Primitive Calculators: live recording from The Tote 04.01.2009

Early in the year a friend was kind enough to gift me a ticket for ATP; a genuine treat - the first time I'd made one of these outdoor scenarios in a non-work capacity. Plenty to engage the senses (not least the setting, which, beyond the concentrated brutalist architecture, was genuinely restorative).

In respect of the actual music, several things struck me. The element of spontaneity, unpredictability, seemed largely absent - most musicians adopted the role of stadium rock entertainers. Even worse, the audience suffered an inertial restraint, breaking their static poses only for polite applause or the sipping of beer. As a study in social morbidity, it was fascinating: as a cultural experience, it had all the thrill of being lost in a foreign city, but eating lunch at McDonalds (Remember also, by way of context, that this was within a schedule of echofromthepast celebration of Aus postpunk...). And for sure, loud music with a regular rhythm and timbral density can be fun and exciting, per se - but the proposition of reassuring familiarity is anathema to this particular auditor.

There was a wry bemusement to be found in all this. "Weren't the Laughing Clowns incredible?" (erm, no, I thought inaudibly; rather, 1 of the 3 or 4 least accomplished things I'd ever seen & heard in my life: superannuated burnouts with no chops fumbling over their instruments and missing the changes. A great band in their day, for sure - only that day was twentysome years back).

It began to remind me of the reflexive brand loyalties that surburban zombies must pledge to an uber-rock corporation like the Rolling Stones. I asked one of the festival organisers to nominate a highlight. "The Dirty Three, definitely. I saw them in Europe last year, and it was fantastic. I didn't think they could repeat it, but they did!" I took my quizzical leave, thinking back to their Brisbane tours of '94-and-5, when the band was the most exciting thing I saw in either year (the first time, in company of one-time drummer for Sydney jazzpunk ensemble The Great White Noise, John Gillies (then in residence with the Institute of Modern Art) and only 3 others... the second, a pre-Christmas show at the Zoo that featured unannounced guest spots from Nick Cave and Robert Forster). Back then, the band's formidable musicianship was the vehicle for a manic intensity, by turns hateful and heartbreaking. Now they played like synchronised sleepwalkers.

Beyond the sheer delight of having momentarily escaped the urban grid, there were other and ample pleasures. The Louis Wain exhibit was modestly staged, but a charming enough diversion (and presumably some kind of epiphany for many of the punters). And music! The Reels' anachronistic pop fragility... Passenger of Shit's ultracore insania... And the Primitive Calculators, with their defiant introduction: "We were shit 29 years ago, and we're still shit!"

Later in the day, I asked Edgar from Missing Link to confirm my very different opinion. "They were shit 29 years ago - this is the amazing thing - now, they're actually good!"

I've heard some incredible live music in the last year: a half-dozen Balkan Gypsy bands; Angelo Badalamenti's opera, with the Pasolini libretto; a killer Nono piece; live diffusions from Pierre Henry; a career-retrospective performance from Dubravko Detoni and Acezantez; Tristan Murail conducting his spectral compositions; even Singing Sadie. And 3 concerts from the reformed Calculators, each time stunning me anew with their cynical indifference, casual nihilism, and an immersive vortex of compelling noise.


Alan Bamford has long been a tireless partisan for the band, and he was kind enough to gift me with this - live recording of the first Primitive Calculators concert in 29 years.

55 minutes, 320Kbps CBR MP3, 131MB: FWIW! DL here

and yesterday's top news: Lightning Bolt ("renowned for being the most insane shit ever", ha!) touring Aus, with the Calculators in support, courtesy of Heathen Skulls...

(couple more links)

photos from this same gig, and eyewitness account

M&N review, & interview

and for DL...

Frontman's egghead dayjob - here's proof (podcast for DL)

Aus TV Hosts 1: Hideously yours, Deadly

Very little by way of information available about this one...



Deadly Earnest was a late-night television host on the 0-10 network to Australian capital cities at 1960s' decadal cusp. For reasons presumably involving the state of the network back then, there was a different Deadly for each city (tho' Perth & Adelaide both shared Hedley Cullen in 1975)

Most prominent among them, & seemingly progenitor of the idea, was the Sydney Deadly; a young drama student, UK expat, name of Ian Bannerman.

By way of ancillary merchandising, this LP - now horribly obscured by history. I spent an age scaring one up; eventually, I landed 2 in the same week. High sherrifs of both the record labels I work for have heard it, but I think we're all in agreement: this is more interesting as an historical artefact, per se, than as actual music. If neither of those companies will be licensing it for re-issue, I figured at least to restore it to public attentions (however small they might be).

Producer, Ron Wills, was a life-long champion of Australian music and had recorded Slim Dusty's 'A Pub With No Beer' in 1957. Co-lyricist & occasional backing vocalist, John Brindle, was a radio announcer for 2CH. No available information on the session players, tho' they might include members of Max Merritt's backing group, The Meteors (whose 3rd LP Wills was also producing around this same time)

You can download the album rip, here

Melbourne's Deadly was Ralph Baker; that link will direct you to infos on a personal appearance from 1993.

Freakbeat-sploitation: The 4 Instants, "Discotheque"

[this has been re-issued on vinyl by Wah Wah; the DL is deleted, buy it instead from them.]

... at risk of this becoming a DL blog: here's one I uploaded for a pal in Austria. Crypto-garage/freakbeat styles from 1966, by a team of what are probably UK session players. Somehow, it got licensed for Antipodean listening 3 years later by, unnh, Basic Books Australasia.

3 originals, credited to Cattini/Winters/O'Neal/Keen, including the second side's blazing hot opening track. In a fairly naked case of plagiarism, Barely Breaking Even once re-released Bogattini on a BigBeat 12, but without any mention of its title or the musicians who'd recorded it (BBE did, however, embellish it with some seal SFX & an Art Blakey drumbreak - tho' I personally doubt this gives them anykind of compelling authorial claims...). Among other choice tunes, the truly epic & thumping double-time cover of Tizol/Ellington's exotica regular, Caravan. That, the several other raucous rave-ups of "jazz standards", & the tremendous technical chops of the players - a 4tet of guitar, bass, organ & drums - might suggest this particular wrecking crew had a background in jazz?

I'm confounded that this one has been overlooked for so long in its native territories, while much lesser discs get their celebratory re-release. Angela Sawyer is dead-on when she remarks on the (B-music) "tendency to lean toward the UK end of collecting: lots of beats, slick brass, clean bass." Within its strictly metered discipline, there's a storm of scattered beats dropping all over the place - but the guitar is filthy with fuzz and in fierce competion for the lead with a rippling funk organ.

As recently as 2006, it was still possible to read in The Wire that the first White Noise LP was an artistic failure (wha?!?). And yet Delia Derbyshire's merely chromatic library tracks seemingly provoke an evangelical fervour (double-wha?!?). Perhaps this all speaks to some kind of structuralist distinction between "raw & cooked" obtaining in UK pop music - an avidity for precisely the kind of MOR over-production that punk stylings reacted against.

... A second "Discotheque" LP followed, 6 years later & produced by the same corporate pseudonym (Art & Sound, Ltd). Failing to capitalise on its predecessor, and somewhat optimistically, that record announced itself as "Discotheque Volume One". That one has a different crew of players and much reduced appeal, but there is one killer track in the rumbling funk of Car Wash (an original, predating the US film by 4 years). Apparently, there are more; Johnny Topper has told me that he's seen a Volume 3.

Anyways. Back to 1966:

A1. Discotheque
A2. Watermelon Man
A3. Mashed Potatoes
A4. Caravan
A5. Portobello Road
B1. Bogattini
B2. Outrage
B3. Monkey Time
B4. All about my girl
B5. Night Train

not any more

Q of the G: performing in St Albans this w/e...

Thx to Balkan beast DJ Delay for clueing me to this caper...

Big news! Esma Redzepova will be performing this Saturday evening at the Croatian Centre in St Albans.

Redzepova - sometime actress, & Nobel peace prize nominee - occupies an Olympian pinnacle of Roma femme-vox. Some readers will be familiar w/ her singing from the Borat soundtrack, but here is the earliest recording of her's I have to hand - a 1979 cassette of A Bre Ramce.

Dig!

Not her first local appearance, but she doesn't make it Aus so very frequently...

... the Balkan beasts explore this sonic terrain in their regular club nights: this Thursday at Horse Bazaar, and Friday at Bar Open.

We remember: Khmer musics

... It was un-proud Australian journalist, John Pilger, who initially alerted international citizens to the horrors of the Cambodian killing fields. Pilger defines his professional mission as a "guardian of the public memory", invoking these words of Milan Kundera: "The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

The Maoist political program of Pol Pot had a very different intention; it sought to erase the past - to declare a revolutionary 'tabula rasa': Year Zero. To that end, books and ancient texts were burned, buildings were levelled, and vast human populations were murdered.

3 decades later, and history has liquidated Pol Pot - if not his memory, or that of the atrocities he visited on his fellow citizens. Now the task of recovering the history of Khmer culture has enlisted humans from about the globe; 1 of my favourite is DJ bUMp, of Defective Records. He's been kind enough to send me a copy of the Cambodian Psych-Out complication... My colleague, Sokha Suy, is going to do a little translation for him.

Mr bUMp relates that several luminaries of the Khmer pop scene were involved in the Royal Orchestra, so for yr delectations I'm posting this LP: UNESCO Collection Musical Sources/Art Music from South-East Asia IX-3 Royal Music of Cambodia...

"This record is dedicated to those magnificent artists, the royal dancers and musicians of Cambodia" - Jacques Brunot, January 1970. Download it here.

The music bears analogy to Javanese and Balinese Gamelan, but is closer in style to the traditions of Malaysia and Thailand. Wonderfully melifluous, and supported by a female choir who sing in a language which is essentially devoid of the harsh guttural consonants of Anglo-Saxon dialects. Recorded on the eve of the coup which would depose Norodom Sihanouk, the palace orchestra employs antique instruments tuned to a traditional scale, and the choir has been augmented to reflect its size at the beginning of the 20th century. A little over 5 years later, and all those instruments and most of the musicians, singers and dancers were 'liquidated' by Pol Pot & his crew.

There is something of an irony that these recordings were made by UNESCO: Cambodia is the only nation to have suffered an embargo on UN aid & assistance. Instead, food & medicine were directed to the Khmer Rouge militia of Citizen #1, in accordance with the strategic interests of the Western democracies.

Cambodian musicians were recording extraordinary pop and psychedelic music in the late '60s and early '70s - music which reflected their indigenous traditions, but made ample accomodations to the alien influence of Western culture. Those unique stylings are enjoying a revival through several documentaries and a succession of CD compilations...

Filmanthropy 1: Sweet Movie (OST)

Disappeared from the imdb listing for the film, but Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie was among a number of films maudite produced by the production company, Filmanthrope.

Filmanthrope were responsible for some of the finest European art/freak cinema of the late '60s thru mid-'70s; Themroc, & works by Alain Tanner and Marco Ferreri.

Sweet Movie is, for me, the pinnacle of Makavejev's filmmaking - clever, creative & fun in equal measure. It also documents a uniquely aspirational moment of the continental counter-culture, with a narrative thread involving Otto Muehl's aktionist crew, and a Pierre Clementi who was already the veteran of work for Bunuel & Pasolini.

Composer Hadjidakis was a partisan for rebetika, and is uniquely responsible for elevating it to greater esteem in Greek culture. He also popularised the bouzouki, and was an early champion of fellow composers, Mikos Theodorakis & Iannis Xenakis. Thus, while he was a cultural nationalist, he also did much to promote Greek modernism - as in the song cycles he adapted from the poetry of native surrealist, Nikos Gatsos.

By the time of this soundtrack commission he had substantial experience of film scoring, having won the US Academy Award for Never On Sunday (1960). I've come across quite a few of his recordings on old vinyls, but for my ears this is easily the finest of his works - the perfectly bittersweet complement to Makavajev's colourful monsterpiece of whimsy & tragoedia: a libertarian sono/cine-manifesto.

Music & lyrics : Manos Hadjidakis,
except 4 & 8 : lyrics by Makavejev & Ann Lonnberg

1.Ta paidia kato ston kampo (2:42)
2.Oi paragkes kai oi anthropoi (1:30)
3.Serenata gia thn sexoualikh apousia (3:16)
4.Is there life on the earth? (2:35)
5.H sexoualikh polyrrythmia (2:07)
6.Oi paragkes kai h kefalh toy karl marx (2:56)
7.Nyxterino (3:24)
8.Is there life on the earth? (1:04)
9.Ta paidia kato ston kampo (3:37)
10.strip tease gia tria paidia (4:47)
11.nyxterino gia dyo fones (2:22)
12.o xoros ths sokolatas (2:39)
13.ta paidia kato ston kampo (2:31)
14.h sexoualikh polyrrythmia kai ta tria paidia (3:01)

Additional music : Les Chants Révolutionnaires du Monde – Les Flûtes Roumaines

download the Sweet Movie OST here

... the imdb soundtrack listing details a couple other tracks, not on the commercial OST release:

• "Réel de L'Arrivée", Dominique Tremblay and Denis Boucher
  
  
• "Macho", Music by Pierre Dutour/Lyrics by Santiago El Ghi
  
  
• "Bandiera Rossa", Record: Chants Revolutionaires du Monde

Some links:

An interview with Dusan Makavejev

The new Criterion DVD release - with David Sterrit's essay

Details of the original Greek soundtrack release

Julien Mazaudier's essay on the soundtrack (in French)

... both this, and Makavayev's previous film W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, are informed to some extent by the theories of Wilhelm Reich - principally, "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and "The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality" - some info on him, here, and a hilarious photo, here

Thanks to Joel, from Brisbane's OtherFilm Festival, for originally gifting this soundtrack to me... Cheers, ears!

lumpen intelligentsia film society - programming archive

Found at Archive.org: the defunct website of the lumpen intelligentsia film society... Program notes for most, tho' not all, of some initial 45 screenings.

Lumpen intelligentsia was coordinated by a trio of myself, Rob Bonica & Tony Arividis. Tony now devotes himself mostly to his landscape architecture business, & Rob is teaching English in Japan. 2001 program screened at Glowbar on the edge of the Melbourne CBD. The following year, we moved to the Rob Roy Hotel in Fitzroy before relocating to a warehouse loft (the "Bughouse Omniplex") in the CBD. Everything was in hiatus through 2003, though we organised an Australian tour for Dame Darcy, brought a program of Jean Painleve's films to the ACMI, and staged a book launch for Outre's Beatsville - among other things.

The 5 months of screening in 2004 - at the Victoria Hotel, in Brunswick - exhausted the last of my own dwindling commitment. By that point, I was working in partnership with a number of music festivals: Liquid Architecture, What Is Music?, the Meredith Music Festival, as well as the OtherFilm Festival in Brisbane.

The screenings sometimes won some generous plaudits in the media, & there's a considerable amount of material here in the form of press clippings & etc.

Sometime (soon), I'll post the audio & video of the Dame Darcy tour... Meantime, this is a live recording of her super-fine cover of In The Pines (200VBR mp3, 5.2Mb via SendSpace)

Submariner Cinema 2: Jean Painleve & Pierre Henry

The link, below, is to the soundtrack of Painleve's Amours de la pieuvre (Eng: Lovelife of the Octopus) - as scored by Pierre Henry, and released on bootleg 45 from maybe a decade ago. Sound quality is tending to indifferent (it derives from a VHS release, and the occasional pitch-shifts are the result of it being played on a sketchy video deck). Jpegs are from my own design; the original B&W photocopy sleeve was a little rudimentary , & I had a lot more discretionary time back then... (not that this isn't also quite rudimentary: glue & scissors paste-up!)

Anyways: the year is 1965. Henry has left the GRM a couple years earlier, a not entirely amicable departure from the Schaefferian fold. This was produced at his own Studio Apsome. The brief except of "Song of the Volga Boatman" was added later by Painleve - something Pierre Henry was apparently less than happy about. (Not sure why; perhaps Painleve'd made a new edit, the film was running a little longer, and he needed to pad the score. Or maybe he figured to enhance the film's popular appeal by dropping some actual "music" into the mix. I don't know.)

This is probably the most outlandish soundtrack produced for a science film to that point - and aptly so, the octopus is a fairly remarkable critter & the ample proof is in the film image.


Love Life of the Octopus - OST bootleg 45

top ten records that cost $1 – or less... (one man’s descent into vinyl perversion)

(thanks to quockenzocker for the jpeg: cheers, ears!)

Perrey-Kingsley “The In-Sound From Way Out” LP

Here’s where it all began. My girlfriend (!) at the time had a taste for antique furniture and she was alla time taking me to ill-lit second hand dealers in remote suburbs where she’d haggle endlessly over the price of some hideous wardrobe that looked like it had a half dozen resident poltergeists. Sheesh! Outcome was a houseful of priceless heritage artifacts that incontestably sucked and I was always hauling one end of the bargain up the front stairs.

The dust in these places played hell with my sinus so I usually made a stroll around the blighted neighbourhood to pass the time. THEN THIS ONE TIME we went to an antique dealer and there were hundreds of records stacked just outside the front door, directly underneath of a warm friendly sun. I absently flicked through the stacks, smirking at endless Kamahl & Liberace cast-offs, imagining the jerks that bought that shit in the first instance only to discover their misguided folly when they put a needle to the damned things... But I pulled up on this one.

Imagine, if you will, a time before the internet provided free exchange of information pertaining to marginal cultures. An object like this record embodied all the eldritch consequence of the pivotal plot-motivating item from a HP Lovecraft short story. It was, frankly, “unspeakably” weird (the attempt to recover this frisson might actually be a shorthand for my complete curatorial endeavour, but what the hey). Perrey-Kingsley are fully documented these days and all their major releases are back on vinyl but back then (not so long ago!) you nervously put it to one side and avidly trawled through the remaining records in hope of unearthing companion LPs that might begin to put the whole thing into some kind of unlikely perspective. No luck!

I was frankly underwhelmed on initial listen. It went someplace well to the back of my extensive collection of mid-‘80s US hardcore and assorted industrial racket. I forgot all about the damn thing until Eugene Carchesio came by and flipped through my records (the record collector’s equivalent to a canine sniff; sorry I know thats crass but its so lamentably true) and boggled over it: I dunno, just some junk I picked up in an op shop... And then we had the Machine For Making Sense staying with us, they carelessly passed over all the ridiculously obscure indie-noise I took such affectionate pride in but huddled in a breathless circle around Perrey-Kingsley. Maybe it was time to take another listen...

I was 19. I had a primary relationship (we lived together for 5 years, even). I had a good job (project officer for an artists’ advocacy organisation, with occasional sidelines programming film screenings, and writing for various art magazines). Lord help me, if only I knew then where record collecting would lead me...

The Four Instants “Discotheque” LP

I love my little Sister dearly – she makes all my tremendous shirts for me – but it takes hours to get to her place & when I apply all that effort I figure the least she can do is drive me someplace more accessible by public transport. But she doesn’t offer and I don’t ask and instead on the way out I make with the shoe leather express and hoof my way back to home.

And this one place she was living that turned out to be a fortuitous thing. I think I was nursing a hangover at the time, anyway I was struggling to make it back to the tramline so I figured to stop at this place in the hope they might have some old records. Bonanza, of sorts: boxes and boxes of vinyl gathering dust at ground level. And if you didn’t know better you might pass this one up – the cover is pure youthquake cash-in, poor-man’s psychsploitation - but its all killer and no filler and I had the smarts ‘cause Wendel clued me to its greatness when he DJed at that Smith St houseparty where we danced to Sabbath & christian moog (this later on the Word label, out of Waco Texas!) and skipped outside, centre road, with that huge monster rope. ANYWAYS... 60s session players doing compelling Euro freakbeat: say no more. Except for maybe, thanks Lucy! (Err, and to mention: this one is distinguished by some gratuitous duck-call)


Krzystof Penderecki “Utrenja” 2LP

Twice now I’ve had me the polish vinyl serendipity; walking into a 2nd hand store, spying those fresh crates back of counter and the salesperson puzzling what-in-the-hell-am-i-gonna-do-with-this-stuff? that they just picked up for nearly nothing from some aged polish jazz cat. My polish is lousy but the first time this happened to me I recognised the original title of Polanski’s Knife In The Water on a 7 and the yes it was the OST 45 by Kris Komeda hisself. Now surely I missed many fine sides of Gomulka thaw-era jazz but I’m given to a certain consumer discretion, you understand... 2nd time I found this one, a sublimely choice Penderecki (parts of which figure on The Shining soundtrack). It actually cost me $2, but its a double vinyl in gatefold sleeve with dual language libretto & Penderecki’s notes. Very precious: outside of Poland, only the first half has ever been released; a much inferior recording by a US orchestra (from memory it was Eugene Ormandy conducting a Philadelphia choir?) that I happily gifted to a Sri Lankan satanist acquaintance. Anyway... Maybe you’ve heard the story: its all about some guy gets his ass nailed to a tree, kicks off, then 3 days later he’s back on his feet and asking where the party’s at like nothing ever happened. THATS RIGHT: its a tale of the undead, and Penderecki invests it with the appropriate minatory creeps. And, sure it has the turbulent dissonance you expect of Mr P, but mostly its doom-struck choir crawling at a glacial torpor: a stone-cold chiller throughout.


Peter Thomas “Sound Music Album 5” LP

This is production library music, and ideally the composer should aspire to anonymity. But the tracks have little descriptions that suggest the possible scenes they might accompany: ‘Weird dreams, imaginations, drugs, effects’ and ‘Ultramodern art’ are two such on the back of this sleeve. One side is raucous psych rave-up, cut with brooding noodling more typical of your average mid ‘70s Kraut stoner. Flip is a bunch of squiggly synth improvs. It rocks. Prodigously.

Peter Thomas has enjoyed his revival as well but back then I only knew him from the confoundingly great Chariots Of The Gods OST. Thomas was never as prolific as some of his sountrack compeers but he assimilated German beat group styles with baroque strings, west coast crime jazz, free electronics, heaps more, and did all or at least most of it very well. But please be aware: some of Thomas’ sides for the Goldring library are unrelieved stinkers, and the rule of caveat emptor obtains always...


Adriano Celentano w Orkestar Ribelli “Stai Lontana Da Me” 45

My 45s fit into an old film projector case. Now, this one time I was broke but Curse Ov Dialect had put me on the door so I’m there at the gig irrespective my penury. It was a scorching night between 2 high-‘30s days. Adam says to me The DJ has quit so they’ll give you a hundred bucks if you play vinyls after the show. I rang my housemate, unhip but well-natured, err umm grab that little grey case of 45s, base of the bookshelf you see direct you open the door, and please to be here pronto! Alright. Now that case is very much of a mixed bag, but it turned out a real fun night and between ‘50s exotica and west coast crime-jazz I turned them on with punk & new wave rarities and even a handful of fondly-remembered actual hits. Plus some ahh kids records and novelty tunes. Well I scrambled like all get out flipping sides but folks dug it so all good and plus I made more than those records had ever cost in the first instance.

I’m typically wary of Balkan 45s, I’ve been burnt bad so many times imaging I’ve discovered some unheralded Peloponnesian psych collosus only to suffer yet another mewing ballad that I thankfully can’t understand in any case (now what was that I seem to recall saying about jerks and their misguided folly?). But the songwriting credits give a small clue so long as its in Roman script: I’m always on the looksee for Meek or Morricone and the like. This one, licensed from Italy, is straight outta Zagreb: a stomping cover of Bacharach’s ‘Tower Of Strength’. And plus of which Celentano is given to these wild vocal extemporisations which sound like nothing so much as Henri Chopin with a barely restrained attack of Tourettes. If you didn’t know it already, Orkestar Ribelli is actually the Croatian way of saying The Rebels. In short, Celentano was a beatific punk and I won’t hear different and if you care to dispute the fact I commend to you his ‘Chi Ce L’Ha Con Me’ 45.

Self-styled ‘serious’ collectors treat the diminutive cousin to the long playing 12 with sneering disdain and thats both a reflection of their age and a prevailing Joe Carducci/Rolling Stone aesthetic preference for rock over pop they’ve been hypnotised into. In actual fact dusted piles of 45s will be yielding treasures long after ubiquitous collector types have exhausted available resources of listenable 2nd hand LPs. The searching does require a considerable diligence, but.


Atlas Copco “Secret Sound Competition 1964” 45

This is probably the single most unlikely record that I own. It was a seasonal, err, ‘gift’ from the management of Atlas Copco’s Melbourne engineering plant to their employees. Side B is somnolent Mom & Pop dance orchestra in regrettable waltz time but the flip is the shocker that set mortified factotums jumping to shut down their turntables on xmas day. It has ten different ‘secret sounds’ – each by way of a recording of one of Atlas Copco’s many industrial grinding, abrading or drilling machines. Now maybe you can straighten me here but I personally can’t hardly figure how some assembly line labourer might possibly enjoy to be reminded of this work environment on their day off? Inside of the gatefold sleeve are pictures of the ten “secret sound” sources. Its like a game you understand: you sit around the hifi with your loved ones and match each blast of doom to the corresponding machine, Aw gee honey that sounds like the 50 inch vertical spindle lathe bearing right through my skull... In between of the “secret sounds” are some fairly snappy Latin/Go Go/Now Sound moments, to allow for momentary recovery. Ahh, the inscrutable logic of industrial management that has provided us this gem! If you yourself know of any recipient of this record back in 1964, or are aware of any equally or more-so unlikely vinyls, please be so kind as to post a comment...


Maurice Evans “Introduction To Shakespeare” LP

Now to be honest I almost didn’t buy this, figuring rather that I already had a shipload of those Shakespeare adaptation LPs with the Desmond Leslie musique concrete parts and nothing else could measure up. Wrong I was and very happy to discover my error. Between dramatic recitals of Big Bill’s finest are Mary Rodgers’ gorgeous arrangements of Shakespearean madrigals. Admittedly some of these tunes would be considered somewhat gay in certain quarters by reason of their sweetly sentimental lyrical content, but this Shakespeare character was on the evidence of this record a highly swinging -type guy. To my ears the whole thing enjoys an unmistakable beat (as in beatnik) inflection... Uhh, if UK group The Roundtable are familiar to you then you might have an idea what I’m talking about; its the place where cool school and the Elizabethan restoration converge. My favourite track is the Fairy Lullaby (yeah, go ahead and snigger) from MidSummer Night’s Dream, which has sleepytime femme vox with contra-alto theremin accompaniment. Damn its good, and the perfect wind-down from any long day.


Patty Pravo “Concerto Per Patty” LP

Enough with those grumblers bellyaching that op-shopping ain’t how it used for to be: last year I got this in a haul of half a dozen Italian LPs on various RCA imprints, all of them from 1969. One dollar each. This particular record has backings by Morricone regulars, i Cantori Moderni di Allesandroni, plus Italian psych groups like The Cyan Three and The Primitives. My favourite track is a cover of ‘The End Of The World’; a big hit for ‘60s Greek supergroup, Aphrodite’s Child (Vangelis & Demis Roussos, plus some other guy noone remembers too well), but Patty’s version is far in advance of the original. Italian pop arrangements from this era tend to rococo grandiloquence – an operatic high drama essayed by overwrought vocals and an expansive instrumental vocabulary. Patty is quite the uberminx in her Nefertiti eye make-up too, but, err, that’s not why I bought it, OK?


“Lebanon: A Holiday Souvenir” LP

Music of the Middle East is one of my consumer obsessions but it doesn’t come around on vinyl so very often. I’m guessing this is a companion to the equally great “Egypt: A Holiday Souvenir”, but in a budget Australian pressing without the gatefold sleeve. Both of these records compile a dozen-or-so tracks of contemporaneous (early/mid-‘70s) tunes; some traditional, but also many fusions of indigenous music with western pop stylings. Thats right POLYGLOT OUTERNATIONAL HYBRIDS FROM A TIME OF HIGH FUNK! (Sorry, I can get a little carried away with this nonsense, ahem...) I’m not so clear that Lebanon back then was actually home to all the folks on this record; weren’t Sabah and Omar Khorshid native to Egypt? Irregardless, Sabah’s tracks are blessed by thrilling polyrhythms and heaps more uptempo than anything else I’ve heard of hers, plus with tasteful strings and we all know how difficult that is to achieve as a compositional device. And most everthing by Omar Khorshid is completely essential: dependant on which particular Egyptian you speak to, he was either the local equivalent to Jimmy Hendrix or else a composer ala Paganini in the service of demonic motive forces and the righteous muslim is well advised to stay clear of his unwholesome sound! Um, well actually he’s both and he mixes a potent stew of scrambled bongo beats, post-Duanne Eddy surf/desert guitar, and throbbing moog synthesiser. Sometimes he covers Western hits and believe me noone can make a petrified standard like ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’ more sinuously palatable than Omar can! Other tracks are by Farid El Atrache and the Rahbanis and I dig those cats special, also.

Lebanese popular music was peaking in 1974 but the civil war that started one year later laid it all to ruin. And by following the dates of these records you can chart the slow rise and rapid decline of a colourful dialogue between Western and Arabic cultures that came to an abrupt halt most everyplace in the Middle East by the end of the seventies. A genuinely sad thing, in all respects, and unresolved to this day.


Bappi Lahiri “Hits Of” LP

Melbourne’s master of interpretive dance, Paddy O’brien, had swung by one Sunday; there was a warm friendly sun overhead, and we were driving to his folk’s place, maybe an hour out of the city. We never made it... Damn, Pat: thats the place I picked up “Exotic Moog” about 5 years back, lets pull in & see whats going. So we’re trawling. Thousands of records. Nothing nothing nothing. And then this. It came from a shop in Suva (Fiji) originally, and my guess is that many of the Bollywood vinyls found in Australia came by this route (due to the expulsion of the one-time sizable Hindi minority there). Annette, Bappi & chorus do ‘Lets Dance For The Great Guy Bruce Lee’. Its got moog, trebly funk guitar riffing, and a solid four-on-the-floor disco beat. The chorus does a weird guttural chant that might be “Kung Fu!”.

I turned up 2 more Bollywood vinyls, an Italian ‘60s pop comp with Morricone arrangements, and a 45 of motorcycle engine sounds: Lord help me, I was in hog heaven! When I found a copy of “In Sound From Way Out”, I figured it was only fair to lay it on Pat. He stared at it in mute bewilderment, just like I did awaysback. Trust me feller, take it home & give it a listen...


(naturally this list precludes records that folks were kind enough to gift me for no money at all, but on which account I would like to register my indebted thanks to Mark, Irving, Neil, Tony, Rob, Aylsa, Kim & Paul: cheers, ears!)

couple tunes for yr delectation:
The Four Instants – Bogattini
Krzystof Penderecki – Utrenja (side 3)
Peter Thomas – Evarella 2073
Adriano Celentano – Stai lontana da mei
Atlas Copco secret sound competition 1964
Mary Rodgers - Fairy Lullaby
Patty Prado - Solo un capo al mondo
Sabah – Dek al Kaff
Annette, Bappi Lahiri & chorus – Let’s dance for the great guy Bruce Lee

(sorry! nothing by Perrey-Kingsley; that stuff is quite readily available elsewhere…)

1 dollar vinyls RAR
192Kb MP3s
68.2Mb in total