1001 Albums To Hear Before You Die by Teuben Rasker Lyrics
Anna Lockwood | The Glass World of Anna Lockwood (1970)Amongst a particular cadre of experimental musicians and field recordists, Anna – or, as she was subsequently credited, Annea – Lockwood’s glass concerts of the late 1960s and early 1970s are the stuff of legend. Installed in dark rooms with a modest light display in tow, the New Zealander rubbed and struck an array of different glass vessels (bottles, jars, tubes) and panels, extracting coos and yelps from these inanimate objects – a sort of double-glazed siren song. The Glass World of Anna Lockwood presents compositions in a similar vein: the results are gorgeous and otherworldly, and herald a decade characterised by curiosity and miscegenation. Not sure what she’d make of Justice Yeldham, though.
Can | Ege Bamyasi (1972)Forget worthies like Stephen Malkmus and Thurston Moore and Beck and Kanye West giving their regal nods to this album – it doesn’t need any of them. All you need to know its greatness is to see a halfway decent DJ drop ‘Vitamin C’ in a club, and see how gloriously the groove abides. That one moment is enough to realise that Krautrock is not about collectors and catalogues and worthiness: as much as anything it’s about the primacy of the present moment and the cavorting foolishness of funk. Ege Bamyasi isn’t afraid to get dark – nightmarish, even, in the second half of the ten minute ‘Soup’ – but when Jaki Liebzeit gets rolling and everything else locks into step with him, Can are every inch the multidimensional interstellar groove machine that Parliament/Funkadelic, for example, ever were.
Libra | Schock (1977)Goblin might (quite rightly) get most of the attention when the conversation zeroes in on Italian horror soundtracks, but there are plenty more gems out there if you care to take a closer look. Libra’s proggy accompaniment to Mario Bava’s Schock is one of the best of ‘em, and it probably won’t come as a surprise to hear that the band were actually only a degree of separation away from Goblin. Drummer Walter Martino had performed with the Italian horror heavyweights in 1975, and while he’s uncredited on the album’s liner notes, long-standing Goblin keyboardist Maurizio Guarani actually drops a few of his signature stabs too.
While Bava undoubtedly wanted to repeat Dario Argento’s winning formula, tracks such as the discordant ‘La Cantina’ might be even more eerie than anything you’d find bothering the Profondo Rosso OST. In fact, it’s those peculiar avant-garde synth touches that give Schock such a unique set of fingerprints, and with gorgeous, spooked-up tracks like ‘L’Incubo’ and ‘Transfert IV’, it’s well worthy of re-appraisal.
Gary Wilson | You Think You Really Know Me (1977)Prime contender for the Least Appropriate Babymaker on this list, You Think You Really Know Me is a bug-eyed collection of traumatised kitsch and spooky boogie-woogie. Inspired by a childhood meeting with John Cage, this New York outcast set out to become “a teen idol in front of a Cage performance, singing love songs but being avant-garde.” Wilson’s sad-sack persona is the main draw, but the compositions (the twitchy ‘When You Walk Into My Dreams’; apocalyptic sex jam ’6.4 = Makeout’) have serious clout too. Now recognised as an outsider pop classic, it still creeps and thrills – a blue-eyed soul album made by a water-damaged droid.
Talking Heads | Fear of Music (1979)
77 and More Songs About Buildings and Food are great – really, really great in parts, and well ahead of the curve – but listening back now, they were too easily imitable, and seem a little of a part with the US new wave that followed. Fear of Music, though, is the one where the band left all the others around them behind, and become completely Talking Heads, impossible to copy despite all the attempts that continue to this day. And from this through until True Stories in 1986, taking in five studio and two live albums, they never put a single foot wrong. So there’s definitely an extra retrospective frisson in knowing exactly what wonders this was the beginning of, the thrill of a band standing on the threshold of true greatness – but even taken on its own merits it’s an absolute marvel. It’s got a heart of ice, the hot guts of funk, and a brain full of bats and butterflies. What else could you need?
Can | Ege Bamyasi (1972)Forget worthies like Stephen Malkmus and Thurston Moore and Beck and Kanye West giving their regal nods to this album – it doesn’t need any of them. All you need to know its greatness is to see a halfway decent DJ drop ‘Vitamin C’ in a club, and see how gloriously the groove abides. That one moment is enough to realise that Krautrock is not about collectors and catalogues and worthiness: as much as anything it’s about the primacy of the present moment and the cavorting foolishness of funk. Ege Bamyasi isn’t afraid to get dark – nightmarish, even, in the second half of the ten minute ‘Soup’ – but when Jaki Liebzeit gets rolling and everything else locks into step with him, Can are every inch the multidimensional interstellar groove machine that Parliament/Funkadelic, for example, ever were.
Libra | Schock (1977)Goblin might (quite rightly) get most of the attention when the conversation zeroes in on Italian horror soundtracks, but there are plenty more gems out there if you care to take a closer look. Libra’s proggy accompaniment to Mario Bava’s Schock is one of the best of ‘em, and it probably won’t come as a surprise to hear that the band were actually only a degree of separation away from Goblin. Drummer Walter Martino had performed with the Italian horror heavyweights in 1975, and while he’s uncredited on the album’s liner notes, long-standing Goblin keyboardist Maurizio Guarani actually drops a few of his signature stabs too.
While Bava undoubtedly wanted to repeat Dario Argento’s winning formula, tracks such as the discordant ‘La Cantina’ might be even more eerie than anything you’d find bothering the Profondo Rosso OST. In fact, it’s those peculiar avant-garde synth touches that give Schock such a unique set of fingerprints, and with gorgeous, spooked-up tracks like ‘L’Incubo’ and ‘Transfert IV’, it’s well worthy of re-appraisal.
Gary Wilson | You Think You Really Know Me (1977)Prime contender for the Least Appropriate Babymaker on this list, You Think You Really Know Me is a bug-eyed collection of traumatised kitsch and spooky boogie-woogie. Inspired by a childhood meeting with John Cage, this New York outcast set out to become “a teen idol in front of a Cage performance, singing love songs but being avant-garde.” Wilson’s sad-sack persona is the main draw, but the compositions (the twitchy ‘When You Walk Into My Dreams’; apocalyptic sex jam ’6.4 = Makeout’) have serious clout too. Now recognised as an outsider pop classic, it still creeps and thrills – a blue-eyed soul album made by a water-damaged droid.
Talking Heads | Fear of Music (1979)
77 and More Songs About Buildings and Food are great – really, really great in parts, and well ahead of the curve – but listening back now, they were too easily imitable, and seem a little of a part with the US new wave that followed. Fear of Music, though, is the one where the band left all the others around them behind, and become completely Talking Heads, impossible to copy despite all the attempts that continue to this day. And from this through until True Stories in 1986, taking in five studio and two live albums, they never put a single foot wrong. So there’s definitely an extra retrospective frisson in knowing exactly what wonders this was the beginning of, the thrill of a band standing on the threshold of true greatness – but even taken on its own merits it’s an absolute marvel. It’s got a heart of ice, the hot guts of funk, and a brain full of bats and butterflies. What else could you need?