Arcane Candy

In German, Neu! means New! And in 1971, Neu! was indeed new, as that was the year this archetypical krautrock band formed. (As its name implies, krautrock is a form of German music that developed in the late 1960s and combined elements of non-blues-based rock, psychedelic, avant-garde and ambient.) It didn’t take much time for the members of Neu!–Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother from another pioneering German band called Kraftwerk–to tear their way out of the shrinkwrap that encased them and become one of the very best bands of the genre.

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Charlemagne Palestine has been pushing the Milky Way-wide padded envelope of minimal music and maximal art since the middle of the 20th century. Starting out in New York City in the late 1950s as a student of accordion and piano, Charlemagne scored some early experience as a drummer for beat poets and Tiny Tim. In the ‘60s, he studied piano, painting and sculpture, improvised some electronic drones, played the carillon at a church and composed music for the Tony Conrad film Coming Attractions.

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No, you vehement vegetarians (of which I am one), we’re not talking about healthy Mexican food here. The Lard Free in question was the name of an early ’70s French experimental prog band that was almost as active as Richard Simmons. Led by drummer Gilbert Artman, they recorded three whole albums for your listening enjoyment. The first one from 1973, shockingly enough called Gilbert Artman’s Lard Free, pretty much rules the roost. “Warinobaril” kicks it off with a simple, repetitive, loping bass / drums rhythm section pleasantly overlayed with a handful of single, drawn-out sax notes that eventually get clobbered by a completely unexpected, dissonant, distorted electric guitar that stirs quite a spicy flavor into this sonic soup.

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Joseph Byrd, circa 1961.

Joseph Byrd is a composer and music teacher who’s been working since the 1950s. After starting out playing in pop, jazz and country bands as a Tucson, Arizona teen, Byrd moseyed on over to Stanford college in New York City in 1959, where he became a student of experimental composer John Cage and joined the nascent Fluxus art scene. He even debuted his first minimal music works at Yoko Ono’s loft! Soon after college, Byrd accepted a teaching position at UCLA in the mid ’60s, but after the music bug bit him hard, he quit to play full-time. His most well-known work appeared on two LPs at the end of that decade.

 Byrd’s first band, the short-lived United States of America, splashed out a unique spray of rock, psychedelic and avant-garde music. They eschewed rock’s staple instrument, the electric guitar, in favor of then cutting-edge electronic devices like an early, primitive synthesizer and a ring modulator, the whoosh and bleeps of which they blended in with crystal clear female vocals and searing violin to effortlessly bake a whole loaf’s worth of damaged space age pop. After the release of their one and only self-titled LP in 1968, the band played a few shows, then promptly and predictably imploded due to the usual drug problems and creative differences.

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One time in a restaurant, I encountered by chance a super rad-sounding ’60s song blasting out of the speakers that seemed vaguely familiar. No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t quite dredge up its title or the artist’s name to save my life. “Straight out of 1968!” I thought to myself. I consulted with the DJ and found out the song is called “Send Me a Postcard” by a Dutch band called Shocking Blue.

 The next day, I conducted a web search, and sure enough, the song was recorded in 1968. I nailed it! Seems the band Shocking Blue existed from 1967 to 1974, and, unbeknownst to me, wrote that famous song “Venus” that became a number one hit in the United States in 1970. (Unfortunately, “Venus” also went on to be ruined in the ’80s by some lame dance pop group that I really don’t care to name.) 

And then there are the YouTube videos.

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Sonny Sharrock (1940-1994) was one of the original wild jazz guitarists. After starting out with a little doo-wop singing in the late 1950s, he wanted to play sax after falling under the spell of players like John Coltrane, but couldn’t due to a bad case of asthma. So, he took up the guitar instead. In the late ’60s, inspired by the fiery horn playing of the free jazz movement, he was among the first to pepper his intricate, saxophone-like runs with angular shards of dissonance and feedback. 

Sonny recorded numerous albums throughout his life. The best early example is Black Woman, which contains such disparate elements as country blues, freeform atmospherics, avant-garde vocals and the aforementioned dissonant outbursts.

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Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time! Proto art punk band Debris formed in 1975 in Chickasha, Oklahoma–of all places–and immediately splattered their dull yee-haw surroundings with buckets of “One Way Spit” and absolutely no apologies. During their blink-of-an-eye existence, which only lasted a year, they played a mere four chaotic gigs and documented their unique, improvised, experimentally-tinged brand of aggressive music on a private press LP in an edition of 1000–complete with a super rad-looking reversed out bondage photo on the cover, the likes of which were not particularly common at the time. 

After mailing out copies to rock labels and mags, Debris received a grand total of no signing offers, and, after a smattering of negative reviews, decided to throw in the towel. That’s a shame, as the band would have meshed perfectly with the New York punk and no wave scenes that were just beginning to form. Too bad they were stuck in a midwest podunk town and never received proper acclaim as one of the first ’70s punk bands!

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Dom was a krautrock band that was more obscure than your first pair of socks. They made a personal appearance on Earth–more precisely Dusseldorf, Germany–from 1969 through the early ‘70s and recorded a really captivating and incredibly nice-sounding folk / psych / electro-acoustic merger in early 1972 called Edge of Time. According to the liner notes, Dom was also “the name of an acid trip you could stay on for nearly two days. You will hear this influence throughout the tracks.” Since they only recorded this one album, let us take a blow-by-blow look at it, shall we? 

“Introitus” begins with a flowing atmosphere of gorgeous acoustic guitar picking and strumming, and some really brain-massaging flute and tablas that are all very beyond right on. About four minutes along, the music suddenly dissolves into an abstract collage full of cymbals, bells and hectic electronic static panned to and afro. Some sparse, somber organ notes are then sustained, joined later by nice acoustic guitar strums that fade in, then percussion. After the organ takes a nose-dive, there is a sudden stop. 

A pensive organ field with subtle disruptions opens “Silence” and slowly segues into more supremely mellow, distant, atmospheric jamming with some nice inaudible muttering.

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Brainticket was an experimental quasi-Krautrock band who were belched out of the hub of the spiral galaxy known as Switzerland in 1968. The band released an astounding psychedelic / musique concrete artifact in 1971 that sports the unlikely and awkward name Cottonwoodhill. Although Swiss in origin, it easily crosses over into neighboring Krautrock borders in most people’s minds. After a couple of short, four-minute psych rock jams that prominently display soothing flute melodies, spastic organ outbursts, and rocking bass, drums, tablas and heavily distorted electric guitar, this group of acid gurus launch into a hyper-intense 25-minute masterpiece of psych / concrete insanity.

 A very repetitious, distorted electric guitar line backed with tabla serves as a nice rhythmic backdrop for a myriad of concrete sounds: glass smashing, motorcyle revving, sirens wailing, crowds cheering, school bells ringing, electronic swirls flitting, some insane reverberated laughing, rain pouring, water rushing,

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Fifty Foot Hose was a San Francisco psychedelic rock / electronics band that originally operated for a hot minute in the late 1960s. A little bit more short-lived and obscure than your average goldfish, they released only one single and an LP on the Limelight label, which was better known for its experimental electronic fare. Titled Cauldron, it proffered a Jefferson Airplane-like sound combined with primitive, chattering and pinging electronics. 

”And After” pops open the disc with nothing more than two minutes worth of low, pulsing, distorted electronics. The Airplane influence appears most obviously on “If Not This Time,” with its San Francisco-style dry strum and doubled female vocals, which were fortunately sprinkled with odd, flitting electronics and a homely melody. A short, Joe Byrd-like electronic ambience called “Opus 777” appears for all of 22 seconds, followed by more Airplane during “Things That Concern You” but with male vocals. “Opus 11” shows off more short flitting electronics, while “Red the Sign Post” brings forth some raw garage rock with distorted guitars.

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