September 1, 1998 by A.S. Van Dorston

Tired of being reminded by other magazines that the best albums in the world were made by The Beatles, Beach Boys and Rolling Stones? So is The Wire magazine. They polled their writers to come up with a guide to 100 records that should have ignited the world’s imagination, except that everyone else was fiddling…

Charles Ives – Symphony No. 4 (1910-16) (Grammophon) 88
Blind Willie Johnson – “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground” (Columbia) 29
Bob Graettinger – City Of Glass/This Modern World (Capitol) 53
Louis & Bebe Barron – Forbidden Planet OST (Small Planet) 56
Esquivel And His Orchestra – Other Worlds Other Sounds (RCA) 58
The Blue Men – I Hear A New World (RGM White Label/RPM) 60
Joe Harriott – Abstract (Columbia/Capitol) 61
Son House – The Original Delta Blues (Columbua/Legacy) 64
William S. Burroughs – Call Me Burroughs (ESP) 65
Steve Reich – Early Works: Come Out/It’s Gonna Rain (Elektra) 65
Albert Ayler – In Greenwich Village (Impulse!) 67
Bill Dixon Orchestra – Intents And Purposes (RCA) 67
Gottfried Michael Koenig – Terminus II/Funktion Grun (Deutsche Grammophon) 67
Sun Ra – Strange Strings (Saturn) 67
Blue Cheer – Vincebus Eruptum (Philips) 68
Dr. John the Night Tripper – Gris-Gris (Atco) 68
Pearls Before Swine – Balaklava (ESP) 68
Spontaneious Music Ensemble – Karyobin (Chronoscope) 68
The United States Of America (CBS) 68
El Camaron De La Isla & Paco De Lucia – Al Verte Las Floras Lloran (Philips) 69
Ram John Holder – Black London Blues (Beacon) 69
Phil Ochs – Rehearsals For Retirement (A&M) 69
Buffy Sainte-Marie – Illuminations (Vanguard) 69
Sonny Sharrock – Black Woman (Vortex) 69
Silver Apples – Contact (Kapp Records) 69
Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence – Oar (Columbia) 69
Kevin Ayers & The Whole World – Shooting At The Moon (Harvest) 70
Comus – First Utterance (BGO) 70
Michael Gibbs (Deram) 70
Alvin Lucier – I Am Sitting In A Room (Lovely Music) 70
Cluster – Cluster 71 (Philips/Sky) 71
The Last Poets (Douglas Music) 71
The Master Musicians Of Jajouka – Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Jajouka (Rolling Stones) 71
John Cale – Paris 1919 (Reprise) 72
Alice Coltrane – Universal Consciousness (Impulse!) 72
Miles Davis – On The Corner (Columbia) 72
Hugh Hopper – 1984 (CBS/Cuneiform) 72
Modern Lovers – The Original Modern Lovers (Mohawk) 72
Annette Peacock – I’m The One (RCA) 72
Pierre Akendengue – Nandipo (Saravah) 73
Faust – The Faust Tapes (Virgin) 73Herbie Hancock – Sextant (Columbia) 73
Larry Young – Lawrence Of Newark (Perception) 73
Betty Davis – They Say I’m Different (Vinyl Experience) 74
Lewis Furey (A&M) 75
Pere Ubu – “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” (Hearthan) 75
Lee Perry – Revolution Dub (Cactus) 75
Lou Reed – Metal Machine Music (RCA) 75
The Electric Eels – “Cyclotraon/Agitated” 7″ (Rough Trade) 77
Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band – Bat Chain Puller (Unreleased) 76
Henry Cow – Concerts (Recommended) 76
The Residents – Satisfaction (Ralph) 76
Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson – Ain’t That A Bitch (DJM) 76Ornette Coleman – Dancing In Your Head (A&M) 77
Glenn Gould – The Solitude Trilogy (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) 67-77
Al Green – The Belle Album (Motown) 77
Ron ‘Pate’s Debonairs featuring Rev Fred Lane – Raudeluna’s ‘Pataphysical Revue (Say Day Bew) 77
Iggy Pop & James Williamson – Kill City (Bomp) 77
Tim Souster – Swit Drimz (Transatlantic) 77
The Human League – Being Boiled (Fast Product) 78
The Walker Brothers – Nite Flights (GTO Records) 78
Chrome – Half Machine Lip Moves (Siren/Beggars Banquet) 79
Lol Coxhill – Digswell Duets (Random Radar) 79
Robert Fripp – Exposure (EG/Polydor) 79
Nurse With Wound – Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella (United Dairies) 79
Family Fodder – Monkey Banana Kitchen (Fresh) 80
Fire Engines – Get Up And Use Me (Pop: Aural) 80
La Nimba De N’Zerekore – Gon Bia Bia (Syliphone) 80
Nancy Sesay & The Melodaires – C’est Fab 7″ (It’s War Boys) 80
Monoton – Monotonprodukt 07 (Monotonprodukt) 81
Derek Bailey – Aida (Incus/Dexter’s Cigar) 82
Bad Brains (ROIR) 82Kip Hanrahan – Desire Develops An Edge (American Clave) 83
Youssou N’Dour – Djamil (Senegalese Cassette) 83
Mark Stewart & The Maffia – Learning To Cope With Cowardice (On-U Sound) 83
Jonathan Harvey – Bhakti (NMC) 84
The Homosexuals (Recommended) 84
Chaba Fadella & Cheb Sahraoui – N’Sel Fik (Factory/Mango) 85
Christian Marclay – Record Without A Cover (Recycled) 85
Arthur Russell – World of Echo (Upside/Rough Trade) 86
Fingers Inc – Another Side (Trax) 88
Conlon Nancarrow – Studies For Player Piano (Wergo) 88
Dead C – Trapdoor Fucking Exit (Siltbreeze) 90
Royal Trux – Twin Infinitives (Drag City) 90
Fushitsusha – DBL Live (PSF) 91
Public Enemy – Apocalypse 91 … The Enemy Strikes Black (Def Jam) 91
Galina Ustvolskaya – No. 1 (Hat Art) 91
Steven Jesse Bernstein – Prison (Sub Pop) 92
Bally Sagoo – Wham Bam 2: The Second Massacre (Oriental Star Agencies) 92
Luke Skywalker – “I Wanna Rock” 12″ (Luke Records) 92
Bernhard Gunter – Un Peu De Neige Salie (Selektion/Table of the Elements) 93
Ken Ishii – Garden On The Palm (R&S) 93
Jean C Roche – A Nocturne Of Nightingales (Sittele) 93
Jeff Mills – X-103 Atlantis (Axis/Tresor) 93
Paul Dolden – L’Ivresse De La Vitesse (Empreintes Digitales) 94
4 Hero – Parallele Universe (Reinforced) 94
Joey Beltram – Places (Tresor) 95
Oval – 94 Diskont (Mille Plateaux) 95
Tony Conrad – Four Violins (Table Of The Elements) 97
Cathy Lane – Nesting Stones (Unknown Public) 98

The Electric Eels – Cyclotron/Agitated 7″
(Rough Trade 1977)
An unbelievable slab of primitive art damage from the deep Cleveland underground. Recorded in 1975, the incredibly itchy-scratchy quality of the vocals, instruments and recording give the songs a crumbling edge that is the mark of only the best sub-underground murk. When this single appeared (on Rough Trade of all places) it challenged every outsider notion of the American pre-punk scene. If Pere Ubu was avant garage, what on earth was this? Could it really have been recorded in 1975? The primitive instrumental raunch dynamics combine with Dave E’s aggressive sissy-boy vocals in a way that should have made every dada-loving teen start a group immediately. If not sooner. And it seems to me that the versions of these songs on subsequent archival issues of Eels material are not as raw and disturbed as the ones on this single. Jesus, what a sound. BC

Esquivel And His Orchestra – Other Worlds Other Sounds
(RCA Victor 1958)
In January 1958, Juan Garcia Esquivel drove from Mexico City to Hollywood, California, at RCA Victor’s invitation, to record an album that would feature American musicians playing some of his startling ‘Sonorama’ arrangements in stereo for the first time. The result, the company decided, was to be a gentle little affair entitled Beguine For Beginners. Esquivel thought otherwise. Claiming that all his sheet music had been stolen, he suggested they tackle “Granada” instead. The producer had a fit. The ensuing session, however, included reworkings of Cole Porter, Sammy Kahn and Kurt Weill of such stark exuberance and scintillating orchestral muscle that, 40 years on, they still have the power to amaze Esquivel’s passion for drawing new sounds from conventional instruments shines through in the taut dynamics of Other Worlds Other Sounds, a tribute to the arranger as an unacknowledged force in 20th century music. KH

Chaha Fadella & Cheb Sahraoui – N’ Sel Fik
(Factory/Mango 1985)
While N’ Set Fik is probably the closest that raj, or any other form from the Islamic world, will get to approaching the verities of Western pop music, such a dizzying, swooning record could never have emerged from the Anglo-American tradition. Chaba Fadella’s comeback record after a sabbatical raising her children, N’ Set Fik expresses commitment with a drive that has only ever signified wandering lust since Charley Patton and Jimmie Rodgers first claimed that they were pistol-packin’ daddies 60 years ago. Needless to say, the closest you will come to hearing such a complete surrender to ecstasy in Western pop music is a Massive Attack or Bally Sagoo remix of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. PS

Faust – The Faust Tapes
(Virgin 1973)
“We made tons and kilometres of tapes and The Faust Tapes is only the best,” is how the group’s Jean-Herve Peron assessed this epochal album. When the group produced the raw musical material, they were holed up in a converted schoolhouse near Wumme in Germany, growing their own dope and tomatoes and living naked. Assembled by their producer Uwe Nettlebeck, this 26 part opus showcases the art of sonic collage at its best. The editing forms a brilliant narrative structure, wrenching the listener through psychedelia, motorik, quirky pop and musique concrete. At a time when the label ‘Krautrock’ is often erroneously applied to any spliff-riffing that goes on for longer than it should, The Faust Tapes reminds how in their hands it meant the whole world in sound, encompassing all music from the daftest to the fiercest. MB

Fingers Inc – Another Side
(Trax 1988)
The first, and still the best, House album ever released. Up to that point, House music had centred on the body, drawing its influences from disco, Electro and soul, all musics centred around the dancefloor. The music of Larry Heard, together with vocalist Robert Owens, seemed to exist outside of any earthly reference point whatsoever. It was as if they had fallen out of the sky. Slow, spacious dreamscapes drifted by, while Owens’s voice recounted tales of dark sexual intrigue, whose emotional brutality were at odds with both the music below and the purity of his delivery. The whole thing was underpinned by Heard’s sense of musicianship and his belief in House as a musical form capable of sustaining a prolonged, varied vision over the course of an album. That he achieved this with a set comprised largely of previously released singles is further testament to the quality of the originals. PM

Fire Engines – Get Up And Use Me
(Pop Aural 1980)
This mini-album offers the freshest of the various inspired rethinks of the electric guitar that came out of post-punk Scotland. Guitarists Davey Henderson and Murray Slade spooled off writhing, dissonant lines of energy that spoke of obsession and entanglement. The music claimed the riff back from bad rock – all the pieces work on nagging, repeated bass and guitar lines. But there was no truck with regular rock rhythms – the group rode on the tightly wound, oddly paced bounce of Russell Burns’s snare hits. Henderson’s vocals are frequently shrieks (“Get up!): the ‘songs’ are essentially guitar instrumentals. The group’s interest in the warping neuroses of consumerism was reflected in the packaging (the record came in a plastic carrier bag) and titles such as “Plastic Gift” and “New Thing In Cartons.” Listening back to the lo-fi, ‘live in the studio’ approach, it’s striking what an unusual sound the group achieved – the harsh, electrifying prickle of the guitars (Rickenbackers, as I recall) and the trashy fatness of the drums. Speedy, delirious and unrepeatable. WM

Family Fodder – Monkey Banana Kitchen
(Fresh 1980)
A loose collection of friends and, more often than not, wanderers, Family Fodder reached their apex (or at least one of them) with Monkey Banana Kitchen. The music took the ferocity of contemporaneous British punk and scaled it way back. They also eschewed the giant pop hook, replacing it with the hoop jumping of songs in three languages, instruments played for only four seconds, harmonic call-and-response motifs and opaque but symbolic political lyrics. Multiple reprises of phrases and fragments result in a much more subtle and effective memory-tickle. I can’t count how many instruments finally made it onto the album, though piano (providing much of the rhythm), melodica, sax, synth and cowbell dominate. Their integrated eclecticism is actually layer after thin layer of dub, jazz and New Wave – peering down into this multi-ply music, you detect traces of structural complexity, and the pop that’s there blurs. Lesson No 537 from Fodder members: participate only when absolutely necessary – knowing when to pare down makes it easier to transcend. RE

4 Hero – Parallel Universe
(Reinforced 1994)
Before Goldie took drum ‘n’ bass into the realms of ‘conventional’ (ie album-oriented) music with Timeless, there was Parallel Universe. These days, drum ‘n’ bass albums are almost the norm, but back then, the idea of not only moving beyond the darkcore dancefloor style prevalent at the time, but sustaining that vision over the course of an album, was groundbreaking. Dissolving Jungle’s tunnel-visioned rhythmic matrices and reassembling them into sonic collages of beats and loops, threaded through with saxophones, guitars and female vocals, the greatest strength of Parallel Universe lay in its ability to touch on all the disparate bases of the breakbeat scene and make it appear totally natural that they should all be sitting there together. No single track stood out; it was the wholeness of the album that was so staggering. To achieve this required a quantum leap of ambition, light years beyond the grasp of those simply content to trace over the 12″ template of Jungle. That would only come later. PM

Robert Fripp – Exposure
(EG/Polydor 1979)
Most of Fripp’s recorded output showcases his talent as a guitarist, but only Exposure offers any serious insight into the man himself. Returning to music after a four year break studying with Gurdjieff disciple JG Bennett, Fripp’s psyche had veered from frustrated hostility to enigmatic good humour, and his first solo album captures every aspect of a many-sided personality. Angelic electric guitar drone in the form of Frippertronics serves to frame a sparse, moving reworking of Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes The Flood”. Tape recordings of Fripp’s argumentative New York neighbours jostle for space with cryptic spoken comments from Brian Eno. Terre Roche and Daryl Hall sing gorgeous, gentle ballads over mildly unreliable rhythms, but the highlights of Exposure see guest vocalist Peter Hammill chewing glass, barking with grisly charisma over cracking rock riffs. There’s no stylistic consistency, and no need Fripp is resplendent in divergence. It’s the Sergeant Pepper of avant punk. BD

Lewis Furey – Lewis Furey
(A&M; 1975)
Previously known to the world only by a session violin credit on Leonard Cohen’s New Skin For The Old Ceremony, Lewis Furey established himself as nothing less than Montreal’s answer to Lou Reed on this, his first (and best) solo album. Cohen’s producer John Lissauer created the sound of francophone cabaret trapped in a bell jar, the perfect showcase for Furey’s piano – and banjo-driven tales of obsessive love and betrayal. Those who currently thrill to Rufus Wainwright’s debut need only hear a few seconds of Lewis’s torchy, nasal vocals to know that there is nothing new under the sun. These tales of Quebec’s demi-monde are laced with imagery drawn equally from Blake and Burroughs, brutal metaphors and sly, devilish arrangements. And speak of the devil, The Rocky Horror Show’s Tim Curry turns up as backing vocalist – along with Cat Stevens. RH

Fushitsusha – DBL Live
(PSF 1991)
It was the emergence of Keiji Haino in the early 90s that really opened up the contemporary Tokyo scene to the West, a scene primarily concerned with glorious guitar reinvention; pushing individual and group expression to the extreme; and making huge leaps of rock imagination. Their geographical position alone gave them, like the Krautrockers, much more of an outsider’s view of the ‘classic’ Western rock canon. Here, the likes of Blue Cheer or Arthur Doyle – not exactly household names – figure as the most influential artists for new Japanese music. DBL Live still stands as the scene’s crowning document – a sprawling double CD set that sounds so otherworldly and unprecedented, the rest of the world is still trying to catch up. From static and forlorn proto-Gregorian howl, minimal feedback hiss and spectral six string tremblings through ridiculously overdriven guitar destruction in the space of 50 minutes, Haino’s power trio redefined the leftfield forever. DK

Michael Gibbs – Michael Gibbs
(Deram 1970)
For the debut album by composer (and reluctant bandleader) Mike Gibbs, youthful passion and intensity burst every seam. Listening to it is a heady experience – it’s packed solid with music whose structural, melodic and harmonic language was way ahead of its time. There’s also an unstoppable personal timbre, something Gibbs’s ‘straight’ contemporaries talked about, but rarely achieved to this degree. It should have changed orchestral jazz forever (it’s hard to believe anyone could churn out conventional charts after hearing this record), yet anonymous big band music has trundled on much as before. What makes Michael Gibbs an essential jazz record is the relationship between great composition and improvisation. There has rarely been a finer setting for Kenny Wheeler’s glittering solos, Tony Oxley’s fractured swing and John Surman’s explosive baritone. Phil Lee, Jack Bruce and Chris Spedding are superb. And the brass chorale that kicks off “Family Joy, Oh Boy”, crowned by John Wilbraham’s piccolo trumpet, is one of the great opening moment in recording history. JLW

Glenn Gould – The Solitude Trilogy
(Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1967, 1969, 1977)
Glenn Gould’s decision to abandon live concert performances for good was three years behind him when he accepted an invitation to make an audio documentary for Canadian national radio. Gould accepted with alacrity and subsequently devoted hundreds of hours of research, travel, editing and mixing to the project, which he called The Idea Of North. Like its two successors (The Latecomers and The Quiet In The Land), The Idea Of North edits a collection of monologues into a complex, shifting meditation on solitude and isolation. Voices advance and recede, questioning, theorizing, wondering, describing; the whole could be described as an oral tone poem, with Gould counterpointing the rhythms of words and emotions with the rattle of a northbound train, the seas off the coast of Newfoundland, and carefully selected snatches of music. The various thoughts, textures and visions fuse into a moving whole – and the climax of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony which closes The Idea Of North is breathtaking. These documentaries mirrored Gould’s increasing withdrawal from the world and were clearly born out of his own intense preoccupations. As one of the voices in The Latecomers says, “People are ecstatic about getting into the mainstream. I think it’s a little bit stupid since the mainstream is pretty muddy…” CS

Bob Graettinger – City Of Glass/This Modern World
(Capitol 1953)
Graettinger’s entire body of work consists of about a dozen original compositions and song arrangements commissioned by Stan Kenton from 1947-53, but it was enough to briefly shake the foundations of big band jazz before sliding into obscurity. Such aggressive dissonance, jagged polytonality and clashing rhythms, in scores like “Incident In Jazz”, “House Of Strings”, and his four movement “City Of Glass”, were previously unheard in the jazz world, and quickly confused and alienated critics and even the musicians themselves. Graettinger’s unorthodox compositional methods were drawn in part from Bartok, Stravinsky and especially Varese in his collision of dramatic blocks of sound, but his own unusual psychological/acoustic theories – plus the undiluted intensity of their presentation – turned them into a musical Rorshach test for listeners. They’re just as shocking and breathtaking today. AL

Al Green – The Belle Album
(Motown 1977)
A pivotal record for Green, launched from somewhere between Memphis and Valhalla, it was pop sensibility infused with Pentecostal fire, and the last gasp of soul passion before the adolescent cool of the post-Jimmy Carter years suffocated the US. These were songs not intended so much to rattle the pop cage as to find Green himself a new and sanctified place in the music. But the shift was too much for anyone in 1977 and left even the cognoscenti confused. And no wonder “Belle” proposed a menage a trois with God; “Country Boy” was an apologia of Southern life, skillfully hidden in part by the hieroglyphics of Southern dialect; there was the spirited eschatology of “Chariots Of Fire”; the ethereal spun gold of “Dreaming”. Even by 1977’s production and technical standards, it sounded like a field recording, especially with Green playing his own lead guitar. But it had real down home power. As Green himself once said, this was music as strong as death. JFS

Bernhard Gunter – Un Feu De Neige Salie
(Selektion 1993, Reissued Table Of The Elements 1997)
Gunter’s debut album is a masterpiece of radical restraint. It’s a compact disc with every last trace of the music seemingly surgically excised, and all that remains are the minute glitches of the recording, mixing and mastering processes. Microscopic pops and buzzes flicker across the surface of nearly imperceptible high frequency tones – unless you listen to it in a quiet space or on headphones, it may seem at first to be completely silent, and the CD pressing plant at first returned the master tape to Gunter as ‘faulty’. Its humility is beguiling – once attuned to their subatomic universe, the sounds become strangely compelling. The disc heightens awareness of your immediate surroundings and the rarely tapped full potential of the human eardrum. BD

Herbie Hancock – Sextant
(Columbia 1973)
One of the charges against electronic music is that it’s cold, alien, deadly serious. As pioneered by academic serialists at Cologne Radio, it certainly invites those adjectives. However, when The Herbie Hancock Sextet recorded Sextant they’d been using clavinets and mellotrons and ARP synthesizers on the road for three years. This gave their burbling sonics a hands on, funky spin that still causes smiles today. Buster Williams’s groovesome basslines and Hancock’s boogie figures float over polymetric layerings that recall Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch and Miles Davis’s ESP. Trombonist Julian Priester supplied the umbilical link to The Sun Ra Arkestra. Uncushioned by the harmonic conventions that padded out later, more saleable fusions, the players’ lines glisten over deep black space and tangle into multicoloured collective improvisations. BWa

Kip Banrahan – Desire Develops An Edge
(American Clave 1983)
Hanrahan, a former film student turned audio auteur, was pushing the envelope even by New York standards. Different musical camps were already checking each other out, but the dolly mixture he picked for 1983’s Desire… looked flamboyant to the point of foolhardiness. This was where Bronx met East Village; Latinos and Haitians doing the bump and skronk with No Wave art punks, free improvisors and jazz’s contemporary cool. Rhythmically luscious, it oozed sensitivity; Jack Bruce sang a blinder (his relationship with Hanrahan still bears fruit), while the likes of Elysee Pyronneau, Arto Lindsay, Steve Swallow, the three Johns – Stubblefield, Scofield and Zorn – Milton Cardona and Davis’s producer (and Hanrahan’s idol) Teo Macero gave themselves completely to the mood. Next to this, Bill Laswell’s pick ‘n’ mix ventures were crude patchworks. DI

Joe Harriott – Abstract
(Columbia UK/Capitol US 1961)
When conjuring up the name of the UK’s greatest jazz musician, all of whose records are out of print, the temptation is to list every one of them. And truth be told, almost anyone of them would qualify for this list: the two with double quartet of Indian and jazz musicians (Indo Jazz Suite and Indo Jazz Fusions, both 1966), and the 1954 records with Buddy Pipp’s Highlifers, would put him on the WoridMusic list; then there are the poetry and jazz record with Michael Garrick; the Afro-Cuban recordingswith Kenny Graham; his Dixieland work with Chris Barber; blues recordings with Sonny Boy Williamson and Jimmy Page… But his heritage will probably rest with Free Form, Movement and Abstract, all three of which have been compared to the best of Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman. In fact, with Abstract, the effect is that of Coleman playing with a group with the cohesion and compositional unity of Mingus. Except that – dare I say it? – Harriott was a more passionate alto saxophonist than Coleman, and the compositional feel of the Harriott quartet evades the cliches which Mingus often relished. If Harriott’s records are ever reissued, or better yet boxed together, the UK’s stock in the history of jazz will go through the roof! JFS

Jonathan Harvey – Bhakti
(NMC 1984)
Harvey fits the profile of the ‘academic composer’ in a New Music ghetto. Yet the British composer has written some of the most stunning electronic music since Stockhausen, with dazzling combinations of synthesized sounds and real-time orchestral forces. Born in 1939, he underwent a “Stockhausen conversion” in 1966: “Here was a man who was quite explicitly seeing in music the language of some greater consciousness.” Harvey’s best known piece, Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, was created at Ircam in 1980. A second Ircam commission, the electroacoustic Bhakti, is probably his masterwork, inspired by hymns from the Rig Veda, “keys to transcendent consciousness”. Harvey’s precise but sensuous aural imagination particularly favours bell – like sonorities, and transitions from tape to orchestra in Bhakti are remarkably seamless. Its first recording inaugurated the NMC label, a vital showcase for contemporary composition in Britain. Still an underrated figure, Harvey is one of the most exciting composers writing today. JLW

Henry Cow – Concerts
(RER Recommended 1976)
20 years after their demise, British avant rockers Henry Cow continue to inspire those who seek the outer limits of rock. Signing to the enterprising Virgin label in the early 70’s enabled their uncomprising LPs to reach the provincial high streets of Britain, as well as more far-flung places. Concerts, recorded live at various European venues during 1974- 75, showcased the remarkable span of their eclectic experimentation; from Weill/Eisler influenced songs, hauntingly sung by Dagmar Krause, and complex instrumentals that absorbed free jazz and avant garde chamber styles, to ambitious non-idiomatic free improvisations like “Oslo”, which, for the young teenager I then was, became the gateway to the wonderful and rather frightening world of Improv. Legendary stuff. CBI

Ram John Bolder – Black London Blues
(Beacon 1969)
In this Windrush anniversary year, it is salutary to revisit this 1969 release. Holder, now known as an actor in films (Lester’s Cuba) and TV comedy (as ‘Porkpie’), is the son of a music loving Guyanese preacher. In 1963 he came to London, where Rachmanism flourished. The blues, big in white suburbs like Richmond and Ealing, were rarely used to express black experience in Britain. Holder’s ten trenchant short stories, including “Notting Hill Eviction”, reflected life as he had lived it in the years when, after decades of economic depression, world war and austerity, thousands of people, black and white, were trapped in slum conditions while prosperity grew around them: “Regent Street is out of bounds/Unless you have a hundred pounds”. Though musically mainstream – electric Chicago with James Brown seasoning – Holder’s songs fixed the picture of a crucial part of British social history as evocatively and potently as Roger Mayne’s North Kensington photographs. BWi

The Homosexuals – The Homosexuals’ Record
(Recommended 1984)
The greatest lost first generation punk group never made a legit album. This 16 song compilation, released six years after the fact, collects singles and work tapes, and omits as much as it includes. It’s still dazzling. The Homosexuals were very smart, very weird and very intent on striking out on their own path; they hid behind multiple pseudonyms and embraced obscurity. Their songs have a million hairpin turns, and they’d stick a big roaring chorus out front – “MY NIGHT OUT GREAT FUN GREAT FUN!” – while they snuck around to kneecap you from behind and leaned over to kiss the inside of your skull. Take Chairs Missing Wire, square the artiness, dub the mix until it’s flipped inside out, and you’re on the right track. Sublimely difficult. DW

Hugh Hopper – 1984
(CBS 1972, Reissued Cuniform 1998)
Recorded in 1972, 1984 may have been intended as a safety valve for Hopper’s more experimental ideas while Soft Machine slid towards the anonymous fusion it espoused after Seven. Whatever, he left a few weeks later. Before Soft Machine, Hopper, Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers often visited Gong’s David Allen in Paris experiment with tape loops and musique concrete. Some tracks on 1984 use techniques learned from Allen, though derived from Terry Riley. The compositions, named after the Ministries of Oceania, range from 15 minute abstract pieces like the hallucinatory “Miniplenty” to brief bluesy emsembles involving Gary Windo, Lol Coxhill and associates from the short-lived ‘big band’ edition of Soft Machine. If 1984 seems less startling and alien now than in 1973 it is because, over the last 15 years, a thousand musicians rediscovered the same territory. BWi

Son House – The Original Delta Blues
(Columbia/Legacy 1964)
Son House tells us he “woke up this mornin'”, but in every other way this is a blues session out of the ordinary. He receives a “Death Letter” and goes to see his sweetheart’s body laid out. Bravura unaccompanied vocals warn of those who “grin in your face”, and foretell the end of the world in “John the Revelator”. “Preachin’ Blues” mixes sacred and profane, while “Pearline” showcases House’s extraordinary bottleneck guitar-playing. Many tracks rework his classic 30s recordings, which influenced Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and through them the history of post-war popular music. Like many bluesmen, he was rediscovered in 1965 after decades of obscurity, but unusually, got a session for a major label, through Columbia’s David Hammond. Then in his 60s, House summoned up his old power and an even greater intensity for some of the most haunting and anguished blues on record. The session has been reissued under various titles, including Death Letter. AH

The Human League – Being Boiled
(Fast Product 1978)
By 1978, the original Kraftwerk gimmick – machines that emote, folks that don’t – had expanded into a potential aesthetic universe, at this stage somewhat underpopulated. The opening was there for others to flesh out what was not just a primary metaphor (new music as the humanisation of emergent technology), but a neat career opportunity too. At a time when grand passion, political or sexual, was pop’s expressive orthodoxy (responsible for most of the 80s’ worst music, including some by the later versions of themselves), The League chose to program their drum machines with the driest Sheffield wit – just as ‘human’ a response, after all, and far harder to fake – and then demonstrated considerable heroism sticking to the plan in the face of intransigent pubrock bigotry on the circuit. MSi

Ken Ishii – Garden On The Palm
(R&S; 1993)
The tidal wave of dark rave and proto-Hardcore (Joey Beltram, CJ Bolland, Mundo Muzique), which had made R&S; one of the most respected labels in dance music, was subsiding when Garden On The Palm made its diffident appearance. However, this double vinyl foray by a previously unknown Japanese producer remains a landmark in Electronica – elliptical, minimal, and relentlessly intriguing. Oblique electroacoustic shimmers, playful squelches, quixotic beats and alien magnetic chimes combine to produce music which follows its own dreamlike logic throughout, maintaining a wordless emotional charge without abandoning either taut economy or its unique sonic palette. CS

Charles Ives – Symphony No 4
(1910-16, Recorded Deutsche Grammophone 1988)
Charles Ives (1874-1954) is now regarded as the father of American music, though during his lifetime his work was rarely played and usually misunderstood. His magnificent Fourth Symphony (1910-16) involves polytonality, polyrhythms, quarter-tones, aleatoric music, and the simultaneous playing of different idioms, achieving a stunning complexity in a work that is by turns nightmarish, phantasmagoric, nostalgic and triumphant. Popular tunes, hymns, ragtime rhythms, marching band themes, atonality and skewed romanticism jostle and collide or are delicately superimposed. And Ives hadn’t even heard any Stravinsky or Schoenberg. His principal influences were an imaginative or eccentric father, and the sights and sounds of his New England childhood. Seiji Ozawa’s DG recording with The Boston Symphony Orchestra effectively handles the myriad changes. Berio and The Beatles, Zappa and Zorn, plus countless tape collagists and samplists, have all followed in the pioneering footsteps of this great composer. CBI

Blind Willie Johnson – Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground
(Columbia 1929, Reissued 1989)
These days it could be filed under Ambient: a piece of Country gospel improvisation, slide guitar with vocal hums and moans, but no lyrics. The great Blind Willie recorded nothing else like this and, therefore, it has no equal in recorded music, even though Ry Cooder has made a good living scoring movies following its lead. I first heard this in the late 60s, surrounded by nuns and schoolgirls, while perched on a hard seat at a Newcastle-Under-Lyme convent during a screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Jesus biopic The Gospel According To St Matthew. The effect was stunning and I have remained in awe of this tune ever since. SB

Gottfried Michael Koenig – Terminus II/Funktion Grun
(Deutsche Grammophon 1967)
In the rediscovery of Cologne’s first wave of Electronica, Gottfried Michael Koenig has still to resurface. Working with Stockhausen on the latter’s Kontakte, he moved on to Utrecht in the Netherlands, where Terminus II and Funktion Grun were realized. The pieces are systems music of sorts: all the sounds derive from an original tone and follow in the order in which they were mathematically processed. But besides the conceptual pursuits, Koenig was evidently drawn into exploring noise colour in great sculptural swathes, pustling ring modulation and its ability to swell tones into the realms of cyberdelia: strata of brittle, industrial sounds on rising and falling vectors and hollow blistering drizzle, like some turbulent data systems architecture. Funktion Grun evolves a spidery modem noise -but this was 1967. MF

Cathy Lane – Nesting Stones
(Unknown Public 8/Sensuality Essence And Nonsense 1998)
Stockhausen’s Gesang Der Junglinge features the voice of a near-infant boy. Nesting Stones doesn’t seem so different: a mix of musique concrete and electronic treatment, featuring the cry of Lane’s own child Mia. What’s so striking is how insipid and even cowardly Stockhausen’s pioneering work suddenly seems, how carefully the young Darmstadt modernist (who had just become a father) distances himself from any of his own feelings about child-as-sound (above all, imposing some irrelevant biblical material on the work). Mia’s yowling, by contrast, is looped and treated until its primal empathic pull (she’s calling “Mama”) folds into maddening repetition, strain and ugliness. Even as the sound mutates into gurgles and chuckles – everything we’re programmed to respond positively to – the baby manifests as parasite, as cancerous scrawl, as chaotic insistent thing. A simple idea, on the face of it far from new, and yet – in this age of child abuse panic and false memory syndrome – far more powerful, daring and revelatory than almost any Electronica or concrete I can think of. MSi

The Last Poets – The Last Poets
(Douglas Music 1971)
“We were rappin’ when they were nappin’,” Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin told an interviewer in 1984, calling attention to his group’s unacknowledged role as the progenitors of rap. That same year, with HipHop fully established, producer Bill Laswell revitalized the group’s career with a new Last Poets record and a reissue of their self-titled debut from 1970. Backed by a spare conga beat, the trio delivers a ruthless critique of racial ideology – white (“On The Subway”) and black (“Niggers Are Scared Of Revolution”) – with a poignancy and fury unmatched even by their recent collaborators, Public Enemy. CC

Alvin Lucier – I Am Sitting In A Room
(Lovely Music 1970, Reissued 1990)
Lucier is the undoubted genius of process music; and this is his masterpiece. He intones a brief text describing the process of creating the album, recording this and then playing it back into the room, before re-recording it again. And again. And again. With each repetition, the frequencies of Lucier’s voice that most closely match the room’s resonant frequencies are enhanced, and soon he becomes incomprehensible, only the dim memory of his text animating glistening spools of sound The music is its own score, but it’s not the formal simplicity of technique that impresses the most. Towards the end, once Lucier has gone and only the inarticulate room remains, it’s a gorgeous and quite extraordinary experience. BD

Christian Marclay – Record Without A Cover
(Recycled 1985)
A visual artist first, Marclay found his musical voice on platters of steel. Record Without A Cover (which it was, literally) was part Fluxus, part Imaginary Landscape and part pure devilry. Not only was it Plunderphonia par excellence, it was an objet d’art which took a poke at vinyl fetishists. In essence, a record about records. Never mind if you were unlucky enough not to find your copy sufficiently mauled in the record shop browser; Marclay would still have you enjoy the sound of a stylus plying its way through muck-encrusted grooves, the clicks and bangs giving way to drums and the onward procession of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan”, and climaxing with a carnival-style pile-up of orchestral manoeuvres, lounge lizards, organ fugues, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Utterly unique DL

The Master Musicians Of Jajouka – Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Jajouka
(Rolling Stones Records 1971, Reissued Point Music 1995)
He only wanted to share: Brian Jones was justifiably evangelical about the shrill, gripping music that he heard in a village nestled in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Simply recording the Pipes of Pan wasn’t enough in 1969. In an effort to communicate his own kif-enhanced experience, The Rolling Stones guitarist took his four-track tapes home to England, where he deployed the full arsenal of psychedelic signal processing. The resulting album documents a millennia-old music, the sound of panic itself, as well as the fragmented mind of Jones in the months before his death. Drums throb in the foreground as the pipers are sucked figuratively into the slipstream of a jet engine via extreme phase shifting. A women’s chorus, shrieking like seagulls, loops in the distance. Jones’s apology for a muffled female solo is sufficient to raise gooseflesh: “It was not for our ears”. Well before dub reggae and its spawn – the cult of remixing – Jajouka showcased techno-primitive terror, up where the air was very thin. RH

The Modern Lovers – The Original Modem Lovers
(Mohawk 1981)
This album, as well as their first LP on Berserkley and a few subsequent bootlegs, makes a potent case for The Modern Lovers as having been potentially the most influential group of the 1970s. Based in Boston, led by the adenoidal Jonathan Richman, The Modern Lovers existed during rock’s darkest period (1971 -74). At a time when no one else even considered doing it, they combined The Velvet Underground’s instrumental textures with garage rock drive and genuine suburban angst. The combination is still riveting. If it had been heard at the time it was recorded, there’s no way that this music wouldn’t have caused a revolution. Its surface is so simple and its guts are so complex that these tunes would almost surely have supplanted those of The Eagles as the most easily xeroxed emo-core of the era. BC

Monoton – Monotonprodukt 07
(MonotonProdukt 1981)
Monoton is, or was, Viennese media, light and sound artist Konrad Becker. His second album Monotonprodukt 07, a double, is so alive with the pulses that triggered many Electronicas to come, from Techno through Trance to Mego’s creeping static, you could make a case for Becker’s guruhood. Yet, for all its prescient washed out tones, threadbare textures and Minimalist rigour, it has the edge on much that followed. Adopting an imperious art stance towards mainstreams and margins alike, Becker cast a cold analytic eye over Electronica’s urfathers, picking up on Suicide’s jittertronic urgency, if not their melodrama, and DAF’s throbbing sequencers, but with the sex threat removed, which he patched into his own crackling circuits, hissing vistas and tumbling beatstreams. His dryness cannot entirely suppress a likeable goofiness: “Fish lives in water – thirsty”. BK

Conlon Nancarrow – Studies For Player Piano
(Wergo 1988)
Until the 80s, Nancarrow’s extraordinary music was almost completely unknown. These digital recordings made in his studio in 1988 – replacing a less complete LP set – helped gain a wider audience. Nancarrow was an avant gardist who almost exclusively used the 19th century technology of the player piano: in the 1940s there was no available electronic alternative for achieving a complex “harmony of rhythms” unplayable by human musicians. The early studies have a blues, boogie woogie or jazz influence, and the very first, from 1947, sets the pattern – like a demented five finger exercise with voices converging from impossible directions and dropping away at the close, the lines in dizzying rhythmic counterpoint. Nancarrow developed serial techniques independently of Boulez and Babbitt, but the chaotic energy of many studies recalls free improvisation. In his painstaking way Nancarrow achieved the rhythmic effects of electronic music in a completely self-contained medium. This is also some of the most hilarious ‘pure’ music you’re likely to hear. AH

Youssou N’Dour – Djamil
(Senegalese Cassette 1983)
There’s no shortage of material on the market by Youssou N’Dour, but little of it really does him justice. This cassette captures Super Etoile De Dakar in creative overdrive, before they discovered Parisian studios and rock ‘n’ roll stadiums. Here they’re pushing the concept of the Senegalised Cuban orchestra to its limits, drawing on the cross-rhythms of the sabar drum orchestra to create exhilarating new structures. Taking on the roles of the different drums, blaring brass, slinkily sinuous guitars, percussion and voices pursue simultaneous conversations, with sudden changes in rhythm and tempo. The interplay of Youssou’s gilded shriek, Ouzin Ndiaye’s braying Islamic baritone and Alia Seck’s exultant rapping adds both drama and a zaniness as disorientating as the complexity of the music. MH

Le Nimba De N’ Zerekore – Gon Bia Bia
(Syliphone 1980)
“Ce disque est une page d’ethnologie,” say the breathless sleevenotes. And this is how I like my ethnology kamikaze kit drumming, delirious wailing saxes and something called ‘chant telephone’ – a growling singing used to embody the spirits of the initiation forest. In post-independence Guinea, regional orchestras were set up to sing the praises of the ruling party while providing culturally ‘authentic’ dance music – one of the pleasanter side effects of Sekou Toure’s thoroughly nasty dictatorship. While the dominant strain was Mande music (well known from Salif Keita, Bembeya Jazz and the like), Le Nimba from N’Zerekore, a rusting market town in Guinea’s forested south east highlands, mixed Mande and Cuban sounds with the songs and rhythms of the Kpelle, Kono and Toma peoples. Supposedly retracing the stages of male initiation, this could be seen as an African concept album. But what gets you going is the wild rhythms booting along spiky guitar melodies, call and response vocals and some blasting saxes. A truly mad record. MH

Nurse With Wound – Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella
(United Dairies 1979)
The key document in the development of the British underground, and the cornerstone for all subsequent outsider forays into ‘electric experimental music’. Originally issued in a numbered edition of 500, it received a fitting ‘?????’ rating in place of five stars from Sounds magazine. A monstrous trawl through twilight sounds, where bellowing, scraping avant garde composition met Krautrock’s expansive pummel. 19 years after Steve Stapleton’s youthful trio hit the fade on “Blank Capsules Of Embroidered Cellophane” and went home for tea, it still stands as a monument to their vision and peerless invention. DK

Phil Ochs – Rehearsals For Retirement
(A&M; 1969)
The single most eloquent collection of protest songs in the English language. Released in the wake of the notorious 1968 Chicago Convention and trials, Rehearsals represents a quantum leap for the Yippie Vice-Presidential candidate (running mate to the porcine Pigasus) and spokesman for ‘the movement’. A song cycle in which the political gives way to the existential, its mixture of angry disillusion and impassioned optimism is entirely disarming. Scathingly satirical social comment and scarily lucid self-analysis combine to provide a sublime drivetime sound track to the collapse of Western civilization. Ochs appears on the cover image of a gunslinger’s tombstone, voicing the death of America. Eight years later, pursued by government agents, drink problems and the ghosts of the counterculture’s ideals, he was dead himself: a suicide A genuine fucking tragedy. EB

Oval – 94 Diskont
(Mille Plateau 1995)
A record of two halves. The opening “Do While” achieves, in little over 20 minutes, a culmination and distillation of all anterior minimalistic endeavour in music. Whether consciously or not, Oval synthesize the influence and best practice of the purest Minimalism of Steve Reich or Terry Riley with the digital essence of new ‘instrumental’ technology. From nothing but digital detritus, Oval construct a resonant holism of pure crystalline beauty. The balance of this disc is given over to brief excursions into textural exposition, pushing back the boundaries of sound as music. TO

Ron ‘Pate’s Debonairs featuring Rev Fred Lane – Raudeluna’s ‘Pataphysical Revue
(Say Day Bew Records 1977)
A document of a single evening in the university town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, March 1975, at the Second Raudelunas Exposition. Dominating proceedings is Fred Lane, towering alter ego of flautist and whirlygig sculptor Tim Reed, who compares with a series of hilarious lateral jokes and weird monologues. His cover versions of “Volare” and “My Kind Of Town” backed by Ron ‘Pate’s Debonairs – a hot, swinging, meandering big band – set new standards as melody gives way to controlled, impassioned and deeply humorous improvisation. This monumental work also features Anne LeBaron’s superb “Concerto For Active Frogs”; Mitchell Cashions’s charming settings of Julius Caesar’s “The Chief Divisions Of The People Of Gaul”; Industrial noise from The Captains Of Industry; and wild Improv combo The Blue Denim Deals Without The Arms. No other record has ever come as close to realizing Alfred Jarry’s desire “to make the soul monstrous” – or even had the vision or invention to try. It’s all over the place. The sleevenotes describe it as “the best thing ever” – time has not damaged this audacious claim.

Annette Peacock – I’m the One
(RCA 1972)
“Pain and Pleasure are equal but different”, Peacock’s liner note said. I’ll choose pleasure, if it’s all the same to you. While this LP lacked simple joy (even “Mister Joy”), it contained many pleasures. Peacock’s earlier involvement with psychedelia and free jazz, and experiments she and Paul Bley carried out with a prototype Moog, fed into her rock albums. She applied techniques developed with Bley to her raw-nerved, frank songs about sex, love, emotions and relationships, intensifying them with electronic alteration of her voice or by voice generated effects. 1968’s Revenge was not released until 1971, when she cut I’m the One, and these albums prompted David Bowie to ask her to play on Aladdin Sane. She signed on at Juilliard instead, but her influence on Bowie and Eno, not to mention Laurie Anderson, is not hard to trace. The spine-tingling “Love Me Tender” is probably the best Elvis cover ever, piping even John Cale’s “Heartbreak Hotel”.

Pearls Before Swine – Balaklava
(ESP-Disk 1968)
The soundworld might be Tim Buckley’s Goodbye and Hello, the ‘lizzardd sound’ (sic) of West Coasters Kaleidoscope (and even the Brit psych-medievalists of the same name), but Tom Rapp’s Florida based outfit nailed together a more intoxicating, Carpenter’s Gothic version of folk psychedelia, in which the whispers of ancient voices created powerful crosscurrents. Like the archivist warlock Harry Smith, the Swine herd were clearly hypnotized by phonography’s ability to re-animate history’s dead voices: encrusted with popping shellac, we hear Trumpeter Landfrey, bugler at the original Charge of the Light Brigade (hence the title), and even the indistinct voice of an aging Florence Nightingale. Concrete features including canned birdsong and seaspray – before Ambient made them naff – and a taperewind of the entire LP, fold Rapp’s lyrical ballads into shuffling temporal layers. Despite being cloaked in sweet arrangements with strings, oboe and distantly swatting percussion, Rapp’s shadowed invocations of Herodotus, Santayana, the Orpheus myth and Blakean angels in response to Vietnam atrocities – America’s Crimea – proved too dark for flowered-up Aquarians. RY

Pere Ubu – 30 Seconds Over Tokyo
(Hearthan 1975)
Of all human emotions, fear is the hardest to capture musically, but this early single from Pere Ubu simply melts with fearful dread. Angular, uncompromised and shocking, its exterior reference point is the American bombing of Japan, but its real movement is inward, trying both to fathom the minds of those who would commit such an act and to acknowledge the terror, felt by subsequent millions, that it could easily happen again. Not a party record, then, but a landmark one – it created a whole new soundworld of shadowed, industrial grief, taking some musical cues from Beefheart but substituting a gaunt foreboding for his crazy organic optimism. Listening hard in Manchester were those who became Joy Division; their sensibility stems from this record, but never remotely matched its evocation of apocalypse. AM

Lee Perry – Revolution Dub
(Cactus 1975)
Lee Perry’s “Yehol Evol” – B-side of a tune called “Honey Love” which ran the vocal track backwards over the backing track – had served notice as far back as 1967 that the producer was prepared to take his music beyond the bounds of the merely sensible. Besides some wildly eccentric vocals, Revolution Dub, from 1975, contains material completely foreign to popular music – snatches of television dialogue. I am Doctor on the Go”, proclaims Perry to a chorus of canned laughter, and so on. The collision of the British sitcom with the rhythm from Junior Byles’s aching “Long Way” took reggae into retaliatory culture-shock experimentation. Also, this album had some of the most potent dubs ever recorded by Perry. There’s the ultra-heavy version of Bunny Clarke’s “Move Out Of My Way,” the rock-hard reworking of Jimmy Riley’s take of Bobby Womack’s “Woman’s Gotta Have It”; and a juddering dub of “Bushweed Corntrash”. Fierce and funny. WM

Iggy Pop & James Williamson – Kill City
(Bomp 1977)
Recorded in 1975, with Iggy on weekend release from the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Los Angeles, Kill City is an overlooked masterpiece sandwiched between the implosion of the Stooges and Iggy’s collaboration with David Bowie. After the explicit savagery of 1973’s Raw Power, this sounds initially muted and less vivid. But Iggy’s arrangements – or should that read Williamson’s? – perfectly highlight a kind of benumbed amorality and sense of toxic dislocation. The title track is a cold slap in the face to the decadent pretensions of The Doors’ “LA Woman”; “I Got Nothin'” is a cold blast of pop nihilism; “Lucky Monkeys” is the kind of post-narcotic comedown groove that Royal Trux have made their name with. Released against Iggy’s wishes, Kill City is a fascinating document of darkness and hard vitality. TR

Public Enemy – Apocalyse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black
(Def Jam 1991)
Not the classic LP for many aficionados – the complexity of Fear Of A Black Panet will probably get most people’s votes – but on this underrated follow-up, PE’s sound is pared back down to its raw essentials to go to war against everything from gangsta rap’s low inspirations to American States refusing to mark Martin Luther King’s birthday. As conventional world views and even the zeitgeist of rap seemed to move against them, PE never sounded louder. The LP opens with the proclamation: “The future holds nothing else but confrontation”, before launching into the sirens and tornado scratching of “Lost At Birth”, where the build-up seems to go on forever until Chuck D’s Old Testament roar soars out of the mix: “Clear the way for the prophets of rage”. It isn’t all this spine-clenchingly thrilling, but the church choirs and swampy boogie riff of “By The Time I Get To Arizona” and the sparse brutality of “Shut ‘Em Down” are among PE’s greatest moments. MSh

Lou Reed – Metal Machine Music
(RCA 1975, Reissued Greatest Expectations 1991)
Q Magazine featured Metal Machine Music in its 50 Worst Records of All Time, describing it as “sadistic, blackboard-scraping feedback”. What higher recommendation could you possibly need? Reed himself reported: “I find it very relaxing – it’s not done as a joke.” The metal machine involved two electric guitars feeding back through mismatched tremolo units. They’re speeded up, slowed down, recorded backwards and layered repeatedly. What results is at once the pre-eminent deranged noise record, an impossibly cacophonous screech of electric torment, and also a classic of Minimalism; some of the most enigmatic, exquisite harmonies ever documented. It’s a pity the CD reissues can’t handle the original double LP’s locked grooves, but even if it doesn’t last forever, the music is infinitely convoluted. It still awaits a proper critical appraisal – even the gleefully enthusiastic Lester Bangs didn’t fully ‘get’ Metal Machine Music. BD

Steve Reich – Early Works: Come Out/It’s Gonna Rain, etc (Elektra Nonesuch 1965)
In 1965 in San Francisco, partly inspired by the phase experiments of Terry Riley’s In C, Steve Reich was playing around with two identical tape loops he had recorded of a black Pentecostal preacher. Letting the loops go slightly out of phase, he became mesmerized by the complex sub-rhythms set up by the interference, the voice morphing into a pulsing Minimalist music. It’s Gonna Rain lifts those three words out of the sermon, turning them into a rhythm -a flickering repeat that shears into depersonalized cyber tones. In a longer sequence, about people beseeching Noah to let them into the ark, the tape subdivides into eight loops of garbled counterpoint. In 1966 he pushed the voice of Daniel Hamm, arrested in the Harlem riots of 1964, even further towards a morass of hypnotic vibrations around the phrase “Come out to show them”. A Techno prophecy. MF

The Residents – Satisfaction
(Ralph 1976)
If there was one record that told you the 60s were over, then this was it. The Clash may have crowed, “no Rolling Stones in 1977”, but their rhetoric was just gasbag posturing compared to this, a blowtorch evisceration of Jagger and Richards’s song that reduces their original to a piece of marketable rebellion fluff (Wham!’s “Bad Boys” with a better riff). The Residents start from the premise that there are rather more serious things to be unsatisfied about than romance or advertising things: like total mental breakdown, a condition they proceed to delineate with unbearably off-key guitars and a vocal that sounds like the most haunted, driven, raging man alive. It’s excruciating, purifying and hilarious, and if inflicted on friends it usually receives two of the highest possible accolades: “Take that fucking thing off”, and “They weren’t being serious, were they?” AM

Jean C Roche – A Nocturne Of Nightingales
(Sittele 1993)
As a genre, field recordings of animals have rarely ventured outside the domains of field guides for wildlife spotters and New Age relaxation tapes. Jean C Roche’s project to record ‘concerts’ of nightingale song, pursued since 1958, escapes the tweeness of its own packaging largely through the arresting qualities of the nightingale song itself. Billed as high art performances given in “Woodland Edge In Bourgogne, May” or “In Willows Beside A Lake, Southern Finland, June”, the brief and flickering patterns of oscillating sound, diving whines, aggressive pulses and piercing beats in a shifting variety of timbres bear striking affinities with the more futuristic tinkerings of human on analogue synthesizers. Not so much a question of framing nature with music, as framing music with nature. Species fusion music has yet to be investigated.

Royal Trux – Twin Infinitives
(Drag City 1990)
Track titles like “Kool Down Wheels” and “Jet Pet” may evoke mid-70s Aerosmith, but this 1990 double album from Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, aka Royal Trux, sits on the very brink of chaos. Hagerty described it mischievously as “harmolodic rock ‘n’ roll”. Given the duo’s former heroin habit, it would be tempting to write off Twin Infinitives as some drug-crazed splurge. But this churning cauldron of anti-rock and Improv noise has its own logic: atonal vocals, drums, boiling synths and ragged guitar lines collide, often in different metres. The roots of rock and free jazz are ransacked for inspiration, then reassembled in startling new forms. And although the album is totally uncompromising, it is hard to resist its fantastic atmospheres. There had been nothing else like in this decade. MB

Arthur Russell – World Of Echo
(Upside/Rough Trade 1986)
One of the least-honoured links between disco and the avant garde, Russell, a cellist whose experiments were too much for the Manhattan School of Music, wa making connections between the formats as soon as he hit New York in the mid-70s. Though not his first release, World Of Echo – for solo cello, voice, effects and electronics – encapsulated many of his ideas for loose-limbed music that kept curiosity at its heart. Echo remains an extraordinary record: sonar rhythms and melodies drift through various layers of sound and meaning, like a metaphor for the unconsciousness. Russell, who died in 1992 from AIDS, is remembered for his disco singles – “Kiss Me Again”, “Is It All Over My Face”, “Go Bang”, the latter resurrected by Todd Terry’s “Bango” – and co-founding Sleeping Bag Records; but this record, categorized as just plain weird when it was released, should be re-examined closely. LG

Bally Sagoo – Wham Bam 2, The Second Massacre
(Oriental Star Agencies 1992)
“Let’s massacre, c’mon take my hand!” Indeed, who could say no to the original wideboy remixer from the Indian side of Birmingham, as he alternates dancefloor versions of catchy Bollywood choruses with seething rappers talking up his current release as even more world-mashin’ than the last. I love Bally Sagoo because he sample everything in sight and then hurls it all into the mix as if genuinely excited by his new toy, the remix studio. Wham Bam 2 is a cartoon-paced Technicolor outburst of infectious joy, and was the last of Sagoo’s nuff-nutty cassette releases before settling down to a nice sensible deal with Sony as a mature, tasteful producer. Still available in Indian cassette shops. CBe

Buffy Sainte-Marie – Illuminations
(Vanguard 1969)
If Dylan going electric in 1965 turned folk purists into baying hyenas, Buffy Sainte-Marie going electronic would have turned them into kill-hungry wolves, if they weren’t already a spent force. Film maker/archivist Harry Smith had established a precedent for folk-avant garde-shamanic pow wows, but Cree-born Sainte-Marie crosswired them, drawing occult aspects out of her folk and Native American sources with electronics. Synthesized from her guitar and voice, already rich in natural reverb, Michael Czajkowski’s score hallucinates ghost shadows on “Poppies”, edges the supernatural ballad “The Vampire” with eeriness, and hatches a chorus of chimeras out of her setting of Leonard Cohen’s “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot”. When Coil picked up on “God…”, the song linked them into a chain leading to Sesame Street, where Sainte-Marie roosted for five years. Occult enough? BK

Nancy Sesay & The Melodaires – C’est Fab 7″
(It’s War Boys 1980)
The seven inch that has everything. Three lopsided pop songs from 1980 in which the drama takes place on two planes – that of the performance, executed with the uncanny joie vivre of the newborn; and that of the idiosyncratic mixdown, the minutely detailed work of a genius (L Voag), a flamboyant performance in its own right. On the title track, Sesay sings at so high a pitch as to be incomprehensible. A boozy male chorus chips in now and then. The bassline swings and pulls together numberless elements – concrete, doowop, vaudeville even – which your brain tells you shouldn’t fit. The ending has an a cappella reprise of the song swallowed by a deafening, all-encompassing death-ray whine. Incredible. The flipside just deepens the mystery – what is going on? In the apocalyptic “Ballad Of Hong Kong”, manic stereo panning of percussion over horror movie loops gives way to an Ivor Cutleresque interlude, which leads swiftly into a distended ska chorus and then fades into very slowed down piano – Sesay all the while singing her heart out. “National Honk” is a two minute dada operetta, delivered as though it meant life or death. Not just groundbreaking, it burrows into caverns not imagined since Richard Shaver entered Lemuria. EB

Sonny Sharrock – Black Woman
(Vortex 1969)
In 1969, Sonny Sharrock, America’s first free jazz guitarist (prominent on such Pharoah Sanders albums as Tauhid) was well into his 1967-73 stint in jazz-pop flautist Herbie Mann’s group, terrorizing Mann fans with uncompromising blasts of atonal electric guitar. Not only did Mann love that clash, he produced this album, Sharrock’s first as a leader, for an Atlantic subsidiary. The album, with a cast of New York free jazz all-stars including pianist Dave Burrell, bassist Norris Jones (aka Sirone), trumpeter Ted Daniel, drummer Milford Graves, and more, features Linda Sharrock’s Patty Waters/Yoko Ono-influenced vocals, with healthy dollops of soul and gospel. I’ve heard side two’s opening track described as “an adaptation of a lullaby [used by Canteloube in his Chants D’Auvergne] culminating in the rape and dismemberment of the singer”. Linda’s fierce wails and screeches are as aggressive as her husband’s guitar playing, yet there’s an unavoidable pop element in the music suggesting that, however naively, the participants believed that they could reach amass audience. Alas, this eccentric musical grab bag (which also touched on Country blues with the first appearance of Sonny’s “Blind Willie”, here played solo on acoustic guitar) was too far out even for those times. A year later, the couple’s music became more extreme on the also-legendary monkey-pockie-boo. SH

Silver Apples – Contact
(Kapp Records 1969)
Being an RAF brat who spent many years abroad, USAF radio stations exposed me to what seemed to be impossibly exotic musics. Along with raw blues, hot gospel, gutsy soul and hard R&B; were Beefheart, Hendrix and the enigmatic Silver Apples (named presumably after Morton Subotnick’s 1967 synthesizer composition Silver Apples Of The Moon). As America swooned on surf, swayed to psychedelia or melted to Jack Jones, The Silver Apples were in their bunker, shaping strangeness from a drum set, a banjo and a homemade hybrid oscillator, ‘the Simeon’, named after the duo’s vocalist. I easily succumbed. Contact, their second album, a four-track recording fusing layered oscillators, sustained chords, frantic skitterings of unearthly insects and Dan Taylor’s metronomic drumming, is the sound of the American dream dissolving into a nightmare. Simeon’s vocals are thin and piercing, incanting spaced-out paranoia or rambling wistful stream-of-consciousness shards pre-dating Underworld’s dislocated lists. They provided blueprints for Suicide, Kraftwerk, Can, Neu!, Eno and the New York ‘No Wave’ artists, and as with many pioneers, they quickly disappeared into obscurity. RM

Luke Skyywalker – I Wanna Rock 12″
(Luke Records 1992)
The guiltiest of guilty pleasures. Former 2 Live Crew member Luke Skyywalker is without a doubt the biggest asshole in music history this side of GG Allin, but this record – which along with the ascendancy of champion scratch DJ Magic Mike moved Miami Bass from its Electro roots to a more streamlined version of breakbeat science (so it actually set about 500 square miles of the world on fire) – sets his unrepentant ribaldry to a beat with so much relentless forward momentum that I’d forgive him for spending the rest of the record talking about his favourite position from the Kama Sutra (which, in fact, he does). Perhaps inevitably, the dirty version rocks a lot harder than the clean one. PS

Tim Souster – Swit Drirmz
(Transatlantic 1977)
Had he not died tragically in mid-life in 1996, Souster might now be winning greater recognition for his saboteur assaults on the frontline separating academic electronic composition and art rock. A former Stockhausen pupil, his Intermodulation ensemble with Roger Smalley brought Beat Music – a Pan Sonic-like rhythmic layering of pulses and frequencies – to the Proms at the dawn of the 70s; several pieces on Swit Drimz were written for his subsequent group Odb. Spectral (1972), scored in graphics and standard notation for electronically processed viola, still sounds superb. The other pieces show Souster exploring the capabilities of various synthesizers. Sometimes the results are merely pleasant, as on the New Agey “Afghan Amplitudes”, but in “Music From Afar”, a synthesized voice recites poems – an unsettling vocoder glimpse into a sci-fi future “Surfit”, intertwining fragments of a Beach Boys interview with live percussion and keyboard, seemed rather pedestrian even in 1976, but prefigured today’s debates on the tension between the classical theoretical approach and the popular impetus toward exploring technology’s sound potential for the sheer hell of it. BWi

Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence – Oar
(Columbia 1969)
This brilliant album – a progenitor of both the loner/stoner and lo-fi movements – was conceived while Spence was incarcerated in a notorious New York mental institution. He had landed there following a series of evil drug-instigated shenanigans he visited upon the member of his group Moby Grape. Recorded on three track(!), absolutely solo, Oar represents a type of internalized psychedelic exploration that would not find a real audience for decades. It would be incorrect to say that the company dumped the record. Oar was reviewed very positively in Rolling Stone, and ads for it ran in the US music magazines. But it is such a dark suite of songs and so accepting of its hopelessness that there was never a chance in hell that hippy turds would latch onto it. BC

Spontanous Music Ensemble – Karyobin
(Chronoscope 1968)
SME had already been going for a couple of years when Karyobin was recorded in 1968. Drummer John Stevens has pushed the group from the freedom of jazz into the wider challenge of collective free improvisation. The awareness and openness this demanded on the part of the musicians can be heard throughout this pioneering album. Compared to the magnificent raging bark of Peter Brotzmann’s Machine Gun (recorded a couple of months later), the music on Karyobin distances itself from the energy and impassioned self-expression of free jazz. Evan Parker and Kenny Wheeler play with extraordinary closeness, between and beneath them Derek Bailey had already taken the guitar into unheard-of territory. The rhythmic flexibility of John Steven’s gentle work provides the space for it all to happen. Like the best of the improvised music that has followed in the ensuing 30 years, it touched on a special kind of intensified awareness, an in-the-moment saying and listening that is enthralling to hear unfold. WM

Mark Stewart & The Maffia – To Cope With Cowardice
(On-U Sound 1983)
After the delirious punk-funk excursions of The Pop Group, Stewart teamed up with ex-members of The Sugarhill Gang and engineer/producer Adrian Sherwood, whose radically inventive approach to sound is still not fully appreciated. It was the perfect alchemical marriage of wayward genius an exercise in inspired miscegenation that drew upon elements of dub, brittle funk, cut-up tapes, and noise. Mark Stewart’s abrasive, yet seductive vocals had found their perfect musical complement. Dystopian visions – unsurprising, considering the contemporary political climate – collide with an almost quasi-mysticai radicalism, derived equally from Jamaican dub and the likes of Blake and Shelley. The highlight of this astonishing record is Stewart’s version of “Jerusalem”, the ultimate statement of radical visionary consciousness that would have been the perfect sound track to Jarman’s The Last Of England. JE

Sun Ra – Strange Strings
(Saturn 1967)
For more than a year Sun Ra had been collecting exotic stringed instruments from curio shops and music stores on his travels, and had gathered together a koto, some ukuleles, a mandolin, and various Chinese instruments. One day at a rehearsal in 1966 he passed them out to the horn and reed players of The Arkestra and explained that their next record would be with strings, since they needed to reach their audience in a different way than traditional jazz could provide. When they complained that they didn’t know how to tune the instruments, much less play them, Sun Ra explained how that was precisely the point it was to be an exercise in ignorance, music at the point where knowledge gave way to the pure spirit which could guide their playing. The result was a remarkable piece of textural, atonal music, save for the few moments where singer Art Jenkins growled through a megaphone. In retrospect they seem to have found the nexus at which Stockhausen and Cornelius Cardew’s scratch orchestras met; but if anything, Strange Strings is a more organic and satisfying work, all the more astonishing as having been the most completely improvised piece of music in the history of jazz. JFS

The United States Of America – The United States Of America
(CBS 1968)
Sometime John Cage associate Joseph Byrd summoned a collection of liberal-minded musicians armed with ring modulators and anti-establishment principles to make an experimental rock record which deserves to be as widely known as contemporaneous efforts by The Velvet Underground and The Silver Apples. Eschewing guitars in favour of violins, organs, calliope, harpsichord and pure electronics, The United States Of America achieved a unique hybrid of psychedelia and electronica which giddily reworked vaudeville and downhome Americana, encircling its sources with vocalist Dorothy Moscowitz’s Iysergic melodic swoops and wildly oscillating synthesized tonebursts. “Where Is Yesterday?” sampled a solemn “Agnus Dei”, and the closing “The American Way Of Love” weaves fragments from the whole record into a wayward tape tapestry. As far as I know, Byrd only made one more record (The American Metaphysical Circus, credited to Joe Byrd & The Field Hippies), but with The United States Of America, he opened up territory which disappointingly few have seen fit to explore further. CS

Galina Ustvolskaya – Galina Ustvblskaya No 1
(Hat Art CD 1991)
The description ‘the lady with the hammer’ makes Ustvolskaya sound like a Russian Mrs. Thatcher, but her music is as much Horror as Hammer. Born in 1919, and a student of Shostakovich, she forged a totally independent path. She made no compromise with the regime, and her music was not performed. This was, as far as I’m aware, the first recording of her music on a Western label, probably the first ever. Hers is an austere tonal world of extreme, often violent contrasts, expressing a despair that invites an obvious political interpretation. Pianist Reinbert De Leuw and his colleagues perform works from all periods. The Duet For Violin And Piano, and the Piano Sonata, are in a mature style that shows an unflinching realism. Unlike other composers who could be called ‘religious Minimalists’, exposure for Ustvolskaya has come very late. But her heroic music must be considered too forbidding for New Age success. AH

The Walker Brothers – Nite Flights
(GTO Records 1978)
Only the first four tracks, Scott Walker’s own, concern me, as the rest of the album is given over to the other ‘brothers, with mediocre results. “Shutout” rips open with ominous bass, knife-edge drumming and a heavy sustained chord screaming into a tunnel of absolute despair. One of the best voices in contemporary music enters, stabbing an elliptical litany of terrors chased by Les Davidson’s chainsaw guitar eating into metal. The brooding atmosphere is set as Walker breathes wreath-like free falls throughout the surging skin-bursting of “Fat Mama Kick” and “Nite Flights”. “The Electrician”, a masterpiece (also bizarrely released as the most uncommercial single ever), follows; the ultimate in barbed intensity. Walker pours venom against US involvement in the politics of torture in South America, from within an evil cloud of shimmering menace (echoing the Eno/Bowie/Visconti hinterlands of Low and Lodger). A middle section flashes from the electric storm as lush orchestration eases into a calming Spanish guitar only to plunge back into the velvet blackness. Brutally honest, somber yet sensual, these tracks shimmer and resonate with as much relevance and power now as they did when they were originally released to near obscurity 20 years ago. RM

Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson – Ain’t That A Bitch
(DJM 1976)
Introduced to a state of the art studio (Paramount) and engineer (Kerry McNabb) by Frank Zappa, the Gangster of Love, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, cut the best-sounding funk album of all time in 1976. Futuristic lyrics (“Superman Lover”) complemented Watson’s unerring ear for note placement. He alchemized the styles he had dallied with in the last two decades rockin’ R&B;, sepia Sinatra balladry, slick soulman confessional and a new superfrosted funk. Bassist Steve Neil, sacked because he asked for too much money, was replaced by bass overdubs. Watson also supplied keyboards, guitar and vocals – each one replete with his unique ‘attitude’. Drummer Emry Thomas and a horn section that included England’s own free jazz hero Paul Dunmall completed a killer sound; as steely and urgently urban as Edgard Varese, as slinky as Nat King Cole, as sharp and sassy as no one else in recorded history. BWa

X-103 – Atlantis
(Axis/Tresor 1993)
Jeff Mill’s solo follow-up to Underground Resistance’s Rings of Saturn project confounded the conventions of the utilitarianism of hard Techno, and the hashish hazy listening of Ambient. I bought the LP on the back of UR 12″s, and found it difficult but relentlessly fascinating. Stylus on vinyl stalks the circular structure of the underwater city through a series of alien rippling ambiences and metallic rhythm workouts. While “Eruption” outstrips any Gabba track for sheer punishing energy, the warbling “Thera” is an understated moment of gothic magnificence. Five years on, Mill’s ideas are now almost mainstream – “Hagia Triada” is similar to his Purpose Maker track “Alarms”, now a standard DJ mixing tool – and how many are still out there on their own. “Minnia”, my favorite Mills piece, sounds like Miklos Rosza with Grace Jones’s “Slave To The Rhythm” turning into an early Chicago House track. MSh

Larry Young – Laurence of Newark
(Perception 1973)
Jazz hepsters may have deeply dug Larry Young’s numerous vibrant Hammond organ workouts for Prestige and Blue Note, but those who longed to hear him stretch out that massive sound of his more imaginatively on record would have to wait until the early 70s. Young’s new found freedom, which took off on John McLaughlin’s Devotion album and the records he made with Tony Williams Lifetime, soared on Laurence of Newark, where his playing entered another creative dimension. The beating heart of the record is “Khalid of Space Part Two” (Part One remains missing to this day) – 12 minutes of Sun Ra inspired cosmo jam that pushes Young and his ‘Arkestra’ toppling over the edge of free jazz freakout to tear a mindblowing solo from the primal fretboard of James ‘Blood’ Ulmer. Young’s untimely death, and the imprisonment of Perception’s founder, ensured that no further experiments of this kind would be carried out. Meanwhile, Laurence Of Newark begs to be reissued. EP

Contributors: Steve Barker, Ed Baxter, Mike Barnes, Clive Bell, Chris Blackford, Linton Chiswick, Byron Coley, Cristoph Cox, Brian Duguid, Robin Edgerton, John Everall, Matt Effytche, Sasha Frere-Jones, Louise Gray, Andy Hamilton, Richard Henderson, Ken Hollings, Steve Holtje, Mark Hudson, David Ilic, David Keenan, Biba Kopf, Art Lange, Peter McIntyre, Andy Medhurst, Russell Mills, Will Montgomery, Tim Owen, Edwin Pouncey, Tom Ridge, Mike Shallcross, Peter Shapiro, Chris Sharp, Mark Sinker, John F Szwed, David Toop, John L Walters, Ben Watson, Barry Witherden, Douglas Wolk, Rob Young

30 runners-up that were left out of the original article.

King Sunny AdeJu-Ju Music (Island 1982)

The album that should have pushed African music into the public eye, it
actually succeeded in burying it ever deeper. An album of intricately
melodic guitars, thundering percussion, call-and-response talking drums,
it was as much a marketing device as a musical statement. Island
Records, looking for a replacement for Bob Marley as the standard bearer
of tropical music, picked up on the commercial potential of Ade’s
earlier work such as Private Line and simply decided to make him that
man. They invested heavily in prmoting Ju-Ju Music – with considerable
success – but leant heavily on Ade to tailor his sound to a Western
audience. The follow-up, Synchro System, although an even bigger
success, was clearly a compromise, one that Ade – a proud man of royal
lineage – was no longer prepared to accept. His music reverted to type,
its Yoruba lyrics and ever-complex rhythms straying right off the
commercial path. Island dropped him and the boom ended. PM

Arcane DeviceEngine Of Myth (ReR Megacorp)

Any album that namechecks Tod Dockstader is all right with me. An
uncredited soundtrack to one of Arthur Machen’s unfilmable stories. A
ledge of noise stuck inside an awesome abyss of sound. A psychotic lathe
unsupervised. Great to mix in with Tubby dubs on the unsuspecting
dancefloor. The horror! Word is that Mr Arcane Device has submitted to
the call of the Lord. SB

The Art Ensemble Of ChicagoFanfare For The Warriors (Atlantic 1974)

The Art Ensemble’s first studio recording for a major US label, produced
in 1973 (funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, following their
return from Europe) featured new member Don Moye playing small
percussion and AACM anchor Muhal Richard Abrams, piano. The seven tracks
range from Jarman’s mytho-poetics on “Illistrum” through Bowie’s raucous
“Barnyard Scuffel Shuffel” to the brief first realization of Mitchell’s
“Nonaah”, demonstrating the rangy “Great Black Music, Ancient To The
Future” concept as well as the members’ bracing collective virtuosity.
It’s particularly notable for Muhal’s contributions, as most ‘free’
groups in that period abjured pianists’ presumed harmonic contraints.
But this music is wide open, rigorously detailed, sometimes meditative,
sometimes screaming, and mostly masterful fun. HM

Baby FordFord Trax (Rhythm King 1988)

Manchester born, New Zealand raised, Peter Ford’s tender years were
spent listening to Marc Bolan, Northern Soul and David Bowie, in the
days when he was any good. It was predictable that this melange would
show up as influences in his own music, less predictable that Ford would
discover concrete techniques for himself (it was in these tape
experiments that his debut single, “Oochy Koochy”, would originate), and
wed them to a revamped song format. Launched into the hubbub of London’s
1988 Acid House scene, Ford Trax contained plenty – “My Innersence”,
“Crashing”, the wonderful “Chikki Chikki Ahh Ahh” (it lost its original
title, “Disco Me To Ecstasy”, as a concession to prevalent drug panics),
with its warped proto-Third Man catch melody – to keep the night feet
flying. But Ford Trax was something more, too: its darker, melancholic
moments show themselves the product of a sensitive writer whose talents,
quite possibly, were eclipsed by the squelches of a 303. Still living in
London, Ford now DJs and runs his own indie label. LG

Ray CharlesThe Spirit Of Christmas (CBS 1985)

Apart from Phil Spector’s famously kitsch effort, the Christmas record
is not a tradition regarded with much affection, but in 1985 Ray Charles
recorded an epic that aficionadi return to each Yuletide. Charles’s
magnificent voice is wielded like a glossy tenor saxophone and
evaporates all doubts about the sentiment-oozing programme. Trumpeter
Freddie Hubbard contributed brilliantly sleek solos to “What Child Is
This” and “All I Want For Christmas”. Jeff Pevar’s guitar keeps
surfacing, insinuating and blue. The knock-out punch was “Rudolph The
Red Nosed Reindeer”: Charles managed to turn this most irritatingly
perky of jingles into a lugubrious, soulful lament. To hear Charles
adlib the aside “ah, Rudolph!” is to experience the most poignant
détournement of late 20th century art. And of course, the blind,
bow-tied genius is posing on the cover in a winter wonderland. He’s
standing on a horse-drawn sleigh, holding the reins. Unbelievable. BW

Vinicius CantuariaSol Na Cara (Gramavision 1997)

The should have been the summer album of 1997, when singer, songwriter
and guitarist Cantuária made a brief, stunning contribution to Laurie
Anderson’s Meltdown. Sol Na Cara is a recording of great subtlety and
musicality, with some appropriately hip little machines, guitar noises
and electronic bleeps courtesy of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Arto Lindsay, who
mixed it at the relaxed Kampo Cultural Centre, a New York building owned
by a Japanese master of calligraphy. There are no inverted commas around
Cantuária’s work. Like a calligrapher, he expresses his art in a few
brush strokes, and his collaborators resist the temptation to overdo the
overdubs. The material could have been more consistent, but there are
some outstanding tracks, including “O Nome Dela” (“Her Name”), with
Lindsay’s fabulously restrained guitar scratchings, and “Sol Na Cara”
(“The Sun On Your Face”), with YMO-ish synths and a lyric containing the
typical Wire reader’s recipe for a lazy day: “Lie in the hammock,
swing/And bring the guitar/I want to play/Play some dissonant chords,
come dream”. JLW

Charles Brown SuperstarDays Of Our Drive/Sweet Piece Of Ass (Win 1995)

LA’s volatile Charles Brown Superstar were beyond perverse: this, their
only album (though it includes both of their earlier EPs), was only
released in a small run of vinyl double LPs, without even a track
listing. But they had a huge two-bass swoop-attack, a singer whose
sneering little-girl voice was nearly obliterated by the waves of bass
and electronics, and one brilliantly shining hybrid of unstoppable
machines and delicate flesh: “Beestung Remix,” which occupies most of
the fourth side – first backwards, then forwards, and finally in its
rocked-up non-remixed version. You can hear the “creative differences”
between kiddie chants and gut-snarling low-end grime and mechanical
hypnosis that eventually broke up the band; the album sounds like
fragile, jury-rigged common ground, and rocks like it’s about to
collapse. DW

Lowell DavidsonLowell Davidson Trio (ESP Disk 1965)

If this pianist’s star-crossed career had developed differently, free
jazz piano could have acquired a style template fitting in between those
of Paul Bley and Cecil Taylor. Born in 1941 in Boston, he died in 1990;
in those 49 years his issued output consisted solely of this
intermittently available album. After studying biochemistry at Harvard,
in the mid-60s Davidson moved to New York, where he played with Ornette
Coleman and cut this LP with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Milford
Graves. Later Davidson played drums in an early line-up of The New York
Art Quartet, but a lab accident affected him both mentally and
physically, short-circuiting his career. ESP never had very high sonic
standards, and this is one of the label’s worst-engineered efforts.
Peacock is nearly inaudible except when Davidson lays out, and the
overall sound is flat, tinny, and undefined. But the music is
fascinating. Davidson worries small thematic nuggets until he has
produced myriad possibilities from them (sometimes suggesting an atonal
Thelonious Monk) and scatters evanescent, twisting right-hand runs in a
style that, while hardly lacking in energy, stands in stark contrast
both to Cecil Taylor’s monumental sonic edifices and to the dense,
furious blowing of the New York school of improvisors who grew out of
Ayler and Coltrane. Throughout, Graves gooses the proceedings with a
masterful array of polyrhythms. Whether considered a false start/dead
end or an intriguing might-have-been from a historical perspective,
musically speaking this album continues to tantalize the few who
discover it. SH

Dead Can DanceThe Serpent’s Egg (4AD CD 1988)

Released in 1988, Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard’s fourth album is
notable for its medieval-effect aesthetic; simple, yet imaginative use
of strings create space for Gerrard’s mournfully expressive voice, as it
alternates with Perry’s rich, lulling baritone. The voices are the
strength at the heart of the album, upholding a channelled intensity
that’s sustained throughout; similarly, the traditional arrangements
benefit from a contemporary twist, as loops of violin, church organ and
hurdy-gurdy weave through each other with considerable finesse.
Overdubbed plainchant and spartan polyphonic vocal pieces like “Orbis De
Ignis” provide the album’s more magical elements, but it’s Perry’s
smouldering voice on “Severance” that truly ignites it, accompanied only
by the wake-like tones of a church organ. Even after repeated
listenings, these remain the most enchanting set of songs I’ve ever
heard. VPI

Eric DolphyOut To Lunch (Blue Note 1964)

Composer/reedist Eric Dolphy pushed the envelope from the inside out in
1964, convening the perfect ensemble to realize his five startling
originals wedding 20th century compositional obliqueness and impassioned
avant garde improvisation. Originality, concentration, interplay and
vivid nuance are this music’s strengths: on “Hat And Beard”, a sketch of
Monk, Dolphy unleashes the bass clarinet’s ’til-then-unknown gruffness;
Freddie Hubbard aims his horn skyward; Bobby Hutcherson hammers then
lightly sweeps his vibes; bassist Richard Davis and drummer Tony
Williams create a beat-shifting round. “Something Sweet, Something
Tender” has both languour and surprise stop-times; in its final chorus,
Dolphy blows and Davis bows, as one. On “Gazzelloni”, dedicated to the
daring Italian flautist, Eric extends that instrument even further, over
Willliams’s super taste and touch; the title track maintainssuspense for
12 minutes, while “Straight Up And Down” is actually kinky and craggy. A
unique achievement, even for the one and only Dolphy. HM

Bob DylanLive At The Manchester Free Trade Hall (Bootleg/Columbia 1966)

Long the Holy Grail amongst Dylan collectors (alongside the original
Basement Tapes), and now at last scheduled for official release by
Columbia, this is the exact moment, preserved forever, when rock became
truly electrified. In 1966 Dylan was at the height of his
abstract/visionary powers, midway through a tour that guitarist Robbie
Robertson likened to a war zone. Slow clapping, walkouts and the sheer
level of abuse suffered by Dylan and The Hawks each night had already
claimed one casualty in drummer Levon Helm who dropped out in late 65,
claiming he couldn’t stand the thought of “taking it to Europe and
hearing this shit”. The Free Trade Hall was where it all finally blew
up. Two sets – Dylan solo with acoustic and harmonica was by this time
so extended and free-form, “Visions Of Johanna” in particular shaped
only by Dylan’s resonant way of chewing over phrases, the sounds of the
words equally as important as the lyrics, arcing across the roof of the
auditorium. The electric set is so charged with aggression and nervous
energy it looms and builds until finally all hell breaks loose when some
lone jerk screams out “Judas!” as Dylan rises from the piano. “I don’t
believe you”, Dylan spits, “You’re a liar!” He turns to face the group,
saying, “Play fuckin’ loud!”, and Mickey Jones’s snare crack kicks “Like
A Rolling Stone” into your face. DK

The 49 AmericansWe Know Nonsense (Quartz LP 1982)

Not many of those visiting the London Musicians Collective venue in
Camden Town during the late 1970s, and hearing the free improvisors
active therein, would have conceived the idea of recording an album of
happy-go-lucky pop songs with them. But that’s exactly what American
expat Giblet (alias Andrew Brenner) set out to do, and so here are 17
doo-wop, disco and samba ditties produced and co-written by David Toop
and Steve Beresford. Musicians include Lol Coxhill, Peter Cusack, Max
Eastley, Viv Albertine (of The Slits), and Etta and Eddy Saunders. The
sense of childlike fun is palpable as the album waves a flag for
unpretentious pop – as Giblet sings on “It’s Time”: “Happy music doesn’t
have to be dumb; there’s a lot of sense, at no expense, in motor
discharge baby”. CBe

Jimmy GiuffreFree Fall (Columbia 1962)

Recorded in 1962, Free Fall put the kibosh on Jimmy Giuffre’s recording
career for nearly 10 years. Condemned for not being ‘real’ jazz,
Columbia responded by deleting the album after several months;
unbelievably, it remained out of print until 1995. Unlike the tumultuous
outpourings on most free jazz LPs of the 60s, Free Fall was a velvet
revolution. Giuffre abandoned time, key and metre in search of a largely
non-idiomatic, freely improvised music of exceptional subtlety,
precision, spatial awareness and restraint. You hang on every nuance of
expression. His radical solo clarinet improvisations presage the work of
Evan Parker, while his duets and trios with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow
are models of clarity and sensitivity. And it still sounds utterly
modern. CBl

Golden Gate Jubilee QuartetGolden Gate Gospel Train (Bluebird 1937)

With their inch-perfect syncopation, slick harmonies and Mills
Brothers-style imitations of trumpets, trains and basses, The Golden
Gate Quartet were more worldly than any of their early gospel
contemporaries. Their suavity, however, barely contained a ferocious
sense of swing that lurked just beneath the surface and anticipated the
‘hard gospel’ quartets of the 50s. Beating out stiff competition from
“Midnight Special”, “Hot Rails To Hell”, “Mystery Train” and “Crazy
Train”, “Golden Gate Gospel Train” is the best train song of them all
because, unlike the others, it has a locomotion that suggests that their
anticipation is almost over and the train is right around the bend. PS

Hot GossipThe Hollywood Jungle (DinDisc unreleased 1981)

Choreographer Arlene Philips’s Hot Gossip was the dance troupe best
known for its inserts on the Kenny Everett Show. For this project, they
recruited producer Richard Burgess and arranger John Walters, who
recorded a rhythm section including Harvey Mason and Airto Moreira at
Conway Sound in Los Angeles. For its repertoire of alternative pop
covers (including “Satisfaction”, “I Burn For You” and Metro’s “Criminal
World”), the album was cast like a cult movie, with cameos from Ian
Carr, Chris Heaton, Guy Barker, Francis Monkman and Andy Pask’s peerless
fretless bass. Phil Minton, Maggie Nicols and Julie Tippetts provided
improvised backing vocals. Has David Sanborn played better than in his
passionate scream of consciousness on “Sister Europe” (a curiously
perverted Psychedelic Furs ballad)? Is this the first example of Gil
Evans playing on someone else’s record (flanged, Monk-ish piano on Percy
Mayfield’s “Hit The Road Jack”)? Was anyone ready for the triple axe
line-up of David Rhodes, Ray Russell and Derek Bailey on Adam Ant’s
“Press Darlings”? The multitracks still languish in Virgin’s vaults,
perhaps waiting for some enterprising remixer, perhaps some different
lead vocalists, to re-awaken the rejected album’s eccentric charms. JLW
(yes, that JLW)

Howlin’ WolfThe Howlin’ Wolf Album aka This is Howlin’ Wolf’s New Album
And He Doesn’t Like It (Chess/Cadet 1968)

The second darkest day of my life was when I discovered that a summer
tenant (a law student, no less) had stolen this album. I lost more than
the outrageous sum of money I paid for it; its very universal power
scalds anyone exposed to it. (Think more Ark of the Covenant, less
collector marginalia.) In 1968, the Chess family wanted to pull the
hippy consumers turning the blues market into the rock market and to
this end they put the greatest shouter of all time (allegedly against
his objections) in front of an electric band and recut some of his old
hits. It just so happened that the group, including Morris Jennings on
drums and Pete Cosey and Phil Upchurch on guitars, was capable of
outdoing both Funkadelic and The Meters at their own game, and unafraid
to get very foreground and doubly black. (So much for the hippies.) This
line-up also recorded two albums with Muddy Waters – After The Rain and
Electric Mud &emdash; that come close to the majesty, but there’s no
topping Howlin’s polytonal bellow. Combine that voice with the rhythm
and noise here and you have evidence of the greatest rock group that
never was. MCA has only reissued Electric Mud, but here’s hoping
someonewakes up. Until then, if you see a copy, buy it and send it to
me. And then get yourself one, even if you don’t eat for the rest of the
year. SFJ

Lee KonitzMotion (Verve 1961)

Surprised at Lee Konitz jamming with Ornette Coleman at an Italian jazz
fest this past summer? Don’t be. Konitz has often ventured into the
thickets of melodic free association over the course of his nearly 50
year career – not that he’s been given credit where it’s due. Everyone
knows about his freeform experiments with Lennie Tristano, and you can’t
play “The Song Is You” (Lone-Lee) unaccompanied for 40 minutes without
drifting away from the chords for a spell. But Motion is a masterpiece
and proves that Ornette and Cecil Taylor weren’t the only ones exploring
music without a map in 1961. It isn’t total freedom, but the episodes
of ‘pure’ melodic improvisation are frequent and fascinating. Part of
the credit must go to Elvin Jones, whose drumming offers buoyant
polyrhythmic possibilities as well as enough open space for the altoist
to imply his own spontaneous directions. AL

LabradfordA Stable Reference (Kranky/Flying Nun 1995)

After their more elemental Prazision debut, Labradford’s second album
was a fully realised exploration of atmospheric, textural music whihc
dismanled conventional ‘rock’ structures and rassembled them in
different forms. Using a combination of analogue synths and pared-back
guitar and bass. Labradford created a kind of reinvented futurism which
floated timelessly in its own space. Here skeletal song structures
emerged out of abstract sound, guitar notes floating up out the ether
and lyrics reduced to a ghostly whisper. A Stable Reference was perhaps
the clearest signifier of a burgeoning underground shift towards greater
experimentation and abstraction inthe pursuit of a genuine alternative
in an increasingly homogenised ‘alternative’ rock culture. TR

Last ExitLast Exit (Enemy 1986)

Recordings which broach a new rapport between hitherto disparate strands
of music are few and far between. Last Exit’s debut was one such –
marrying the aggressive dynamics of electricity anbd amplification to
the visceral intensity of free music. remarkably, it nonetheless remains
staunchly non-idiomatic. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Miles’s In
A Silent Way are its only real documented forebears – although these
were works of individualistic genius, whereas Last Exit exemplify
collective endeavour. Bill Laswell, Shannon Jackson, Peter Brotzmann and
Sonny Sharrock distil their essences into a thrillingly potent group
exorcism &emdash; Laswell’s bassline melding Jackson’s awesomely potent
harmolodic polyrhythms with Brotzmann’s primal b ellow and Sharrock’s
excoriation of the blues. TO

JB LenoirAlabama Blues (Bellaphon CD 1965)

Just as folkies were picking up the remnants of American Country blues,
and The Rolling Stones were starting to brag about the size of their
mojos, JB Lenoir cut one of the finest post-war blues albums, and one of
the few to deal head-on with contemporary political issues. Though he’s
generally remembered in blues anthologies by the jaunty electric riff of
“Talk To Your Daughter”, Alabama Blues captured his uncommercial but
preferred acoustic style – stark, intimate protests about racism and
Vietnam, that revealed Alabama as the biblical lion’s den, mixed with
more upbeat items in what he termed ‘African hunch’ rhythms. Prefiguring
the political turn in soul music, the album’s outspokeness caused it to
remain unissued in America for years, though it seems a copy reached
Jimi Hendrix who cited it as an influence. MF

Derrick MayDebut LP (Transmat unreleased)

“The album I did which has not been released is not me toying with
people”. Which album? Is it one of the two Ambient-type LPs that R&S;
(with whom May’s Transmat label have a deal) have allegedly refused to
release? Is it the African drumming project he’s produced with, amongst
others, percussionist Sundiata and former Last Poet Omar Ben Hussain? Do
any of these actually exist? The fact is, since Derrick May, the man
who, together with Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, effectively invented
Techno, pulled the plug on recording activities in 1990, the concept of
an album from the man has become, for many, the Holy Grail of
electronica. The music may have moved on in quantum leaps, but the
brutal beauty of creations such as “R-Tyme” and “Strings Of Life” remain
peerless statements, sounds that moved dance music to a level previously
undreamt of. Will he ever move that music even higher? PM

Rachel’sMusic For Egon Schiele (Quarterstick CD 1996)

Pianist Rachel Grimes originally composed this as a live soundtrack, for
a theatre and dance production of Egon Schiele’s life. The CDs
handmade-style card packaging, with its exquisite sepia-tinged sleeve
and accompanying booklet, is the first thing that catches your eye, but
it’s really the skeletal structure of the musicthat conveys the
austerity of Schiele’s work. It’s easy to become swept up in Grimes’s
delicate piano, combining with viola and cello to form a kind of chamber
ensemble framework. Although classical in nature, the gentle timbre
portrays a delicate intimacy, with an aura more reliant on
sophistication than snobbery. This unique, beautiful work succeeds
because it’s flexible enough to uproot deep-seated emotion, while
sending shivers racing down your spine. VPI

The Soul Stirrers (featuring Sam Cooke)Jesus Gave Me Water (Specialty) (1951)

Cooke was 19 and this was his first recording, as a replacement for the
retired lead singer of the most famous gospel group of the day. If he
was nervous, there’s no sign. He swoops, he flies, he floats, he cries.
Solid as rocks, the rest of the group provide the rhythm and structure –
just listen to the vocal bass line from Jesse Farley. The record sold
around 70,000 at the time, a hit in gospel circles but virtually unknown
outside the black ghettoes of America. It was another six years before
the rest of the country discovered Sam Cooke’s golden voice, when “You
Send Me” topped the pop chart. Sam went onto make some other great
records, but he had put it all together, flawless technique and
controlled emotion, right at the start. CG

The Staple SingersUncloudy Day (Vee Jay Records 1959)

Another alien sound courtesy of the USAF radio stations which were my
conduits to avoid the ‘pap’ music of England during my teens. My first
hearing of The Staples featured Mavis at 15 singing some of the most
plaintive and assured gospel I’ve ever heard. Souldful and deeply
erotic, this was the throb of heat from the swamps. Against the eerie
plantation guitar of ‘Pops’ Roebuck Staple and the restrained drumming
of Paul Crussman, the five kids snaked complex harmonies to lead Mavis
into the shining mix. Her contralto swooping from arcing melisma to
dark, growling gasps, shuddering into orgasmic moaning. Devotional
deliveries charged with sensuality, undercurrents tremble into
unfettered abstractions asa she flies. Only Mahalia Jackson and Aretha
have come close. “I’m Coming Home”, “Low Is The Way” and “On My Way To
Heaven” are some of the best examples of minimal forces producing
maximum emotional range of extraordinary power. Mavis has one of the
finest voices in the world, capable of sucking tears from the most
determined cynic and of inducing a faint from the devil himself.
Uncloudy Day is the best example of The Staples at their most glorious.
RM

Cecil TaylorLooking Ahead! (Original Jazz Classics 1958)

There’s something peculiarly exciting about listening to serial
rule-breakers back when they were just getting a taste for it. Cecil
Taylor’s late 50s recordings seem all the stronger for their relative
conservatism: the groove they kick against, the sudden cluster, the wide
interval leap against the orthodox walking bass. Looking Ahead!, from
1958, features bassist Buell Niedlinger, drummer Dennis Charles and, in
a stroke of genius, Earl Griffith on vibraphone, and benefits from a
fractured but climactic opening (the minor blues “Luyah! The Glorious
Step”) that must rank amongst some of Taylor’s finest quartet work. LC

Willie Mae ThorntonHound Dog (Vogue 1953)

You ain’t nothing but a hound dog. The record came together more or less
accidentally at a recording session in Los Angeles in August 1952.
Precocious songwriter Jerry Leiber (20 years old) came up with a few
phrases for Willie Mae to spit out with gleeful venom, The Johnny Otis
Band hit a funky mambo groove, and Pete Lewis was goaded into playing
one of the best guitar figures ever, especially in the solo where Willie
Mae exhorts him to growl and moan like a dog without a bone. Three years
later, Elvis truly did shake the world with his reworking of the song,
and Leiber & Stoller had to take Johnny Otis to court to establish that,
young as they were, they really had written the song without his help.
Later, when everybody thought that the only credible performers were
those who wrote their own material, Willie Mae said she wrote it. But I
look into Jerry’s eyes (one brown, one blue) and I believe he thought up
those words – “You can wag your tail but I ain’t gonna feed you no
more”. CG

Lennie Tristano “I Can’t Get Started With You” (Keystone 1946, now
available on The Complete Lennie Tristano on Mercury)

In a year in which the most advanced records made were bop anthems like
Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Things To Come,”
pianist Tristano took a pop song from the 1930s and questioned its very
ground for being. Given only a Nat King Cole-type trio of piano, guitar,
and bass, and the piano vocabularies of Art Tatum and Bud Powell,
Tristano reframed the song with atonal harmonic clusters, moved the
rhythm back and forth between standard time, double time, and
double-double time, and shifted the meter from 4/4 to 2/4 back to 4/4
and ended in 3/8. Gunther Schuller suggests that within only three
minutes, Tristano broke new ground in melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre,
dynamics, form and structure, making it one of the most radical
recordings that jazz has yet produced. JFS

Various ArtistsIce Cream And Suckers (Mercury 1963)

At the same time that more respectable South African musicians like
Dollar Brand, Miriam Makeba, and The Blue Notes were thinking about
making tracks to Europe, the rural township musicians on Ice Cream And
Suckers watched their music leap the ocean to become one of the first
exports to America. . . if they were informed at all. Using Western
instruments – harmonicas, chunky saxophone, lots of guitar &emdash; the
patterns of the highlife dancehall were underlined in funky bass and
drawn above with cascading harmonies. In this collection of singles,
each group has a strong presence that comes from the hybrid of soul and
mbube. The place where cultures collide can form greatness, like the
birth of rocksteady in Jamaica, but a clash is not easy when you’re
trapped in it. When “Mr Bull” (Freddie Gumbi) yelled “You bloody
bastard, get out of my yard!” over the goofy sound effects of a
distressed steer, you wonder what he really meant. An almost painfully
happy record, Ice Cream And Suckers yields a fascinating and
suspiciously sunny picture in a brutal period of history. RE

David S WareThird Ear Recitation (DIW 1993)

Tenor saxophonist David S Ware’s synthesis of free jazz, post-bop and
New Thing traditions is unique. Third Ear Recitation wasn’t his first
great moment &emdash; an alumnus of Cecil Taylor, he was already well
into a solo career – nor is it typical. Conceived as a suite, Ware
ultimately deconstructed his own work to reclaim his original
inspirations, in the process laying bare the mechanics of pianist
Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker’s partnership, one of the
finest in all jazz history. Without Shipp and Parker, Ware would b much
diminished, his trenchant individualism merely demotic bullishness.
Without them, he tears the living heart from jazz standards – “Autumn
Leaves”, in this case – and rends the souls of empathetic listeners. TO

Marva WhitneyIt’s My Thing (King 1969)

Marva Whitney was one of James Brown’s 60s protegées, which is her
blessing and curse. An awesomely powerful gospel-trained screamer
&emdash; she’s basically incapable of singing more than two lines
without going into an ecstatic howl – she got backup from the hardest,
trickiest funk outfit of her day, and on her duet with JB here, “You Got
To Have A Job”, she calls for Maceo Parker like she’s calling down the
judgment of God. But working for the Godfather meant that her own career
was an afterthought where the label was concerned; this is her only
studio album, and bootlegs aside, she only had one solo track left in
print before this year’s James Brown’s Original Funky Divas compilation.
With her crisp, bold grooves and electrifying yell, she deserves better.
DW

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