music, page 9 of 10

I can’t remember how I first came across this album now. Mojo listed it as number one in their “Top 50 Eccentric Albums” feature a couple of years back, and its opening track was sampled to eerie effect on Alan Moore & Tim Perkins’ The Highbury Working, in the Ignis: No. 1 With A Bullet segment, repeatedly playing the line “What’s in store for me” after Moore recounts how Joe Meek shot his landlady then ended his own life with a single-barrelled shotgun. But I think it was while doing a Google search for weird science fiction soundtracks (something I’m into — see my Spacewreck project for my own attempt) that I came across it on Amazon and ordered it.

This has to be one of the strangest albums ever released. Not necessarily strangest-sounding, just strangest. Entirely Joe Meek‘s concept (though arranged by Rod Freeman and performed by The Blue Men), it manages to mix late-50s guitar pop with mid-60s trippiness as Meek invites us on an audio journey to the moon — well, his version of the moon anyway — to “Hear A New World”. “Without it,” he says in his liner notes, “you have discovered only one third of outer space” — politely assuming his listeners have gone even that far. (His success with that anthem of space-age optimism,Telstar, was two years in the future.)

The result feels like a glimpse into some childhood fantasy world, so long-cherished it has passed into objective reality. Rather like the Demons, Witches, Imps and so on of E R Eddison’s The Worm Ourobouros, Joe Meek’s moon is inhabited by Dribcots, Sarooes and Globbots. The Globbots are “happy, jolly little beings and as they parade before us you can almost see their cheeky blue-coloured faces.” (Meek tried to get his band, The Blue Men, to wear space-suits and paint their faces blue while playing live, but they were none too keen. If only he’d waited ten years, he’d have had trouble trying to stop them from doing it.) The Dribcots, meanwhile, have a “Space Boat” that “looks rather like an egg, and it floats about 100 yards from the surface of the ground. It glides about 20 m.p.h… It is driven by huge inductance coils…” The liner notes are peppered with this sort of specific detail, giving the whole thing the air of something Meek actually witnessed rather than made up. (Elsewhere, in the notes to “The Bub Light”, he says, with the searching-for-words air of an alien-abductee’s account, “This is a wonderful sight — a great patch of the sky becomes filled with different coloured lights, almost I should imagine like the end of a rainbow, except that each light takes on a different shape… This lasts in our time about ten hours…”) Unfortunately, the Globbots and Dribcots are represented in their respective tracks by Pinky and Perky-style sped-up voices which, along with a military marching drum, gives some sections of the album the feel of a cartoon soundtrack. The Sarooes, however, are a “rather sad people” whose life is “a hard struggle”; “they have a form of rationing which is a strain and they seem always to be sad”. Rather like the postwar Brits of Meek’s childhood, perhaps. The sad Sarooes get two tracks, the first of which, “Love Dance of the Sarooes”, describes the way these green people “dance for almost four hours non-stop, and then fast for three days”, and their music is certainly at the moodier, weirder end of this album’s spectrum.

It’s when the music breaks free of the constraints of 50s teen pop to move into the genuinely weird, with wooshy sound effects, Hawaiian guitar and detuned pianos, that it really gets going. “Glob Waterfall” is a moody mix of atmospherics and cymbal crescendos that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Doctor Who soundtrack (as in the sort of library music released on Doctor Who: Music From The Tenth Planet — a CD that’s a bit over-priced for 19 minutes of music, though). “Valley of No Return” sounds like some 60s western movie’s exit music, though oddly is not one of the handful of tracks Meek recycled for The Outlaws’ western-themed instrumental album Dream of the West.

This CD, from RPM records, comes packaged with a half-hour Joe Meek monologue on his life and work, and a clip from a 1964 World In Action episode about the record industry. A real oddity, a real — dare I say it? — space oddity.

More Asian Horror, this time not part of the post-Ringu era, but a classic from 1964. Kwaidan is an anthology film, collecting four of the folk-tale-inspired ghostly horrors of ex-pat writer Lafcadio Hearn, all set in pre-modern Japan.

The Black Hair (from which the 2006 anthology-film, Dark Tales of Japan, got the title and idea for its Blonde Kwaidan segment) tells of a poor samurai who abandons his faithful wife for a new bride from a wealthy noble family. Later, regretting the unhappy match, he goes back to his old home to find it ruined but his wife still there, still spinning on the same old wheel. He spends the night with her but wakes to find himself lying next to a withered corpse, then goes mad as its long black hair comes to life and pursues him through the crumbling ruin.

In The Woman of the Snow, an apprentice woodcutter sees his master frozen to death by the breath of a pale, demonic woman, but avoids a similar fate by promising never to speak of what he has seen. Some time later he marries, though of course doesn’t notice how remarkably similar his bride looks to that very same ice demonness. Inevitably, he breaks his promise and tells his wife what happened that night.

Hoichi the Earless is the rather bleak tale of a blind biwa-player whose skill brings him to the attention of the denizens of the underworld. To stop him from being snatched, nightly, to play before an undead court, a local priest covers Hoichi from head to foot in holy writings, missing only his ears. That night, when a ghostly messenger comes once more to summon Hoichi, all he can see is a pair of ears floating on their own in the air. The next thing we know, Hoichi is screaming, clutching where his ears once were, blood pouring from between his fingers. Lovely.

The last segment, In a Cup of Tea, is a story-within-a-story, as we learn why one writer failed to finish one particular story about a samurai who inadvertently drinks a man’s soul.

Throughout, Kwaidan makes no attempt at realism, but uses very theatrical sets, sometimes with fantasticated backgrounds, as with the Dali-esque eyes-in-the-sky of the Woman in the Snow segment, which adds to the superstitious feeling that all of nature is alive with a threatening demonic presence.

The most striking aspect of the film, though, is its soundtrack. Kwaidan uses a minimal set of traditional instruments, one of which, at times, sounds almost like an eerily extended human scream. The moments of supernatural horror are made all the more effective by the way natural sound effects drop into silence, as if the characters have fallen into another order of reality, while the sparse music twangs and grunts and screeches.

Recently I have got totally and utterly into The Flaming Lips. I bought their 2002 album, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, when it first came out and (partly because I was low on funds at the time) listened to it again and again till it became one of my all-time favourite albums. (Whose names I precede in iTunes with an asterisk for quick access. My iPod has over 800 albums on it, which takes some scroll-wheeling through.) Oddly, considering how much I loved that album, it took me a while to buy anything else by them, and when I did get The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Clouds Taste Metallic (1995), only a few tracks really sunk in. Then, quite suddenly, last month something just clicked and I’ve been unable to listen to anyone else. I’ve tracked down rarities and oddities (the Fight Test and Ego Tripping At The Gates of Hell EPs, the limited edition Fearless Freaks CD, and of course the Fearless Freaks documentary, to name a few), and slowly upped my iTunes star ratings of their songs from three to four to quite a few five-star songs. The Soft Bulletin, which I originally felt almost cold towards, has pretty much joined Yoshimi in my absolute all time faves.

But even then, I was sure that I’d never buy their Zaireeka album. Why? Well, Zaireeka is a 4-CD set with 8 songs on. Now, I’ve nothing against this. I own Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans (4 songs on 2 CDs) and am not embarrassed to say I listen to it and enjoy it. But Zaireeka’s eight-songs-on-four-CDs only amount to 45 minutes of music. Its 4 CDs are designed to be played on four different CD players, at the same time.

But I took the plunge. The more I learned about the band, the more I realised Zaireeka represents a musical turning point, taking them from the surrealistic poppy grunge of Clouds Taste Metallic and its forerunners to a much more thoughtful, much more musically open approach to song-writing in The Soft Bulletin and beyond. Every so often, artists of any sort who are serious about their work go through phases of experimentation and emerge transformed, with new directions, new freedoms, and often much stronger for it, but it’s rare that such experimental phases are laid out for us to look at and try to see what was going on. (JG Ballard publishing his “condensed novels” is an example.) For the Flaming Lips, Zaireeka was that transformative moment. (The name partly comes from the word eureka.)

The four CDs arrived yesterday, and I’ve just finished my first listen. It wasn’t a full listen. I played one CD on my hi-fi, one through my TV using my DVD player, and one through my computer, meaning the fourth was unplayed. (The only way I could play it would have been to have plugged my iPod into my guitar amp, but I knew I’d already find it difficult enough to start three CD players simultaneously (one remote control in each hand, plus an elbow to hit the space-bar on my computer), without having to click an iPod at the same time. That’s why people have Zaireeka parties. The logistics are easier.) Even then, the three CDs didn’t start in sync, because not all three players responded with the same speed. The first track I listened to, the three players were up to a couple of seconds out, but after that, a few quick stabs on various pause buttons brought things more into line.

Zaireeka’s CDs aren’t meant to be played in perfect sync, anyway. Wayne Coyne, the main vocalist and the bloke who had the idea in the first place, says in his liner notes that he found that even when playing two identical tracks on two CD players, the sound would occasionally go in and out of phase, as the players played at slightly different speeds. With Zaireeka, the idea is that such real-world glitches would bring in some randomness to turn each listen into more of a unique experience — and it’s definitely not a passive experience. There was a certain amount of pausing and playing, adjusting of volumes, and walking round the room finding the best place to hear all three sound sources at once.

As for the music, it’s difficult to judge on one listen. I thought the more successful tracks were those where one CD played what could be considered the main track and the others added embellishments, sometimes by playing quite weird, and seemingly unfitting accompaniments that nevertheless sort of worked because they were coming from a different direction. It was one of those situations where sounds from outside start to include themselves in the music. Usually, for me, Hawkwind is about the only band who can take on a police siren, car screeches, train brakes, arguing neighbours, and so on, without it jolting you out of their musical world, because I’m used to hearing weird sounds in the middle of Hawkwind tracks. Well, it happened with Zaireeka too, as if the world were conspiring to perform alongside the Flaming Lips.

The best song of the lot was the last, “The Big Ol’ Bug Is The New Baby Now”, in which, on one CD, Wayne Coyne tells a story about his dogs and their predilection for tearing things apart, while another CD plays a pretty much conventional rhythm section backing, and the third comes in with sound effects (dog barks); then all three CDs go into a multi-part chiming vocal chorus, singing the song’s title at different times, to produce a sort of “Row, row, row your boat” effect.

The idea with Zaireeka was for the band to introduce its listeners to new ways of listening to, and participating in, their music. (Brian Eno felt the same sort of thing when he started making ambient music.) Of course, since 1997, when the album was released, further “new ways” have come about. It’s much more likely, for instance, that today’s purchasers of Zaireeka have the computing power and hard drive space to rip the four CDs and mix them down into stereo. Okay, it’s perhaps against the spirit of the thing, but sometimes you want to just sit down and listen.