Last month our writers picked out some of the weirdest, most obscure records in their collections – there was jazz played in the middle of the Black Forest, gay punk activism from Orange Country, and 10-year-olds singing about pimps.
Not to be outdone, you the readers suggested your own curios, and amid the more dubious suggestions (a concept album about penguins on the moon, for example) there were some truly stunning suggestions – go down the rabbithole below.
Just been introduced to Sydney's feedtime.
I'd describe it as 'thuggish, menacing, avant garde Australian pub rock gone a little bit Krautrock'. Releasing a number of one-chord songs is not normally something I'd celebrate but these guys make them considerably more interesting than I'd expect.
Jaqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom — Daytime Viewing
If you like slightly avant-garde style electronics with a pop sentiment, give it a go! Such a wild and bizarre concept album from 1980. Lyrics are utterly savage indictments of America's consumer/suburban culture. Awesome album art too.
Arsedestroyer sounds like a poor man's Mortician with two pissed up tramps on vocals, if I'm being honest.
HERE'S THE PROPER (NSFW) SHIT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMnqLPKJ0RA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcqLqaFnQck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qr9ElWhJD4
I am endlessly a champion of expatriated Italian-American punk New Yawker, Patti Palladin, particularly her work with Johnny Thunders to whom she was introduced in London for her sterling work updating the Shangri-Las for the former's first solo release So Alone.
Leaving the proto-punk Snatch, Patti found some brief fame with The Flying Lizards on their Floyd cover before reuniting with Johnny for Que Sera Sera and an admired if now little-known rockn'roll tribute record entitled Copycats.
Christ on a Crutch have been seemingly forgotten, though their album 'Crime Pays When Pigs Die' remains one of the angriest punk records of all time.
Any fan of the wilfully obscure needs some Caroliner in their life.
If Butthole Surfers were too accessible for you and only 17th century industrial bluegrass will do.
Their ever changing name and album titles may be entertainment enough...
Caroliner Rainbow Hernia Milk Queen - "Rear End Hernia Puppet Show"
Caroliner Rainbow Stewed Angel Skins - "I'm Armed With Quarts of Blood"
Caroliner Rainbow Open Wound Chorale - "Rise of the Common Woodpile"
Caroliner Rainbow Wire Thin Sheep Legs Baking Exhibit - "Strike Them Hard - Drag Them to Church"
Albums usually packaged in whatever rubbish they could clag together.
Rear End Hernia Puppet Show...
https://youtu.be/Y0UXw_jxNRQ
The most obscure music I've ever come across is an album called Ženklas that a friend bought on vinyl in Lithuania at the beginning of the nineties. It was lovely folky ambient stuff. Very restrained and discreet. I taped it and used to listen to it a lot back then, until the cassette inevitably went the way of cassettes. Quite recently I was astonished to see that it had appeared on YouTube, put there by someone called no obi, no insert who seems to specialise in putting up quite obscure and very good world music. Here it is:
"Please share your own curios in the comments below."
Curio immediately brought one album in my collection to mind, as every time I come across it I'm left looking at it curiously, wondering why it's in my collection. I know I didn't buy it, and I don't know anyone into the genre enough to have borrowed it from. Worse, looking on wiki. it's apparently their poor seller!
The band is Prematia Forneria Marconi (PFM). The album is Chocolate Kings.
An Italian progressive hard rock kind of album erm..with fiddles, thrashy drums and a nod to classical. Avant garde is probably easier.
I've never been into this stuff, try as I did with Genesis et al. It just wasn't for me. But funnily enough I've discovered that if you put any album on and off the turntable at least once in a blue moon over a period of 40 years, it ends up growing on you and becoming familiar. Okay PFM, you can stay.
The Brooklyn Sounds - Libre Free
Taking Willie Colon's trombone-led NY salsa to extremes.
Flight Commander Solitude and the Snake by Mark Gouldthorpe and Simon Hinkler.
The sleeve notes advise against "listening to this album under the influence of LSD". Which is kind of odd, because it sounds like that's how it was recorded.
Nominal Bad Seed Ms Lane succeeding in channelling Bardot-Gainsbourg kitsch Euro-decadence into New World lounge aesthetics long before Nouvelle Vague, Del Rey and contemporary Gallic pretenders.
Her Mick Harvey Gainsbourg collaborations have now been reissued but a revisit is warranted to her own belated LP which could very well warrant a new incarnation of her Dirty Pearl Mute compilation
Anita Lane - Sex O'Clock
The Electro Hippies' Play Fast or Die would give Teenass Revolt a run for their money-The epic " Mega-Armageddondeath Pt. 3" coming in at a mammoth 1 second long
Released years earlier as well
Stuart Demptster's Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel
Real underground music this: a modern avant-garde album using traditional instruments (mainly, although not exclusively, trombones) which was recorded in a disused underground water cistern at Fort Worden, just outside Seattle in the US. This disused cistern was around 200 feet in diameter and 14 feet deep, giving it an unusual acoustic effect: a 45 second echo (to put this into context, some of the best cathedrals have a reverberation of around 4 - 6 seconds). The resulting sound - and I'm sure that MP3 nor CD would ever do it any justice - is something which is deep and textured, with layer upon layer of sound which feels organic and real, because it is organic and real. The layering isn't due to clever sound recording or mixing: what was recorded was exactly what was heard in that perfect acoustic chamber.
This album won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if you're a lover of acoustic, ambient music that isn't mainstream (especially modern classical which borders on being New Age) then this is well worth a listen.
Only heard of one of these - Thee Headcoatees. They were the first band I ever saw live, supporting Mudhoney in 1995.
I have no idea what a cutoff should be for "obscure", but I arbitrarily picked less than 100 "haves" on Discogs. So I have many obscure records from the late 90s/2000s, and almost all of them are terrible. But ones which spring to mind which I still occasionally listen to (or would love to listen to again but have sadly lost over the years):
Wall of Sleep - Wall of Sleep - there are at least two other bands called Wall of Sleep but these ones are from 1995 Coventry and released this amazing pyschedelic doom album on the Bevis Frond's label Woronzow. And then split up. A perfect one for listening to with the lights down low and the smell of your favourite burning leaves in the air.
Vialka - Curiosités Des Coutumes Populaires - bizarre nomadic French experimental punk. This one is from 2005 but they've been releasing stuff for years and still are I think. My favourite song on this album is called Shitty Monkeys
Among the Missing - Disorder of the Templar. Disclaimer - I know these guys. But still, an absolutely brutal slice of mid-00s sludgecore/grindcore with obligatory British humour and references to smoking too much weed.
Finally, not an album, but I did have an amazing hardcore punk song that I absolutely loved on the compilation album Peace-War, called "Endless Blockade for the Pussyfooter" which was by a Japanese hardcore band called GISM. I never saw a copy of the record it was on, I never met anyone who had it, but I just looked it up on discogs and saw it's going for over £200!
Anyway, god knows why I bothered writing all that seeing as it's unlikely that anyone will have the faintest clue what I'm talking about, but it did fill my lunch break with reminiscences of old bands I liked.
Morning Way by Trader Horne. A band named after John Peel's nanny is off to a good start and splitting before the launch of your debut album was an impressive way to finish.
Syndicate - Appetite for Destruction (Bloody Fist Records), fits the obscure and underground tags I think. Worth checking out if '90s techno is your nostalgia and you don't get enough Aussie hardcore techno/gabber in your diet.
Techno was never my thing (still isn't in general), but an old mate had stuff like this blasting while weightlifting and AfD has been stuck in my head since then.
Union Galactic Tours Vol. 1 by Union Galactic. It doesn't get any more obscure than this.
Released on DMT[REC] in 2016, this was an album of luxurious cosmic decadence, a soundtrack provided by the tour operator, giving you "twenty golden memories that will instantly transport you back to your time spent travelling amongst the stars!" It gave me much pleasure last year. Looking at the Bandcamp page, it only sold about 50 copies. A Shame, it's a great concept album.
I have one or two of these on the list and look forward to exploring more. I'd add 'Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-revolutionary America' by Culturcide, wherein re-written lyrics are crudely added to existing recordings, 'Love is a Cattle Prod', 'They Aren't the World', 'Color My World With Pigs' etc. Hilarious and disturbing.
I'm also something of a fan of Negativland, whose work never seems to get mentioned much - and it's a vast body. Their recent LP, 'the Holy Bible' is quite superb, and comes packaged with an actual bible, the only only copy I would have in the house. There's supposedly a Qu'ran version, too, which I've searched for ever to find with no luck, but this could be a myth. The story of how they came upon a cache of outtake recordings from the studios at Disney where speech and effects for installations at Disneyland is brilliant. Oh, and their last album, 'The Chopping Channel' was packaged with a random studio cartridge from their 40-year career, and a bag of recently deceased founding member Don Joyce's ashes. The pranksters!
Derdiyoklar Ikilisi - Disko Folk
Germany based Turkish psychedelia duo long player from 1979. They'd have played at your wedding!