November 30, 2004

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• There's also this
• I'm too busy at work for long post, but when I'm feeling weird I listen to the Butthole Surfers, Deerhoof, Sun City Girls, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Couch, Klaus Nomi, or The Boredoms.
• The Residents' "the Commercial Album' is the best litmus test for a relationship. Play it while having an intimate moment with your partner, and if there's no flinching, no "what the... is THAT!?", no sudden getaway, you're in business. Oh. Boy.
• I'm too lazy for a long post, but if you want weird music, check out Black Dice, Lightning Bolt, The Locust, Slint, Xiu Xiu, Fennesz, Wolf Eyes, or Merzbow. Actually, don't listen to Merzbow. Oh, God. No.
• April Winchell has some gems on her site. Ragnar Bjarnason's Smells Like Teen Spirit is indescribably wonderful.
• The Frogs. The Legendary Pink Dots
• I'm not into enough weird music for a long post, but Pere Ubu. It's the weirdest thing my weird-music-loving husband listens to, besides The Residents, Butthole Surfers and others already mentioned above. Oh, and also Diamanda Galas
• On a side note, I used to work with a guy who played electric jug with Roky Erickson. Thirteenth Floor Elevators? I forget exactly the band name, but he was an odd one for sure.
• The stuff in this thread. Old-skool: Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band (the ultimate litmus test). The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Check out Songs In The Key Of Z for an excellent history and sampler of weird-ass outsider music throughout the ages.
• Anything by Autechre but in particular the album "confield". If you can sit through that puppy, you got some serious immunity to weirdness goin on... Oh, and a big third to the Butthole Surfers, specially their early stuff.
• Recently I've been listening to a guy called Devendra Banhart, who is brilliant, but quite weird. His voice is unlike anything you've ever heard, and his lyrics are certifiably insane.
• Jandek, Wild Man Fischer, The Shaggs, early Half Japanese, etc. There's so much musical weirdness and so little time.
• I've long thought the Cocteau Twins were sublime, yet strange. Liz Frasier sounds like an angel, but eff if I can figure out what she's singing most of the time.
• Einsturzende Neutzbaden. Strange puppies indeed. Ken Ishii. Some interesting digestible tecno, but mostly obscure and odd rythms. Add (n) to X. Love their 'Plug Me In' video.
• afx, if you like Devendra Banhart, you'd love Joanna Newsom. She's kinda like Dev, with a harp, and female. She's also indescribably, unspeakably gorgeous.
• Find some Bulgarian women's choral music. Seriously.
• Silophone. Was/is big in Montreal for a while. It's all soundscapes designed to be played in an empty grain silo or abandoned foundry or some such thing -- all the sounds go bouncing off the concrete walls, and it gets quite trippy. Concerts are played in the dark, and there might be some visuals made to accompany the sounds. It's a little intimidating at first, but soon you just slip beneath the music, and don't wake up until you're awoken into silence. Then you wonder where you've been for the last hour. Strange, strange stuff. But highly recommended. Just not while driving. http://www.silophone.net/
• Throbbing Gristle
• Captain Beefheart
• Old Eno, esp. the albums Here Come the Warm Jets Before and After Science Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy And if you like that, see if you can find the 801 Live album he did with Phil Manzenera and Nico. I just love that version of Third Uncle.
• On a side note, I used to work with a guy who played electric jug with Roky Erickson. Thirteenth Floor Elevators? I forget exactly the band name, but he was an odd one for sure. Yeah, it was the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. I did some reading on them after Roky's "Creature With the Atom Brain" was stuck in my head for three days straight. Was the jug player the OTHER member of the band besides Roky who went crazy, or was that the guitarist? Roky's cool, though not nearly as weird as the Residents and I'm sure much of the other stuff here. Confession: before this buying binge the weirdest stuff in my music collection was Fantomas, King Diamond and Frank Zappa's You Are What You Is. I'm so whitebread.
• Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder, so some people might find some of this stuff to be totally normal, others will find it unlistenable. On the electronica front, the godfather of weird is Aphex Twin, who does weird all the way from ambient to insanely fast IDM. One of my favorite new artists is Prefuse 73, who does a sort of deconstructed hip hop. He'll do things like take a rap, break it down into it's component syllables, and then rearrange it in a way that's totally nonsense but somehow preserves the MCs original flow. All those links are to amazon listings, but you can check them both out at Warp Records, which they're both on. Also on Warp are Boards of Canada, which might not be that weird to some, but if there's any group to which the term "vast soundscapes" applies to, it's them. Frank Zappa once described his work as sonic sculpture, and I think that applies equally well to Boards work, especially the first track of the In a Beautiful Place in the Country Single, one of my all time favorite tracks. And then there's plenty of weirdness from Japan, from the likes of Cornelius and Nobukazu Takemura. On the jazzier side of things, my favorite band, Medeski, Martin, and Wood is capable of being plenty weird (for a good middle ground, try the hauntingly beautiful The Dropper. You can find plenty of weirdness from http://members.tripod.com/~JFGraves/zorn-index.html'>John Zorn</a>, though to be honest I wouldn't really know where to begin recomending albums (he has well over 100, I'd guess). Anyone know a good place to start?
• Daniel Johnston. The Cows. And Roky Erickson is the greatest. He has always been here before.
• oops. I even preview the post, and still missed that glaring HTML error. Oh well, the jist of it is clear.
• I actually got to see Roky play 12 years or so ago at a club on Hollywood Blvd that was called "The Haunted Garage". At the end of the show my buddy and I were walking out and overheard Roky speaking to this teenage girl who was sitting between him and Rodney Bingenheimer. Roky: "Ok then, I can do you with whipped cream, Rodney can do you with whipped cream, we can BOTH do you with whipped cream, right?"
• I really wish I had CD versions of my old Suns of Arqa stuff. A loose collective, weird highlights include collaborations with Professor Stanley Unwin and ur-punk poet John Cooper Clarke
• Oh, and The Fugs. Early Sixties strange beatnik fun.
• Ooh, ooh, and Eugene Chadbourne!
• I really love the extremely weird, but occasionally melodic (IMHO) His Name Is Alive. Noise/weird doesn't really push my buttons, and I intensively dislike the atonal wailing of Diamanda Galas. Not that you asked, but "weird" is a big genre, and it has weird subcategories.
• Seeing as we're hopping out with the TG and the IDM, can i recommend the sublime, glitching, tape-loop Arabism of Muslimgauze, which has carried literally hundreds of releases since about 1984. Even since Bryn Jones' death in 1999, there is still unreleased material to obtain (about 4 eps and albums a year) - all of it passionate, intelligent, informed, and creative. There's a nice selection of mp3's at Epitonic
• Ooo, I second the recommendation for Muslimgauze.
• Chrome's "Half Machine Lip Moves" is pretty freaky, in a good space rock / damaged way. Man Is The Bastard (r.i.p.) & Bastard Noise are perennial favorites - picture hardcore punk kids playing fusion jazz for the former, and stowing away in a deep-space probe (in the engine room) for the latter. Nurse With Wound's "Second Pirate Session" is another good source of inspiration and enlightenment.
• housepig: Nurse With Wound is a Coil side project, is it not?
• eto ami
• Keiji Haino, Three Day Stubble, Dead C, Can (especially Tago Mago), Sun City Girls, Sun Ra (anything by Sun Ra...as a matter of fact, make sure you ignore all other suggestions until you buy some Sun Ra), Hans Reichel, Faust, the Godz, Borbetomagus, Gerogerigegege, Hanatarashi, MX-80 Sound, Ghost, Mathew Shipp, William Parker, Gate, Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos, Whitehouse (beware), Handful of Dust...
• S.K. Thoth This guy performs in Central Park under the Angel Bridge nearly every day. If ever have the chance to see him, you really should. And he has CD's.
• oh...don't forget the Hafler Trio. ...and Os Mutantes. ...and Harry Pussy.
• check this place out Also, good stuff at your local library/SuprNova.org: Kurt Weill Villa Lobos Ennio Morricone Eric Dolphy the Akira soundtrack and Lou Reed's attempt at the worst album of all time: Metal Machine Music. /really wants to have a Metal Machine Music endurance-party
• ennio morricone did the music for all sergio leone's films, as well as some other spagetti westerns and a bunch of other movies
• Godspeed You Black Emperor and Butt Trumpet are great fun, but I don't know if they qualify as weird or not.
• kimdog, I saw that dude when I was back home this past summer. I was all, "I didn't know Adam Ant plays violin!"
• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It is weird (to normal people). It is also gorgeous. And brilliant. And my favorite record of all time.
• And how could I have forgotten the incomparable Robyn Hitchcock
• A quick vote for another Warp records release: Sabres of Paradise - Haunted Dancehall.
• A whole thread about weird music and Ween was not mentioned once? For shame, my monkeys, for shame.
• Nurse With Wound is a Coil side project, is it not? NWW is mainly Stephen Stapleton collaborating with different people -- including John Balance (RIP) and Peter Christopherson of Coil -- on different projects.
• A running list of bands mentioned that I second, having personally spent money on them (along with a parenthetical mark on how "weird" they are, 1 being unremarkable Muzak, 10 being atomic unlistenable weird): Deerhoof (6), Butthole Surfers (early 8, late 2), Thinkin' Fellers Union (5), Couch (the early '90s band on Bulb records, more on that in a bit- 7), The Boredoms (8), Black Dice (6), Lightning Bolt (6), Slint (4), Xiu Xiu (6), Wolf Eyes (7), Merzbow (8.5), The Frogs (3), Pere Ubu (4), Autechre (3), Wild Man Fischer (7), Jandek (3), The Shaggs (3), Half-Japanese (5), Cocteau Twins (2.5), Einsturzende Neubauten (early 8, late 4), Add N to X (3), Throbbing Gristle (6), Captain Beefhart (can waver between 3 and 8), Eno (1.5), Fantomas (7), Zappa (4, roughly over whole career), Aphex Twin (5), Prefuse 73 (3), Boards of Canada (1), Medinski, Martin and Wood (1), Daniel Johnston (4), The Cows (3), The Fuggs (4.5), Eugene Chadborn (6), His Name Is Alive (3), Nurse With Wound (6), Can (3), Sun Ra (anywhere from 2 to 9), Matthew Shipp (4), William Parker (3), Os Mutantes (3), Ennio Morricone (2), Godspeed You Black Emperor (2), Robyn Hitchcock (2), Ween (7). Keep in mind that these are a) subjective, and b) not an index of how much I like each of them. Like, William Parker is fucking brilliant as a bassist and songwriter, but he's just not very weird at all.
• And now for more "weird music" that I didn't see listed (and I'm gonna go buy me some of what I did see listed): Nearly everything on Bulb Records (who put out Wolf Eyes and Couch). Pete Larson runs it, and here's something I wrote about it (sorry for the self-link). It also has bands like Forcefield, Temple of Bon Matin and Quintron on it. All are weird. You might also check out Load Records, which has Lightning Bolt along with a slew of others. And SNSE records, or American Tapes, both of which are run by noise-heads related to Wolf Eyes. Back to bands: KK Null, Ian Xenakis, Acid Mothers Temple, Tokyo Kid Brother, Sunburned Hand of the Man, John Zorn (who I'm surprised no one mentioned), Christal Methodists, Was (Not Was), Lead Into Gold, The Most Amazing Cat And Mouse Game, Slovak, Need New Body, El Guapo, Mog Stunt Team, The New Sound of My Bossa Nova, No Doctors, Los Reynols, Nautical Almanac, Brain Science, Lord of the Yum-Yum (aka Paul Vilat), and ChefKirk. If you get through those, lemme know...
• John Zorn was actually mentioned by TheRoach about halfway up the page, but due to a missed "<" his name was lost in the jumble of a tripod URL. I've been collecting Zorn for years. Check out his record label Tzadik, with lots of great wierd artists like Rashanim, Jamie Shaft, and Koby Isrealite. Some good Zorn stuff to start out with: Masada: an improv bebop-ish quartet with an affinity for klezmer (note:live albums are especially good). The Big Gundown: an album full of Ennio Morricone covers. The Gift: jazzy surfy stuff. Some bad stuff to start out with: IAO: barely anything happenes on this album. Locus Solus: an album in which you are assulted with a saxaphone. Elgy: just plain boring (somebody may like it, just not me).
• John Zorn is not weird music. That's why I didn't mention him on this thread. Also, the worst band I ever saw by approximately a street was The Residents.
• "by approximately a street"? I don' geddit. Anyway, I like Demons Dance Alone, but like I say, I hear this CD is less Rezzish than regular Rez stuff. Does Mike Patton and his various post FNM side projects count as weird?
• I think most anything Mike Patton does outside Faith No More qualifies as a little strange (Tommahawk & Lovage excluded). At least the second major Mr.Bungle release, the first and third Fantomas albums, both solo "albums", and anything he's done on any of John Zorn's albums are pretty wierd. Zorn is wierd. [I'll fight you] : )
• Masada: an improv bebop-ish quartet with an affinity for klezmer (note:live albums are especially good) Zorn's Masada is more beautiful-if-a-bit-eclectic than weird, I'd say. And I have a studio album of theirs (I forget the name of it, but it's a double CD), and it's wonderful. Just FYI. If you have an at-all-adventurous taste in jazz, you'll probably love Zorn's Masada. John Zorn is not weird music. I've heard Zorn be very weird. I'm thinking especially of a vinyl record I used to have, of mostly country music covers, by Eugene Chadbourne with John Zorn. Wildly interesting, but full-on weird. Hey, while I'm thinking of it, Elliott Sharp can be pretty freaking weird. And Controlled Bleeding, which is the sporadically productive project of my old HS senior-year English teacher, Paul Lemos. (They're big in Germany.)
• I forgot Danielson Famile.