Incredibly Strange Music Vol. 1+2

ANOTHER REUP: Vol. 1: sharebee
190VBR, 52 mb
1. Buddy Merrill - Busy Bee
2. Bob Peck - Sweet 16
3. Dean Elliot - Lonesome Road
4. Katie Lee - Will to Fail
5. Harry Breuer - Minute Merengue
6. Rajput & The Sepoy - Up, Up & Away
7. The Scramblers - Mister Hot
8. Rod Dave Harris - Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals
9. Perrey & Kingsley - Swan's Splashdown
10. Jo Ann Castle - Tico Tico
11. Billy Mure - Hawaiian War Chant
12. Fred Lowrey - William Tell Overture
13. Kali Bahlu - A Cosmic Telephone Call



Vol. 2 REUP: megaupload
190VBR, 50 mb
1. Hot Butter - Skokian
2. Bob McFadden & Dor - The Mummy
3. The Nirvana Sitar & String Group - The Letter
4. Lucia Pamela - Walking on the Moon
5. Ken Nordine - Flesh
6. Billy Mure - Chopsticks Guitar
7. Myrtle K. Hilo - Lover's Prayer
8. Russ Garcia & His Orchestra - Delicado
9. Del Close & John Brent - Introduction
10. Jean Jacques Perrey - Gossipo Perpetuo
11. Ken Nordine - Green
12. Eden Abhez - Full Moon
13. Harry Breuer - Bumble Bee Bolero
14. Little Marcy - Join the Gospel Express
15. Les Baxter - Terror
16. Ken Nordine - Yellow
17. Rusty Warren - 1st Song/Opening Monologue

Once in a while one needs a visionary to point back and say: Something important just happened while you were looking the other way. Lenny Kaye did that in 1971, releasing the Nuggets compilation. It single-handedly created the "garage" genre and started a long line of similar releases - Pebbles Vol. 1 through god-knows-how-many, Green Crystal Ties, Acid Daze, Back From The Grave, and all these Teenage Cavemen: Lost Psych/Garage-Punk No-Hit Wonders of Cowshed, South Dakota and the like. We turned around and realized that those teenagers smoking dope and bashing out three chords in their parents' garage were not an accident, but a part of a scene, a spontaneous social and cultural grassroots movement which embodied the spirit of the 60s as much as Woodstock and Summer of Love did.
A revelatory moment happened again in 1994, when these two compilations came out together with two eponymous books from the RE/Search publishing. They gave a name and a voice to all things unusual, obscure, left-field. This time the visionary pointed not back, but forward. The internet media revolution was about to happen, and these two books became its prophets. Nowadays all sorts of unclassifiable weirdness is rescued from the 10-cent bin, digitized and offered through blogs and Soulseek to the appreciative listeners. The Incredibly Strange publications turned it overnight from trash into treasure, Cinderella-style, giving it the second life (or sometimes the first).
Several kinds of recordings are collected on these CDs. There is some early electronic music - Hot Butter and two Perrey tracks. There are far-out instrumental experiments by the "real" musicians - Buddy Merrill, Billy Mure, the supersonic accordeon of Jo Ann Castle, the whistling virtuoso Fred Lowrey. There are some novelty recordings such as Sweet 16, Will To Fail and The Mummy. There is spoken word - beat poetry of Ken Nordine, a track off "How To Speak Hip" by Del Close & John Brent. And, finally, there is some truly outer-space stuff that defies description, like a track of the LSD casualty Kali Bahlu and one by Little Marcy, a christian ventriloquist doll. Many of the recordings mentioned are now available complete online, but only because of these comps.
I should add that these are not "good albums" in the proper sense. They are cohesive conceptually, but it is difficult to listen to them straight through. Just as everyone will find something attractive, everyone will find something irritating or repulsive - the variety here is both a strength and a weakness.