Future-Retro 151108

Last shindig for the year by the Sound Art kids from RMIT. They throw a good party!

The Dawson St Warehouse is just next to the trainline, between the Brunswick Baths & the police munitions depot...

Hugo Montenegro - Mr Groovy (liner notes)

Sunshine delirium with an electronic edge

"I'm an experimenter in music. I am interested in enhancing the musical experience by utilizing dramatic effects" – Hugo Montenegro

Gratuitous guru of the groovy glee-club, Hugo Montenegro cooked the Western world’s nearest equivalent to the kind of ‘marsala’ composition so famously wrought on the Indian subcontinent by the likes of Rahul Dev Burman. No instrument is safe, and the human voice is the most ubiquitous instrument of all. Like Burman, Montenegro was adept in writing for a choir of wordless vocals; jazz-scat stylings via the innovations of their soundtrack compeer, Juan Garcia Esquivel... “Babada!”

Born to a modest New York family, World War 2 and a tour with the US navy provided youngster Montenegro with a G.I. bill place at the Manhattan School of Music. Here he applied his lessons in composition to the dance band he led outside of class. After graduation, a second tour-of-duty saw him arranging for the band at the Newport naval base; ultimate return to civilian life found him working as staff manager for Columbia Record’s king of saccharine strings, Andre Kostelantz, and Montenegro’s earliest LPs are subject to this regrettable “pazz and jop” influence.

By the dawn of the HiFi era, Montenegro was on staff at Time Records label, leading large ensembles through stomping covers of erstwhile standards like Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King (from the particularly choice Bongos And Brass LP). Work at Columbia Records had also brought him into the orbit of Harry Belafonte, and through the early and mid-60s Montenegro was arranging and conducting for Belafonte’s elaborate live performances. As Producer of Belafonte’s The Midnight Special LP in 1961, he hired a fledgling Bob Dylan as session harmonica player – but the gruelling rehearsal schedule proved too much for the aspirant star, and Dylan reportedly quit after recording only a single track...

By 1966, Montenegro had relocated from New York to Hollywood and was writing and recording soundtrack music both for Columbia Pictures, and Columbia’s television company, Screen Gems. Contracted to score Hurry Sundown for Otto Preminger, he brought Belafonte back into the studio to record the film’s theme. Other assignments on Western B-films followed; by 1969 he was scoring star vehicles Charro! (Elvis Presley) and The Undefeated (John Wayne). Around this same time, Montenegro’s staccato double-time adaptation of 50s West Coast jazz to an amplified rhythm section - fuzztone guitar and surf drums swinging a bossa beat - made him as responsible as anyone for 60’s spy-jazz style. 2 LPs worth of music from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV series suggested him to the producers of the Matt Helm franchise, but between scoring The Ambushers (1967) and The Wrecking Crew (1969) Montenegro enjoyed perhaps his most unlikely commercial success.

(etc)

...one of the (many) great things to admire about that cover: the "Goodies" typeface.

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

Haackula (liner notes)

With his wildest aspirations realised in the major label release of Electric Lucifer (CBS, 1969; reissued on Omni 110), the future blazed bright with promise for Bruce Haack. But his elation was shortly eclipsed by a brutal reality: the incomprehension and indifference of the listening public and the US recording industry. The Electric Lucifer was to be Haack's solitary release on a major label. Within 2 decades he was dead, mourned only by a small group of devoted friends.

Throughout the intervening years he never ceased from inventing new instruments and recording music. Madison Avenue had offered him work, but after 1972 he never accepted another advertising commission. When his friend and collaborator, Ted Pandel, took up a teaching position in the rural Pennsylvania town of West Chester, Haack relocated from New York to join him. His creative partnership with Esther Nelson fell apart, but she continued to release his music - a record a year until 1976. With Pandel's support, his bohemian lifestyle took a turn for the wholesome, and when Pandel bought a house in 1976, Haack established his home studio in an upstairs bedroom. Haack struggled against the most profound unhappiness: frustration and disappointment had followed him South. Dispirited by the institutional apathy of the music industry, it was the love and kindness of his friends, and the solace of his music and inventing, that sustained him.

There are multiple revelations contained on this disc, which essentially documents the "lost years" of Haack's career - a 5 year hiatus in his discography between the 1976 release of Ebenezer Electric, and his final 2 LPs, Bite and Zoot Zoot Zoot, Here Comes Santa in his New Space Suit (both 1981). The 3 recordings on this disc speak to the breadth of the always prolific Haack's activities across that period...

(etc)

... a "true story". Because this is the first-time-ever commercial release of all this music, Omni bossman Dave Thrussell mocked up some covers, & emailed the Jpegs at his crew of friends & fellow-travellers. The vote was split, so as a decider, Dave held a seance, summoned "Bruce Haack", and the ouija board picked out this one.

(Just for the record: I was & am in agreement w/ the ethereal Haack on this)

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

(liner notes) Country Moog/Nashville Gold - Gil Trythall

A single cyclopean eye winks from the apex of a hotwired haystack. The landscape is etched like a circuitboard; the new frontier is electronic, and these recordings describe the point at which the folk traditions of acoustic & digital eras play at their innocent capers and courtship…

In a year and an era of youthquake upheavals, 1968’s Switched-on Bach was an electric shock that convulsed the U.S. music industry. Created on a prototype Moog synthesizer, Wendy Carlos’ LP was the first classical recording to go platinum (and double), and won her 3 Grammies the following year. That success launched a wave of “Switched-On” albums directed at other audiences - jauntily synthesized cover versions drawn from the familiar back-catalogues of successful songwriters, like George Gershwin and The Who. It all culminated someplace in the seventies with the giddy ascent of Popcorn into the higher reaches of international charts, but that Hot Buttered hit was the exception that proved a rule… Inbetweentimes, most of these records had blazed into unremarked and rapid oblivion, but among the good and the bad there are more than a few genuinely inspired recordings. 2 of the most singular are by Gil Trythall.

now available from the Omni Recording Corporation

Gil Trythall's software is available for D-L, here

(liner notes) The Electric Lucifer - Bruce Haack

How does a transcendental inventor, working at playfully hep music for small humans, come to create an inspired outsider monsterpiece like The Electric Lucifer? There is a considerable sympathy for the devil in these grooves, but it’s not by way of sophomore satanism. Rather, Bruce Haack’s record is testament to a more ambiguous archetype: mythical figure of Prometheus, the titan who fell to earth, bringing the gift of fire to man – a visitor from the stars, who elevated hairless apes beyond their hunted beast origins...

now available from the Omni Recording Corporation

more infos on Bruce Haack, here