A track for...(darkness fish)

[Sneelock]

Mar 7, 2024 14:48:30 GMT DarknessFish said:

Ok. Here's something pretty special that I couldn't really fling in the direction of anyone but Sneelock. Something about Kristin's mental state that I reckon Snee's posts sometimes delve into.

good gravy! I can honestly say I found that to be a remarkable 8 minutes and 6 seconds. I can say every bit as honestly that I doubt I'd soon knowingly do so again. LOL. it's amazing. the simple song of faith gets a run for it's money from a caterwauling so frenzied that it simply MUST be a bizarre expression of faith. HA!

it really rattles me in a good way but the voices in my head tell me not to listen to it again for a good, long while.

let's see what fonz has to say about Gimmee Water by Masters of Reality

:

[fonz]

Ah! Chris Goss. No relation of Bros.
Coincidentally, I had this album on last week. They’re not my favourite band by any means. I saw them when they supported The Cult a while back. I’ve got this and the s/t debut.

This track: starts off Cream-like, and his voice isn’t far off Jack Bruce’s, is it? They’re way more Cream-like than Sabbath-like, generally. I’d never really noticed that before.

[fonz]

Here’s one for John Coan. I think there’s a bit of something he might like.

[Ollard]

Thanks Guy!

I made it through to the end, so it's not the very WORST thing I've ever heard, but....sorry, not my bag at all, I have to say (I couldn't see who it was from the post, so went to YT and saw Porcupine Tree, who I've heard of, at least - kind of modern prog or something?)

[Ollard]

This one's for everyone reading.

First one to like it can post a new song.

[fange]

Mar 9, 2024 21:31:25 GMT Ollard said:

This one's for everyone reading.

First one to like it can post a new song.

Oh that's fab. It's all about that big sock-it-to-em arrangement, and of course Taylor's incredible singing. Always loved his voice.

[fange]

Ok, this one is for fearlessfreap, a bit of Midnight Oil off their late-70s first album.

They became more a radio rock band later, but in the beginning they came out of the Sydney pub/club scene spitting nails and taking no prisoners...

'Powderworks'

[fearlessfreap]

I liked that quite a bit - I may even buy it! I like that sort of messy extended late 70's thing. To be back in high school

I have one but I don't know who to subject it to. Probably 35 years ago I saw this thing sitting in a $1.00 bin in a New York record store. I bought it unheard because it was on ESP disk. I was surprised once I heard it, because it sounded contemporary (contemporary by late 1980's standards) I don't know anything about the band or duo or whatever the fuck they are. What rock they crawled out from under remains a mystery to me.  They people at the store never heard of them either.

I'll give it to Charlie O. Maybe he knows something about them.


The B -Side is more of the same glop but maybe even more ridiculous

[Charlie O.]

Thanks, ff! I'm at work and can't listen now, but I'm excited about this. I thought I knew ESP-Disk' pretty good, but this is completely new to me. It's not on Discogs, but is on Rate Your Music. Apparently, there have been two further Gnostic Algae releases planned by ESP in the past decade - both mysteriously cancelled. Curiouser and curiouser...

[Charlie O.]

Well, whaddaya know - there's a band bio in the YouTube descriptions:

www.discogs.com/release/4752159-Gnostic-Algae-SpidersMeets-A-Mermaid

What a difference a few years makes. In 1966, the Godz could release a radically terrible album featuring a song called "White Cat Heat" featuring nothing but meows, and go on to become Paul McCartney-cosigned underground legends with a respectable discography. Gnostic Algae's original seven inch of "Spiders" was recorded in 1967, but it didn't get a wide release until 1970. By the time their debut "On Bugs" came out in 1971, ESP-DIsk was buckling under the weight of so many unprofitable avant garde acts, and the Algaes' planned second album, recorded simultaneously during their four year incubation on the NYC scene, never got a chance to see the light of day before ESP closed altogether, surfacing only in '74 in a private pressing.

Hence, what once was a respectable psychedelic force in the late sixties East Village scene has been more or less forgotten by time. The band Tuli Kupferberg once called "the realest cats we ever played with, the ones who seemed the most serious while having the best time," whose albums were famed for their improvisational immediacy while packing more structure and big-pedal innovation than anybody this side of Zappa. Today they sound like mystics, with little of the Fugs' dated politics or the simplistic formulas of the folk scene. The lyrics are heartfelt and abstract in a way that still sounds spooky and unfamiliar, nearing some kind of Cromagnon-esque conceptualism (the songs are all allegedly about bugs, bugs and mermaids), while maintaining a thrilling unevenness in the self-production, with levels all over the place, like a true garage document.

Future Phillips engineer Onno Scholze produced the two single tracks, "Spiders" and "Rebirth of the Bugs" (nee "Meets A Mermaid"), and the lush pop and proto-punk of those songs are the standouts here. But the anti-war "Mermaids Versus The Bugs" is a stream of consciousness freakout up there with weirdest late-sixties nuggets, Afterglow included, complete with a testy Godz shout-out at the end. "Ants" is an incredible spoken word slice of NYC life, and fragments "Caterpillars" and "Paranormal Parasite" hint at the legendary, mostly improvised shows that the Algaes would put on, opening for ESP groups, and famously, the Velvet Underground at Max's.

"On Bugs," perhaps due to its apocryphal nature at the end of the first ESP era, never got the CD reissue that their major releases received in the '90's. But with their second, self-released record "All People's Liberation Album," surfacing online to no small buzz, hopefully the time has come for a wide release, the kind of respect the Algaes never got while they were alive…

Fascinating... but I smell a hoax. I see no evidence online of any "buzz" whatsoever about their second album, or anything else by this group. The alleged quote from Tuli Kupferberg doesn't sound like him. I question whether Onno Scholtze, a proper engineer, would have put his name on this smudge, plus I don't think he was with ESP-Disk' in 1967 (though I could be wrong about both those things). Every US ESP-Disk' single I know of had a big hole in the center rather than the small one shown here. The Discogs link at the top leads to a draft (which is why I couldn't find anything about them on Discogs earlier); why would someone draft that and not publish it, hmmm?

Then there's the music itself, which sounds like the sort of modern self-consciously lo-fi sputum that certain of my co-workers are inexplicably drawn to. (Actually, I kinda sorta almost like the "Spiders" side.)

Come clean, freap - did you really find this in a dollar bin 35 years ago? (Even if you did, I'm still thinkin' "hoax.")

[Charlie O.]

For Half Machine Lipschitz:





The Collectors - "Looking At A Baby"

[fearlessfreap]

I think it was is well. I think it’s a bootleg of something and was probably recorded much later. There are some krautrock bands (Golem, Nazgul) that were supposed to have recorded in the early 70’s that really recorded 20 years later, and a hard rock band from the mid 70's (I can't remember their name) that sounded like 1990's death metal (this had a picture sleeve)  and this is probably the same thing. It would have been easy for an art student to make a label like that.  Since I was only out a dollar I’m ok with it, but I was fooled by it nevertheless. I thought if anyone would know about it, you might.
This is something my friends and I would have liked to do if we had access to a record lathe.  The Krautrock and metal (and probably a lot of garage rock on sub Back From the Grave albums which were probably fakes) would have been beyond our capacities as muscians, but this Gnostic Algae thing would be something we would have been capable of.  Press 20 copies, have people spread them around the city, and send some to friends in Los Angeles to do the same. It would be fun.  My son has a program on his computer where you make beats and can make samples.  If someone hasn't already used this to make fake hip hop records, then somebody should.

[Stacy Heydon]

Mar 11, 2024 23:31:49 GMT Charlie O. said:

Well, whaddaya know - there's a band bio in the YouTube descriptions:

www.discogs.com/release/4752159-Gnostic-Algae-SpidersMeets-A-Mermaid

What a difference a few years makes. In 1966, the Godz could release a radically terrible album featuring a song called "White Cat Heat" featuring nothing but meows, and go on to become Paul McCartney-cosigned underground legends with a respectable discography. Gnostic Algae's original seven inch of "Spiders" was recorded in 1967, but it didn't get a wide release until 1970. By the time their debut "On Bugs" came out in 1971, ESP-DIsk was buckling under the weight of so many unprofitable avant garde acts, and the Algaes' planned second album, recorded simultaneously during their four year incubation on the NYC scene, never got a chance to see the light of day before ESP closed altogether, surfacing only in '74 in a private pressing.

Hence, what once was a respectable psychedelic force in the late sixties East Village scene has been more or less forgotten by time. The band Tuli Kupferberg once called "the realest cats we ever played with, the ones who seemed the most serious while having the best time," whose albums were famed for their improvisational immediacy while packing more structure and big-pedal innovation than anybody this side of Zappa. Today they sound like mystics, with little of the Fugs' dated politics or the simplistic formulas of the folk scene. The lyrics are heartfelt and abstract in a way that still sounds spooky and unfamiliar, nearing some kind of Cromagnon-esque conceptualism (the songs are all allegedly about bugs, bugs and mermaids), while maintaining a thrilling unevenness in the self-production, with levels all over the place, like a true garage document.

Future Phillips engineer Onno Scholze produced the two single tracks, "Spiders" and "Rebirth of the Bugs" (nee "Meets A Mermaid"), and the lush pop and proto-punk of those songs are the standouts here. But the anti-war "Mermaids Versus The Bugs" is a stream of consciousness freakout up there with weirdest late-sixties nuggets, Afterglow included, complete with a testy Godz shout-out at the end. "Ants" is an incredible spoken word slice of NYC life, and fragments "Caterpillars" and "Paranormal Parasite" hint at the legendary, mostly improvised shows that the Algaes would put on, opening for ESP groups, and famously, the Velvet Underground at Max's.

"On Bugs," perhaps due to its apocryphal nature at the end of the first ESP era, never got the CD reissue that their major releases received in the '90's. But with their second, self-released record "All People's Liberation Album," surfacing online to no small buzz, hopefully the time has come for a wide release, the kind of respect the Algaes never got while they were alive…

Fascinating... but I smell a hoax. 

I agree Charlie. Lots of names thrown in there amongst the hyperbole, but crucially no actual names of the band members themselves, surely not that hard to find out if they were regularly playing in NYC at the time. That raises a big red flag for me.

[Charlie O.]

I didn’t even think about that!

[Half Machine Lipschitz]

Mar 11, 2024 23:48:22 GMT Charlie O. said:

For Half Machine Lipschitz:





The Collectors - "Looking At A Baby"

Not bad, but would've benefited from a blazing fuzz-guitar solo in my opinion. 

Chilliwack, the band they would morph into in the 70's were a pretty big deal up here for a while, and got lots of radio play. No idea if they broke in the US at all, but I somehow doubt it.
My band used to cover their tune 'Fly At Night' and I had to sing it 'cause I was the only one who could hit the high notes. First time I ever sang lead and played drums at the same time!

Here's Neil Merryweather from his 1974 album "Space Rangers" with 'Step In The Right Direction' for Stacy Heydon: