miss St. Louis pageant and photos from her days performing with her band, Lucia Pamela and the Musical Pirates. They show a slender young woman with delicate features and long hair arranged in elaborate curls on top of her head. "She had beautiful hair," remembers her grandson Kenny Irwin. "It was reddish, golden hair, wavy and thick as can be."

Late in 1926, after rejecting a career in vaudeville, Pamela married an insurance man named Reginald Irwin, who would be the first of her three husbands. Their daughter, Georgia, was born in November of 1927, and Ken came along two years later.

Motherhood did not impede Pamela's musical career. Ken Irwin remembers her performing throughout his childhood with the Musical Pirates, the first all-girl orchestra in the United States.

"They started as a novelty act," he says. "They were beautiful women dressed as pirates. But people would come to watch them perform because they were extremely talented musicians. In an age when a woman being able to vote or work wonderful jobs standing up in a telephone center was considered the height of achievement, [Pamela] was really unreal as far as breaking through glass ceilings."

The Musical Pirates played the rooftop of the Chase Park Plaza and the nightclub at the elegant Statler Hotel and eventually became the house band for the Odeon Theatre. They performed on KMOX (1120 AM), and Irwin says the violinist eventually went on to national radio.

When the Depression hit, though, the band had trouble getting gigs. The musicians' union wouldn't let them join, Ken Irwin says, because they were women. The Musical Pirates broke up, and Pamela went solo, performing as a featured accordionist with the Lionel Hampton and Paul Whiteman orchestras, two of the biggest dance bands of the '30s and '40s.

After her divorce from Reginald Irwin in 1943, she took her children with her on tour. Georgia, who had aspirations of becoming an opera singer, eventually joined the act. They called themselves the Pamela Sisters and were very popular on the USO circuit. (Pamela told Chusid she was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for her service.)

But Ken Irwin's most vivid memory of his mother from that time was from a show with Hampton in San Francisco during World War II:

"She was playing an accordion covered with diamonds," he recounted in Los Angeles magazine. "When the floodlights hit it, it absolutely lit up the stage. She did a back bend while leaning into the orchestra pit, playing that heavy accordion.

"She ran her hands down the keys so it sounded like the accordion was falling, and the floodlights cut out at exactly that moment. People in their seats all gasped, they thought she'd fallen, but then she would come back up playing the rest of the song, and the spotlight turned on again. That was a showstopper."

Pamela moved west to Fresno, California, in 1947. She never gave up singing, but the era of the big bands had come to an end, and the venues became considerably less grand: car-lot openings, bowling alleys and, memorably, the Moon-Glow Drive-In.

"I'm the only person who has ever had a vaudeville show at a drive-in movie," she proudly told the Los Angeles Times. "We played before the movie started, during intermission and when the cars were leaving."

She decided to embrace the then-new media and became (she said) the first person to appear on both radio and television. Her first show, Gal About Town, was a list of events going on in Fresno. On the second, The Encouragement Hour, says Ken Irwin, "she would take young people and train them, and they would appear on her show. She would coach them how to look and dress. It was like American Idol.

"My daughter was talking to the mayor of Fresno," he continues, "and he said of my mother, 'She made me who I am today.' He was on the show and said she taught him how to appear with people and be comfortable in front of an audience, to be a politician."

In 1962 Pamela took a job managing the Fresno amusement park Storyland where she also portrayed Mother Goose. After her retirement, she worked with several volunteer organizations.

She never divulged the details of her trip to the moon outside of what appeared in the album and coloring book, though she did once tell Chusid she considered recording some tunes on Venus but decided she didn't like the atmosphere. "All the music is true," she informed Neil Strauss in a 1992 article in New York Press. "Most of it is from experience."

Courtesy of Irwin Chusid on behalf of the estate of Lucia Pamela
Chusid and Erik Lindgren have tried to figure out how, exactly, Into Outer Space was recorded.

"The album is definitely the work of one person," Chusid posits. "I presume she had an engineer because the reverb is great. It has a real lo-fi sound. Bands used to spend tens of thousands of dollars to go into the studio and get crappy sound like that. I really don't know when it was recorded. For an album from 1969, it's not really pegged to what was going on musically."

"At this point," says Lindgren, "I really do think it was recorded on the moon."

The circumstances of the album's distribution are only slightly less mysterious. Gulfstream was a fairly well-known rockabilly label in the late 1960s and early '70s. "I can't see them signing her," Lindgren says. "I'm pretty sure it was a vanity project that she bankrolled herself. A year later, there was a second pressing on L'Peg. Apparently, she needed more copies. I'm fascinated that it had to be re-pressed. There were about 500 originally. I don't know if she sold them or gave them away."

amela promoted the album by driving around Fresno in a pink Cadillac emblazoned with bumper stickers that read: "Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela." She claimed the Cadillac could fly.

These days, an original copy of Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela is a collector's item, selling for as much as $1,000.

The Arf! Arf! reissue has been far less profitable. "We've sold maybe 1,500, 2,000 copies," estimates Lindgren. "It's a pretty limited market. When one sells, it's a major victory." Chusid suspects that more have been downloaded through online file-sharing.

Most of the CDs have gone to fans of what Chusid has dubbed "outsider music," though some listeners may consider the term "music" a misnomer. Outsider songs are usually produced by people of limited ability or people such as Pamela who deliberately choose to ignore the conventions of popular music. Some practitioners are homeless or mentally ill.

Yet, as Chusid writes in Songs in the Key of Z, the definitive work on the subject, "despite dodgy rhythms and a lack of conventional tunefulness, these often self-taught artists radiate an abundance of earnestness and passion. Most importantly, they betray an absence of pretense. And they're worth listening to, often outmatching all contenders for inventiveness and originality."

The genre is perhaps epitomized by the Shaggs, a trio of profoundly untalented sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire, whose single album Philosophy of the World has inspired a cult considerably larger than that which surrounds Into Outer Space.

Some fans of Into Outer Space consider it a brilliant children's album, despite songs like "You and Your Big Ideas" in which Pamela laments that her boyfriend gambled away all their money in Vegas.

"Lucia was just all about fun and playfulness," says Lindgren. "It's like going back to childhood. I sing 'Walking on the Moon' all the time. I live on a farm. It really resonates here."

In her old age Pamela made plans to build an amusement park in Southern California that would feature a ride that simulated her 1969 trip to the moon. She lived quietly in Fresno with her third husband, Billy Angelo, a former prizefighter whom she married in 1960. She attended church and bingo games and amassed enormous collections of coins, stamps and antique keys. She continued to perform into her early 90s at retirement communities and piano bars.

"I'm going to live forever," she assured Chusid in 1991.

She sang her moon songs as lullabies to her grandchildren and told them stories about her adventures. "Did I believe them?" asks her grandson Kenny Irwin, now 35. "Well, come on, I was a kid at the time. I thought she was pretty amazing." Pamela, he recalls, loved to spoil her grandchildren, taking them on outings to ice cream parlors and arcades and buying them presents like a cigarette-smoking robot.

Pamela moved to Los Angeles after her stroke and took up residence in a tiny bungalow at the foot of the office building that housed the LA Rams' headquarters. She kept a Christmas tree up year-round. But both Chusid and Lindgren, who visited her there, remember that the main feature of the house was the grand piano in the center of the living room.

"She was like an elf or an imp," Lindgren recalls. "She had a magical quality. I played the piano. She picked out a few notes. When she was playing the piano, she really came alive."

"Music was her life," says her son Ken Irwin. "You'd ask her to play a song written in the 1800s. She didn't remember until I played a few bars and then she could play the whole thing. I could never stump her." According to Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Pamela memorized 10,000 songs.

In "Flip Flop Fly!" Pamela appears as something of a showbiz huckster. In one speech, she declaims, "[Madonna's] the Lucia Pamela of her day. She may not be the best actress, but she believes in herself, and when you do that, everything's possible. You just gotta believe! That's what it means to be an American!"

To Ken Irwin, though, she was, more than anything, a free spirit.

"She had confidence," he says. "That's something women lacked in that generation. When she wanted to go onstage, my grandmother's argument was, 'Women don't do that. Men will be ogling you. They'll think you're not a nice woman.' Lucia said, 'They can think what they want. I'm going to play music and enjoy it.'"
4 comments
Posted in , ,

Harry Smith (1923-1991)


Harry Smith to postać niezwykła w świecie sztuki XX wieku. Muzykolog (autor legendarnej kompilacji Antologia Muzyki Amerykańskiej), prekursor New Age - miłośnik ezoteryki i filozofii Wschodu, malarz, antropolog, bitnik i filmowiec.

Zainteresowanie Smitha filmem animowanym to przede wszystkim fascynacja animacją europejską - przedwojennymi filmami Len Lye`a i Oskara Fischingera. Pierwsze, powstałe pod koniec lat 40. filmy Smitha to niezwykle barwne, abstrakcyjne animacje realizowane nierzadko w technice animacji bezpośredniej. Prace te zapowiadają już estetykę psychodelii, która miała zdominować kulturę amerykańską po kilkunastu latach. Mimo częstego wykorzystywania figur geometrycznych, animacja Smitha to głównie organiczna abstrakcja spod znaku Jeana Miro, próba nawiązania do czystych, absolutnych filmów Fischingera za pomocą malarskiej estetyki filmów Len Lye`a z połowy lat 30.


Inspiracją dla tych prac były nierzadko stany wywołane narkotykami, popularnymi wśród kultury bitników i powojennej bohemy artystycznej Zachodniego Wybrzeża. Filmy Smitha to także kontynuacja Fischingerowskiego poszukiwania relacji między obrazem (w szczególności kolorem) i muzyką.

Kolejne filmy Smitha to odejście w stronę kolażowej abstrakcji figuratywnej inspirowanej buddyzmem i Kabałą. Jego najważniejszy, ponadgodzinny film z tego okresu to nr 12 - Smith numerował wszystkie swoje filmy - znany także pod nadaną przez Jonasa Mekasa nazwą Heaven and Earth Magic.


Mnogość zainteresowań Smitha nie pozwalała mu skupić się na niezwykle pracochłonnym filmie animowanym - w kolejnych latach powstawały tylko ich krótkie fragmenty. Ostatnie lata życia artysta spędził dzieląc mieszkanie z Allenem Ginsbergiem, tworząc kolejne kolekcje (m.in. największą na świecie kolekcję papierowych modeli samolotów czy kolekcję ukraińskich pisanek). Za swoje dokonania w dziedzinie archiwizacji klasyki korzennej muzyki amerykańskiej został uchonorowany w 1991 roku prestiżową nagrodą Grammy. (3cinema)



Harry Smith was an artist whose activities and interests put him at the center of the mid twentieth-century American avant-garde. Although best known as a filmmaker and musicologist, he frequently described himself as a painter, and his varied projects called on his skills as an anthropologist, linguist, and translator. He had a lifelong interest in the occult and esoteric fields of knowledge, leading him to speak of his art in alchemical and cosmological terms.

Harry Smith was born May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, and his early childhood was spent in the Pacific Northwest. Smith's father, Robert James Smith, was a watchman for the local salmon canning company. His mother, Mary Louise, taught school on the Lummi Indian reservation. Robert Smith's grandfather had been a prominent Freemason who was a Union General in the Civil War. Harry's parents were Theosophists, who exposed him to a variety of pantheistic ideas, which persisted in his fascination with unorthodox spirituality and comparative religion and philosophy. By the age of 15, Harry had spent time recording many songs and rituals of the Lummi and Samish peoples and was compiling a dictionary of several Puget Sound dialects. He later became proficient in Kiowa sign-language and Kwakiutl. In addition to developing complicated systems for transcription, he also amassed an important collection of sacred religious objects, one of a number of museological endeavors that occupied Smith throughout his life.


Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington for five semesters between 1943 and 1944. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met members of San Francisco's bohemian community of artists and intellectuals, and experimented with marijuana for the first time, Smith decided that the type of intellectual stimulation he was seeking was unavailable in his student life.

It was in San Francisco that Smith began to build a reputation as one of the leading American experimental filmmakers. He showed frequently in the "Art in Cinema" screenings organized by Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Smith not only became close with other avant-garde filmmakers in the Bay Area, such as Jordan Belson and Hy Hirsh, but traveled frequently to Los Angeles to see the films of Oskar Fischinger, Kenneth Anger, and other Southern Californians experimentalists. Smith developed his own methods of animation, using both stop motion collage techniques and, more uniquely, hand-painting directly on film. Often a single film required years of painstakingly precise labor. While a few other filmmakers had employed similar frame-by-frame processes, few matched the complexity of composition, movement, and integration in Smith's work. Smith's films have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes, while his fusion of color and sound are acknowledged as precursors of sixties psychedelia. At times, Smith spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound and sound and movement.


Smith's films cannot be easily separated from his paintings, and in both he was influenced by the abstract work of Kandinsky, Marc, and others who formed the foundation of the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum) in New York. Smith developed a relationship with Hilla Rebay, the museum's director, and she arranged for Smith to come to New York and to receive a Solomon Guggenheim grant in 1950. He moved to New York permanently in the early fifties. In need of money, he offered to sell his extraordinary record collection of American vernacular music to Folkways Records. Instead, Moses Asch, the label's president, challenged Smith to cull his collection into an anthology.

In 1952 Folkways issued Smith's multi-volume Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology was comprised entirely of recordings issued between 1927 (the year electronic recording made accurate reproduction possible) and 1932, the period between the realization by the major record companies of distinct regional markets and the Depression's stifling of folk music sales. Released in three volumes of two discs each, the 84 tracks of the anthology are recognized as having been a seminal inspiration for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960 (the 1997 reissue by the Smithsonian was embraced with critical acclaim and two Grammy awards). Traditional American music was only one of Smith's musical interests. From the late 1940s, he was a passionate jazz enthusiast, going so far as to create paintings that are note-by-note transcriptions of particular tunes. He spent much of the fifties in the company of jazz pioneers like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Smith's involvement with recording continued into the sixties and seventies as he produced and recorded the first album by the Fugs in 1965. His long term friendships with many of the Beat writers led to the release of Allen Ginsberg's First Blues in 1976 as well as unreleased recordings of Gregory Corso's poetry and Peter Orlovsky's songs. Smith spent part of this era living with groups of Native Americans, and this resulted in his recording the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians (Kiowa Peyote Meeting, Folkways, 1973).


Smith's broad range of interests resulted in a number of collections. He donated the largest known paper airplane collection in the world to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. He was a collector of Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter Eggs. He also considered himself the world's leading authority on string figures, having mastered hundreds of forms from around the world.

Smith spent his last years 1988-1991) as "shaman in residence" at Naropa Institute, where he offered a series of lectures, worked on sound projects, and continued collecting and researching. In 1991 he received a Chairman's Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony for his contribution to American Folk Music. Upon receiving the award, he proclaimed, "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music."

Harry Everett Smith died at the Chelsea Hotel on November 27, 1991. (harrysmitharchives)
1 comment
Posted in , ,

Friendsound - Joyride (1969)



In 1967, Drake Levin, Phil Volk, and Mike Smith (all former members of Paul Revere & the Raiders) formed a band called Brotherhood. They released two LPs in '68 and '69. Sometime during this period, they were also allowed to record this musical "joyride" with a bunch of friends and outside musicians. From this came one of the most peculiar American psychedelic LPs of the time. As a kid, I related it to the second disc of the Mothers' Freak Out! album, and there's certainly some of that freak-out thing here. What you hear is mostly experimental and improvised. And it's just beautiful! But there's also Drake Levin's "Love Sketch," a delicate psychedelic instrumental and the only written piece here. And there's "Childsong," with field recordings of kids playing mixed in with unobtrusive space music. A lot of what's happening here is the three Brotherhood members using "the control console as a musical instrument"--i.e., they're (re-)mixing and adding effects through the mixing board. The second side consists of two nine-minute pieces: a remixed jam called "Lost Angel Proper St.," and "The Empire of Light." The latter consists of prepared piano (Phil Volk) and organ (by Ron Collins, a member of Brotherhood on their first LP) being fucked with by Drake Levin and Mike Smith behind the console. What they produce sounds like minimal space music. Very nice! (slippytown)
2 comments
Posted in , ,

Ron Pates Debonaires - Raundelunas Pataphysical Revue (1975)


A document of a single evening in the university town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, March 1975, at the Second Raudelunas Exposition. Dominating proceedings is Fred Lane, towering alter ego of flautist and whirlygig sculptor Tim Reed, who comperes with a series of hilarious lateral jokes and weird monologues. His cover versions of "Volare" and "My Kind Of Town" backed by Ron 'Pate's Debonairs - a hot, swinging, meandering big band - set new standards as melody gives way to controlled, impassioned and deeply humorous improvisation. This monumental work also features Anne LeBaron's superb "Concerto For Active Frogs"; Mitchell Cashion's charming setting of Julius Caesar's "The Chief Divisions Of The Peoples Of Gaul"; Industrial noise from The Captains Of Industry; and wild Improv combo The Blue Denim Deals Without The Arms. No other record has ever come as close to realising Alfred Jarry's desire "to make the soul monstrous" - or even had the vision or invention to try. It's all over the place. The sleeve notes describe it as "the best thing ever" - time has not damaged this audacious claim.
  • Ron 'Pate- Trombone
  • Rev. Fred Lane- MC, Star, Vocalist, Comic
  • Abdul "Ben" Camel- Bass
  • Omar Bagh-dad-a- Piano
  • Cyd Cherise- Guitar, Alto 'Pataphone
  • Don "Pretty Boy" Smith- Trumpet
  • Dick Foote- Oboe, Musette, Tenor Sax
  • Bob "Cheapskate" Cashion- Trombone
  • "Bill" The Kid Dap- Drums
  • Johnny Fent-Lister- Alto Sax
  • Nips "Napes" Newton- Harp, Percussion
Steve (Stapleton) was fascinated by this, especially where at one moment it sounds like the musicians are sawing the stage to.
No comments
Posted in ,

Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930)


Szwajcar Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930), typ psychotyka, którego urojeniom towarzyszyły napady agresji. Wolfli, nękany atakami wściekłości i halucynacjami, w 1895 roku (po próbie gwałtu na nieletniej dziewczynce) został umieszczony w zakładzie zamkniętym Waldau w Bernie. Tam od roku 1904 z pasją oddawał się tworzeniu własnej mitologii, w której osobiście występował jako św. Adolf II, wędrujący po niesamowitym świecie, w którym wszystko jest groteskowo wyolbrzymione i udziwnione.


Dzieło życia Wolfliego, którego tworzenie rozpoczął w roku 1908 liczy 45 tomów, łącznie 25000 stron, a zawiera ok. 3000 ilustracji. W pracach Wolfliego mieszają się w przytłaczającej obfitości uzupełniające się wzajem przedmioty i postacie: fajki, buty, parasole, naczynia kuchenne, hotele, linie kolejowe, statki parowe, fabryki, mosty, zegary o ludzkich twarzach, klatki schodowe, owalne drzewa, ryby, katedry, drogi i tunele, słońca, księżyce i komety. (…) Wszystko w jego dziełach jest ogromne, wręcz monstrualne. (…) Podczas swych podróży odkrywał [św. Adolf II, czyli Wolfli we własnym wyobrażeniu] urwiska wysokie na ponad 350 mil, długości 25 000 000 mil i szerokości 900 000, zbadał największą w świecie jaskinię na 24 000 000 długą, 500 000 mil szeroką i 250 000 mil wysoką (…) Wolfli zapełnił swoje uniwersum niezwykłymi stworzeniami, takimi jak Gigantyczny Ptak Transportowy, Wielki Wąż Śnieżny, czy Wielka Bogini Regentia, a św. Adolfa II uczynił także uczonym i wynalazcą całej masy przedmiotów codziennego użytku (jak np. telefonu, zegarka elektrycznego, łodzi podwodnej, nowego rodzaju hamulca etc.).


W 1921 roku Walter Morgenthaler, lekarz w klinice Waldau, zainteresował się przypadkiem Wolfliego, czego owocem stało się opracowanie „Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler” („Pacjent chory umysłowo jako artysta”), dzięki któremu szwajcarski pensjonariusz stał się znany w świecie sztuki. Później zafascynował się nim m.in. znany malarz i rzeźbiarz Jean Dubuffet.


Wolfli parał się nie tylko literaturą i plastyką, ale także muzyką – komponował mianowicie utwory, które zapisywał za pomocą własnej notacji. Wiele lat po jego śmierci podjęto próby jej odczytania i wykonania dzieł Wolfiego – m.in. w roku 1976 zadania tego podjęli się Kjell Keller i Peter Streif. Okazały się to być utwory silnie zrytmizowane, zdradzające podobieństwa m.in. do muzyki ludowej i marszowej. Z kolei album oparty między innymi o kompozycje Wolfliego (lecz przetworzone i połączone z elementami muzyki industrialnej) wydał w 1987 Graeme Revell (m.in. SPK) przy współpracy Nurse With Wound i DDAA. (legitymizm)


Adolf Wolfli's childhood was one of degradation and indigence. The youngest of the seven children born to a stonecutter and a laundress, Wolfli, orphaned before his tenth birthday, was made a ward of the community and lived in a succession of wretched foster homes. Forbidden to court the girl he loved by her scornful father, Wolfli temporarily abandoned life as an itinerant farm laborer in 1883 to join the infantry. In 1890, he was sentenced to two years in prison for the attempted molestation of two young girls, and in 1895, after a third incident of alleged molestation of a three-and-a-half-year-old-girl, he was committed to the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic in Bern, where he remained until his death in 1930. Suffering from terrifying hallucinations, Wolfli was often placed in isolation during the first decade of his hospitalization. From 1910, working systematically on his writing and drawing, Wolfli desired the solitude and protection of a private cell, which he decorated with his own works.


After four years in the Waldau clinic, Wolfli began to draw. The earliest preserved works, dating from 1904, are restless, symmetrical pencil drawings on newsprint. Combining images, words, and musical notations, the early works forecast the principal motifs and pictorial devices of his later work. In 1908, the year Dr. Walter Morgenthaler arrived at Waldau, Wolfli embarked upon the epic autobiographical project that would consume the remaining twenty-two years of his life. The text of the fanciful autobiography, interspersed with poetry, musical composition, and three thousand illustrations, comprises more than twenty-five thousand pages. Hand bound by Wolfli and stacked in his cell, the forty-five volumes eventually reached a height of more than six feet. Intermingling reality and fiction, Wolfli's autobiography begins as an adventurous geographical world expedition, of which Doufi (Wolfli's childhood name) is the hero, and expands to a grandiose tale of cosmic war, catastrophe, and conquest with Doufi transformed into St. Adolf II. The fascinating illustrations of the narrative are labyrinthine creations and mandalalike compositions of densely combined text and idiosyncratic motifs.


A few days before his death, Wolfli lamented his inability to complete the final section of the autobiography, a grandiose finale of nearly three thousand songs, which he titled "Funeral March". In 1972, Wolfli's work was exhibited at Documenta 5 and since then has been shown throughout Europe and the United States. In 1975, forty-five years after his death, Wolfli's staggering artistic production — including the autobiography and its illustrations, as well as some eight hundred loose leaf drawings-was transferred from the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic to the Kunst Museum in Bern. (phylliskindgallery)
No comments
Posted in , , , ,

Ray Manzarek - The Golden Scarab (1974)

Raymond Daniel Manzarek (Manczarek) (ur. 12 lutego 1939 w Chicago) – amerykański muzyk, producent płytowy, reżyser, pisarz, klawiszowiec zespołu The Doors, którego wspólnie z Jimem Morrisonem był założycielem.

Rodzice Helena i Raymond Manczarek, oboje będący dziećmi emigrantów z Polski, od najmłodszych lat dbali o muzyczne wykształcenie ich syna, ucząc go gry na pianinie. Studiował muzykę w chicagowskim konserwatorium muzycznym. Poza studiami na brzmienie jego muzyki wpływ miały przede wszystkim jazz i blues. W Los Angeles studiował na University of California w Los Angeles na wydziale filmu; w czerwcu 1965 z bardzo dobrymi wynikami ukończył go. Przed założeniem The Doors grał i śpiewał w zespołach: Rick And The Ravens i The White Trash Quintet. Po śmierci Jima Morrisona kontynuował karierę muzyczną. Solową karierę rozpoczął wydaniem płyty Golden Scarab. Po trzech latach znudził się graniem w pojedynkę i z nowo sformowaną grupą Nite City nagrał dwie płyty. Po dziesięciu latach przerwy w 1993 stworzył muzykę do wierszy amerykańskiego poety Michaela McClure'a. W 1980 został producentem biorąc pod opiekę nagranie krążka punkowego zespołu X zatytułowanego Los Angeles. W 2001 wrócił do reżyserowania obrazem Love Her Madly. Poza wspomnieniami Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors opublikował również powieść The Poet In Exile. Od września 2002 wraz z Robbiem Kriegerem grają w towarzystwie Iana Astbury'ego i Tya Dennisa jako The Doors of the 21st Century.



More than Full Circle and Other Voices, The Golden Scarab is the best embodiment of the Doors by one of the three surviving members, and it is amazing it wasn't a huge underground smash. With mentions of moonlight drives, tightrope rides, and titles of past Doors tunes in "The Solar Boat," drummer Tony Williams, guitarist Larry Carlton, bassist Jerry Scheff, and producer Bruce Botnick generate an eerie sound behind the singer, creating a title track as mysterious and fun as anything by Morrison and company. With intense rhythms and tons of creativity, Ray Manzarek brings us on a musical journey as unique as The Phantom's Divine Comedy, and if Robbie Krieger brought the commercial element to the Doors' gravy train, it is clear here that the eldest of the quartet had more a hand in the development of the Doors persona than he may have been given credit for. One can't fault Krieger and John Densmore for stretching out with Butts Band, but there is a certain responsibility hit artists should have to their audience. The Bright Midnight releases finally address those concerns, but decades before the opening of the Doors tape vaults, that sound from L.A. Woman was most obvious on "The Purpose of Existence Is?" on this solo effort. Yes, Ray Manzarek veers off into his jazz leanings; given the players on this, how could he not? But he gives enough of a taste of past glories to make The Golden Scarab accessible, spoon feeding his musical styles to those who couldn't get enough of the music he was associated with. It's dramatic and cohesive, making more sense than Jim Morrison much of the time, with more controlled insanity. It is amazing that such a fine work as The Golden Scarab escaped the masses, and shameful that classic hits stations don't add this to their incessant repertoire. Had Jim Morrison lived, this is the path the music of the Doors should have taken. Smooth and demanding of repeated spins. --- Joe Viglione

No comments
Posted in , , ,

Moolah - Woe, Ye Demons Possessed 1974 (2005)



Formed in the 70s by Walter Burns and Maurice Roberson, Moolah delivers a bewitching tranced-out droning krautrockin' universe. Their own musical identity is made of lysergic-aleatoric experiments, garage sounds, neo-shamanic voice incantations and cosmic synth ondulations. Rather intuitive anarchic release but it contains some memorable creative moments and nicely done eastern-like buzzing spaciness. Woe Ye Demons Possessed (1974) is a rarity and a must have for fans of the most experimental side of krautrock music (Eruption, Kluster, Organisation, Think, Zweistein?.) (Philippe Blache
2 comments
Posted in , , , ,

Chore IA - Neologizmowa (1994) cassette


Bliżej mi nie znana grupa ze Swarzędza (bodajże), która nagrała bardzo ciekawy materiał wydany przez legendarną wytwórnię Obuh. Z tego, co jestem zorientowany ukazał się tylko na kasecie i nie był wznawiany na LP liub CD. Magiczna muzyka i klimaty - zresztą takie zawsze serwuje Woycek.

Unindexed tape of a Polish band. Largely synthesizer based music, but no always very ambient. Quite experimental.
1 comment
Posted in , ,

Faust - Untitled (1996)


Faust, one of the greatest bands to come out of Germany in the 70's, did a fantastic job of terrorizing rock music. Twenty years later, they are back again, currently reduced to a three man line-up of Zappi Diermaier, Hans Joachim Imler, and Jean-Hervé Péron. The Untitled, CD, 6 tracks in all, features live & well-remixed songs along with new ones.


As usual, Faust make it difficult to determine which tracks are which, giving titles like A 70's Event to Krautrock (IV) and Komm mit to a untitled track off of the The Faust Tapes (the one with the chorus "you are the one to be me"). The first track, titled Not Nearest By, is an un-familiar masterpiece with deep bass rhythms, and dare I say "funky" horns (off of So Far). Fourth on the CD is a wonderful live 1995 version of the Sad Skin Head complete with strangely-enthusiastic vocals, concluded with the screaming of "shut up". Expecting S. In Love, one of the new tracks, is a sad, intricate, cliche acoustic piece with a bit of humming - it is almost a ballad without vocals. Fastened 60/60, another new one, includes a riff from you know faUSt's Cendre which is instead played electrically and instrumentally while being repeated over and over again. Untitled comes with a beautiful booklet (The Rachels band are going to have to try hard to keep up with Faust) containing a brief history of Faust taken from the forthcoming Faust book, a discography, some fantastic looking pictures with a direction theme, reviews, and a clip from a map key showing the word Faust located at 55.19 N and 115.38 W. (Jeremy Rotsztain)
1 comment
Posted in , , ,

The Best Of Disco Demands (2011)



The Disco Demands series started sometime in the early 2000s - I couldn't give you an exact year because it didn't feel like a big deal, so I never noted it. I simply wanted to put out a compilation of some records I really liked and maybe make a little of the money back I was spending on them. Buy some food and stuff.

There's always been Disco comps around of course but there was rarely anything that strayed too far from the standards.. the same songs kept appearing over and over again, or the comps would feature records you could pick up anywhere for little money. I've never seen the point in that. I gave up judging a record on its value or rarity a long time ago but surely there's more to disco than Exodus, Martin Circus, Mass Production and all those Salsoul, West End and bloody Prelude records. So it was a nice surprise to find that there were other people out there who thought the same way.

Volume 1 was pretty straightforward - just some nice records, with the only edit being an instrumental of Disco Socks; a strange, thinly veiled reference to the disco sucks movement. Then on Volume 2 I included a few of my edits and introduced the cover up concept to the disco world. That caused a bit of controversy, which of course I loved. And so it continued for five volumes.

What we have here then is the full series, give or take one or two cuts, all remastered, many re-re-edited, with lots of nice naked pictures to boot. For those who've asked since day one "will there be vinyl" I can finally say yes, you're holding it!

In 2005, revered DJ and record collector Al Kent started to compile rare disco tracks, many of which were presented in his re-edited form, with the small-run Disco Demands series, released on his Million Dollar Disco label. The discs are re-circulated here, via the bigger BBE, as a slim five-disc package that contains most of the original series' tracks. Kent's cunning edits, both slight and severe, have a lot to do with his status as Dimitri from Paris' and Joey Negro's favorite DJ. Some serious disco heads might even be brave enough to declare a preference for Kent's version of Arts & Craft's version of "I've Been Searching" over the Walter Gibbons mix, as it's both tighter and tougher, with more emphasis on the clavinet and an elimination of the male vocal part. Only six of the 45 selections -- including the album version of Brooklyn Express' "Back in Time," an homage to Eddie Kendricks' "Girl, You Need a Change of Mind" -- are left untouched. The whole set makes it apparent that Kent doesn't play around and intends to keep limbs and hips in motion at all times. Those who have tired of '70s dancefloor classics and favor the funky and slightly odd will find this to be an embarrassment of riches. --- Andy Kellman
No comments
Posted in , , ,

Sperm - Shh! 1970 (1998)


The Finnish underground movement started to formulate after Jimi Hendrix's year 1967 concert at Helsinki's Kultturitalo venue, and as the news from Monterey's hippie concerts stranded to the far-away arctic peninsula. On that year art critic J.O. Mailander, film director Peter Widén and musician Pekka Airaksinen formed a group named as "Pyhät Miehet" (Holy Men) in Helsinki. Later that year the group was joined by writer and performer Mattijuhani Koponen, who would be a clear leader of the collective establishing its final name Sperm. Along with Turku-based group Suomen Talvisota, they were the true pioneers of 1960's underground movement in Finland.

Though the few recorded music albums along with some fuzzy photographs are the only available documentations of Sperm's artistic activity, they were witnessed to commit to all kinds of happenings, stage plays, festivals, performances and concerts. Their dadaistic and aggressively chaotic primitive approach was a new thing in a civilization with severe mental scars from the early 20th century wars, but most shocking impact of their activity were their focus to sexual themes, aggressive opposing of formal society's standard values, and open adornment of the shunned weed-smelling lifestyles related to hippie movement.

In the actual happenings, the musical elements were atavistic bellowing, random usage of pianos, flutes and self-constructed instruments, and all these being united to pre-recorded tapes following the logics of free association. Especially these recorded sequences and the early electronic ambiences on Sperm's musical appearance were mostly created by Pekka Airaksinen. These tonal concepts were freely adapted to analogue visual installations and acted performances. Music to one of these theater productions, "Sisyfos" from 1968, is preserved on Pekka Airaksinen's album "One Point Music" released 1972. From the levels of atonal chaos related to the Sperm's philosophy, the early album "3rd Erection" possibly gives a most correct hint, having Mattijuhani Koponen whipping out vocal free flow, and Airaksinen testing new tuning possibilities and playing methods of electric guitar.


The group's members got quite much publicity from their provocations, and Koponen was convicted to jail in 1969 from the obscenities of both performing a poem at an United Nations event dressed only to a wool cap and socks, and performing a sexual copulation with a woman upon a piano as part of a performance; A deed which was later claimed to be an acted out event without real penetration. In 1970 after Koponen was released from the prison, Sperm grouped for live concerts with Heikki Hietanen on keyboards, Nikke Nikamo (early Wigwam) on guitar, and Wando Suvanto playing drums. After touring Finland they recorded their most known album "Shh!" with Pekka Airaksinen, and his impact to the record was possibly stronger than the musical ideas borne from the live band's road trips. Later Airaksinen and Koponen were involved with a band Samsa-Trio doing more serene psych music, captured to an album released year 1972. During that time the rock scene in Finland had evolved further from underground avantgarde and commercial pop towards more non-political mainstream rock, left-wing political singing movements like Agit-Prop, progressive rock acts with lesser anarchistic motives (Wigwam, Tasavallan Presidentti etc), and transcendental psychedelia taking refugee to Pekka Streng's visionary albums. Though Pekka Airaksinen would continue his hermetic musical career actively, walking towards paths of Buddhism and new age avantgarde impressionism, the story of Sperm was eventually over.

The most significant impact of this group in my opinion was its sociological commitment; Being a fundamental part on the local movement which broke the stagnant mental atmosphere of post-war Finland, made the needs of demonizing both open sexuality and disagreement of social standards by practicing these misdeeds more minor. These pioneers had to pay the price through legal martyrdom, and after this reveal for the society that their shunned activities had not caused any harm, and through pragmatism the basis for moral hysteria was thus lowered. In my own personal contemplation the gained tolerance from authorities to such vulgarities and open disagreements of existing political system are signs of both civilisation and sophistication from the leaders, and the co-existence of these opposing forces strengthen the standards of practiced democracy, allow alternatives and choice of freedom for the citizens, and prove the tolerance of the state rulers following The Spirit of The Enlightenment.

Musically their 1968 freak out record could be admired as good artifact among the other similar albums on global scale, and their "Shh!" album a recommendable target for collectors of vintage avantgarde electronic psych recordings. The adorers of anarchist global hippie revolution movement might be interested of this group, being the persons doing this stuff at the early days in a small distant Nordic country. About the group's name, in many international occasions it has been formulated as THE Sperm, but the original Finnish name is simply Sperm. (Eetu Pellonpää)
2 comments
Posted in , , , , , ,

VA - Well Hung. 20 Funk-Rock Eruptions from Beneath Communist Hungary Volume 1 (2008)



Turns out that one of the products of communist Hungary during the '70s was an amazing selection of psychedelic rock bands. Who knew? Well, clearly the folks at Finders Keepers have been in on this for a while, because they cottoned on to the alluring wigouts of Sarolta Zalatnay a while back, reissuing her eponymous LP to glowing reviews a good twenty-five years or so after its original release. As this album demonstrates, Zalatnay was by no means a one-off. Artists like Kati Kovacs, and bands such as Skorpios and Piramis were all experimenting with adventurous, prog-tinged funk rock. However, if there's one thing to be learned from this compilation, it's that the Hungarian scene of the '70s was far from a single, unfragmented movement, and within this community of performers you'll hear music that ranges from the protracted far-outness of Omega's experimental epic ' to the knockabout, goodtime glam boogie of Meteor & Demjen Ferenc's 'Kivánj Te Is Nekem Szép, Jó Éjszakát'. The weighty and authoritative booklet (with an intro written by Ms. Zalatnay, no less) adds a necessary air of rigour and context to the compilation, which otherwise could easily have come across as a bit of a novelty item. Awesome. (source)

B-Music break yet more ground with 22 stomping selections from the vaults of Eastern Europe's best kept secret, Hungaraton / Qualiton Records. This first ever compendium piles heavy psych, jazz, glam and funk onto a heaped spoonful dripping with the cream of the 60s/70s Hungarian rock scene - Omega, Metro, Locomotiv GT, Skorpio as well as B-Music's very own jet-set fit-bit Sarolta Zalatnay.

The unique ways in which Hungarian rockers interpreted such sporadic and disparate influences and unknowingly mirrored embryonic developments in Western rock from behind a political blindfold is truly unique. The national pride of Hungary's pre-war musical heritage ensured that the state-owned label Supraphon's in-house studio was designed to immaculate classical standards with acoustic specifications that would put its surrounding Eastern European labels to shame. The quality of phonograph records, from a part of the world that was usually notorious for low quality pressings and repeatedly recycled vinyl, would surpass the European standards ensuring that the hand crafted sound of Hungary's futuristic pop music was light years ahead of its time and would stand the test of time for many (delayed) years to come.

The introduction of electronic instruments penetrated Hungary like a double-edged sword and polarised progressive pop aficionados over night. Where the introduction of Czechoslovakian electric guitars unified Eastern Europe's rock 'n' roll fantasists and spawned the rock in opposition movement in the mid 60's the spurious arrival of synthesizers ten years later spawned a host of new streams of hybrid rock which embraced funk, soul and disco.

The restrictions of communism coupled with the silver-spooned Westerners musical xenophobia, however, as good as guaranteed that no matter how close Hungarians got to the authentic rock 'n roll sound their music would still never safely make the journey over the language barrier. In recent years, as much as 15 years since the collapse of the iron curtain, the interjection of many forms of latter day communist era art into popular western culture has become apparent and increasingly well documented. Hopefully at some stage discerning palettes will develop a taste for Hungarian rock music in the same way that we have come to accept, champion and be inspired by Polish poster art and Czech cinema.
2 comments
Posted in ,

Sproton Layer - With Magnetic Fields Disrupted 1970 (1992)


Pierwszy zespół Rogera Millera znanego przede wszystkim z Mission of Burma, który założył jeszcze ze szkolnymi rówieśnikami w 1969 roku w Ann Arbor. Późnym latem 1970 roku nagrali materiał na album, który wydany został dopiero w 1992 roku pod tytułem "With Magnetic Fields Disrupted". Zważywszy na młody wiek muzyków, wyszło im z tego całkiem niezłe psychodeliczne granie, dość nietypowo urozmaicone charakterystycznymi partiami trąbki.


In March of 1969, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Miller brothers Roger (17), Benjamin (15) and Laurence (15) had a mind-altering improvisation session on guitar, bass and drums in their basement.  They called it "Freak Trio Electric", and none of them, or their views on music, were the same after this event.  A few days later, after repeated amazed listening to the tape ("Sounds like Pink Floyd cut with Captain Beefheart!" wrote Roger in his journal), they decided to form a band.  Roger wrote many songs that spring incorporating riffs and motifs from their improvisations.  Later that year they added trumpeter Harold Kirchen (brother of Bill Kirchen of Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen fame) and changed their name to Sproton Layer.  Benjamin and Laurence began composing around this time. Their music was most definitely psychedelic, with many songs based on the "Toke Mythology."  The band played 20 or so shows in 1969 and 1970 before folding in the fall of 1970 due to the conservative direction rock music was moving.

In late summer 1970, they recorded and album's worth of material with classmate Mark Brahce engineering, again in their parents' basement.  This album, "With Magnetic Fields Disrupted", was released 23 years later on New Alliance, along with a 45 from 1969 sessions, to very little notice.

In 2010, the German label World in Sound found out about the group, contacted Laurence, and agreed to re-release "With Magnetic Fields Disrupted" in higher fidelity.  And, to the amazement of the brothers, they offered to include a 24 page booklet with photos, song-lists, drawings, journal entries,  and a history of the group.  The CD and LP will be released summer 2011.  Another album, including many other songs and improvisations, will be released somewhat later by World in Sound (with a smaller booklet!). (sprotonlayer)
1 comment
Posted in , , , ,

Iron Butterfly - Fillmore East 1968


Iron Butterfly – zespół rockowy założony w 1966 roku w San Diego w Kalifornii przez Doug Ingle'a i Ronalda Bushy'ego. Zespół grał w stylu acid rock, rock psychodeliczny i hard rock.

W pierwszym składzie zaspołu, który rozpadł się po nagraniu debiutanckiego albumu Heavy w marcu 1968, grali również: Darryl DeLoach, Danny Weis i Jerry Penrod. Ich miejsce zajęli Erik Brann i Lee Dorman. W czerwcu 1968 Iron Butterfly już w nowym składzie nagrał swoją najlepszą płytę In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (sprzedana w czterech milionach egzemplarzy), na której znalazł się ich najsłynniejszy 17-minutowy tytułowy utwór -In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (tytuł powstał przez uproszczony zapis angielskiej frazy In the Garden of Eden – "W rajskim ogrodzie"). Po tym sukcesie zespół wystąpił na Newport Pop Festival i Miami Pop Festival. W lutym 1969 zespół wydał kolejną płytę – Ball, która dotarła do 4 miejsca na amerykańskich listach najlepiej sprzedających się albumów. Zespół został zaproszony na festiwal w Denver, gdzie wystąpił obok takich gwiazd jak Joe Cocker, Creedence Clearwater Revival i Jimi Hendrix.

Po koncercie w Atlantic City zespół opuścił Erik Brann, a jego miejsce zajęli Larry Reinhardt i były gitarzysta Blues Image - Mike Pinera. W maju 1970 Iron Butterfly wydaje album koncertowy Iron Butterfly Live, a w sierpniu płytę Metamorphosis, z której pochodzi piosenka Easy Rider (Let the Wind Pay the Way) związana z filmem Easy Rider.Mimo sukcesów grupa rozpada się w maju 1971. W połowie lat 70. Bushy i Braunn próbują bez powodzenia reaktywować zespół. (wikipedia)



OK people, I took one for the team and bought this blind without hearing samples. I've loved this band for years. When I saw that Rhino Handmade was releasing this double live disc of a 1968 Fillmore concert of Iron Butterfly, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame, regardless of price.

First, let's get the bad news out of the way. This is not a cheap purchase. Rhino Handmade traditionally makes a limited amount of copies of any given release available to the public. I did initially go to Rhino's website to see if I could buy it cheaper from the source, but found many negative reviews of transactions by going direct. One of them was high shipping fees. The other downside is that 6 of the 22 songs are repeated multiple times over the course of 4 sets over a 2 night stint at the Fillmore East.

Songs performed are largely culled from the "Heavy" LP (Fields of Sun, You Can't Win, Unconscious Power, So-Lo, Iron Butterfly Theme, Stamped Ideas & Possession). One song is taken from the "Ball"  (Her Favorite Style) and the remaining tracks are from "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (Are You Happy?,
My Mirage & the title track).

Now for the good news...this is NOT a bootleg!! The sound is quite good. The instrument separation is excellent. The vocals on a couple tracks seem distant but that could be because Doug was too far from the mike...Other than that a big thumbs up for sound quality.

The one odd thing I found was that Iron Butterfly are VERY tight & disiplined in concert. Remember this was recorded during the 1968 acid-age era. They perform all the songs, with the exception of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida & Iron Butterfly Theme, record perfect. Erik Brann's melodic and frenzied guitar is just as it is on LP, which is fine by me...

On the plus side, they performed several deep cuts from their LP's here. Sadly, for whatever reason, we only have this double disc and the official LP released in the late 60's as the only recorded document of them live.

Let's cross our fingers and hope Rhino can unearth more live material from 1969 or 1970 from Iron Butterfly. In short, I've tested the waters. It's OK to come in and swim...The waters fine. --- George Spiggot (amazon)
    Serpent.pl