Blog Archives
The Vegetable Orchestra
Doing this blog really is a gift that keeps on giving. You’d think by our third year of operation, bands like Austria’s Vegetable Orchestra would be old hat to us. But truth be told, we only just recently discovered that these guys existed. Apparently, we’re not very good at our jobs.
The Vegetable Orchestra (also known as the First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra, or Das erste Wiener Gemüseorchester in their native tongue) was founded in 1998 by a group of college students who were interested in exploring the acoustic properties of, well, vegetables. Initially they created vegetable-based instruments that closely resembled their wood and metal counterparts: drums made of pumpkins and celery roots, flutes made of carrots, a “cucumberphone” made from a hollowed-out cucumber with a bell pepper at one end and a carrot doubling as a reed at the other. Since then, their instruments have gotten increasingly bizarre, often with the aid of electronics; how the hell the “leek violin” works, to give just one example, we have no idea.
When performing live, the VO buys fresh, organic produce that day and assembles it into instruments just hours before showtime. At the end of each performance, they use the vegetables to make soup, which they then serve to the audience. Fresh veggies in a warm broth of Austrian saliva–yummers!
The Vegetable Orchestra have released three albums over the course of their 14-year existence. Their latest, Onionoise, is a mix of techno, tribal, ambient, industrial and avant-garde sounds that would be pretty darned weird even if it wasn’t being mostly produced on produce.
Here’s a 2007 promotional video of the Orchestra in action. Apparently they had to disable comments on YouTube because some people were attacking them for wasting perfectly good vegetables in the face of world hunger. To which we say: Come to a Vegetable Orchestra show and have some soup, you darned crankypantses!
Links:
- The Vegetable Orchestra official site
- The Vegetable Orchestra on Facebook
- Institute for Transacoustic Research (an art project run by four VO members)
Klaus Nomi
Today’s weird band…or rather, weird artiste…was suggested by a reader named Aaron, who notes that New Wave opera singer Klaus Nomi was “most defiantly a awesome weird guy.” True dat, Aaron! Even if you meant to say “definitely,” there was also something defiantly weird about Mr. Nomi, too.
Klaus Nomi was an opera-obsessed gay kid from Bavaria, which is sort of the German equivalent of being from Alabama. He moved to Berlin as a teenager to attend a music conservatory and work at the Deutsche Oper where, legend has it, he gave impromptu concerts for his fellow ushers while they were sweeping up after the shows. But he didn’t really fit in with either the Berlin opera community or the gay nightclub scene (which wasn’t used to drag queens singing arias), so like many of the world’s great freaks, he finally washed up in New York City. The year was 1972.
By 1978, Nomi was finally making a name for himself in the East Village art scene, performing arias in a melodramatic counter-tenor and even more melodramatic costumes, engulfed in smoke bombs and sci-fi sound effects. His reputation eventually caught the ear of David Bowie, who invited Nomi and one of his backup singers, Joey Arias, to perform with him on Saturday Night Live in 1979. You can watch clips of the performances over on this site, and marvel at how much tamer pop music is these days (yes, even you, Lady Gaga).
The SNL appearance changed Nomi’s life. Not only did he borrow the oversized plastic tuxedo look Bowie sported and make it his signature outfit, he also scored a record deal and released two albums, Klaus Nomi (1981) and Simple Man (1982), before his AIDS-related death in 1983. He was 44.
Nomi’s music was a bizarre and totally unique mix of original pop tunes done in a campy, New Wave style, avant-garde covers of oldies like Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” and operatic pieces–his set closer was an aria from the 19th century French opera Samson and Delilah. You could call him a trail-blazer, but really, no one’s quite followed the trail he blazed. Everyone from Morrissey to Jean Paul Gaultier has acknowledged him as an influence, but really, there just ain’t that many pop/New Wave opera singers in the world. Klaus Nomi was probably a one-time deal.
Here’s a clip of him performing his most famous tune, “Nomi Song,” on French TV. Purists might prefer the original “Nomi Song” video, but the picture and sound quality are a little better on this version.
Links:
- Klaus Nomi ZABAKDAZ (official site for posthumous Nomi album, Za Bakdaz)
- Klaus Nomi on MySpace (unofficial)
- The Nomi Song (official site for Klaus Nomi documentary, released in 2004)
- The Klaus Nomi Tribute Page (fan site)
- Klaus Nomi Keys of Life (fan site)
- A weird little Klaus Nomi Flash animation tribute site
The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble
It might not be obvious at first, but the distance between classical music and techno isn’t that great. Both are predominantly instrumental forms of music. Both layer sound in complex ways that go far beyond melody, or sometimes do away with melody altogether. Both think those avant-garde minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley are pretty dope. Techno and classical may play in different sandboxes, but they definitely share a shovel occasionally.
Still, the lengths Brandt Brauer Frick go to in order to combine the two genres seem a tad extreme. The first time we heard about these German cats, they were still pretty much building their minimal techno tracks the old-fashioned way: with lots of loops and programmed beats, albeit ones based mostly on acoustic sounds. But they were clearly interested in playing with people’s expectations of how such sounds are created; in the video for their track “Bop” (pictured above), they cloned themselves several times over to create an imaginary orchestra, playing the track’s hypnotically repetitive piano, percussion and even a well-timed rain stick with robotic precision.
But not content to stop there, BBF went ahead and created a ten-piece chamber orchestra called the (wait for it) Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble to recreate their tracks live, with no loops or programmed sounds at all. Even after watching two videos of the Ensemble in action, I still can’t decide if it’s a cool idea or not. I mean, on the one hand, it’s pretty damn impressive that these musicians–including a harpist, cellist, trombonist and whatever you call a tuba player (tubist?)–have the restraint, rhythmic sense and technical prowess required to produce the layered, percussive sounds of techno with mostly acoustic instruments (they sneak a Moog in there, but still). On the other hand, well, isn’t this what drum machines were invented for? I’m just not sure if it adds anything to my enjoyment of the music. It’s like watching a master sculptor carve an IKEA table.
But judge for yourself: Here’s a clip of the BBF Ensemble rehearsing a handful of tracks, including two (“Teufelsleiter” and “606 ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll”) from the first BBF album to feature the Ensemble, Mr. Machine, which is out on !K7 Records next month. What do you think…brilliant techno/classical fusion, or pointless technical exercise?
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Well, kids, we really missed the boat on this one. A whole bunch of you out there in Weirdo Land have been suggesting almost since we started this blog that we write about Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and we were always like, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll get around to it.” And we blew it off, and blew it off, and now Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is no more. Last week we got an email announcing SGM’s final L.A. show this past Friday, and final San Francisco shows yesterday. “As it turns out,” read the email, “we are being replaced.”
For those of y’all not familiar: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is basically what happens when a bunch of SF art freaks get together and decide to make Dadaist-inspired prog-metal on a combination of traditional and homemade instruments. They were started in 1999 by Dan Rathbun and Nils Frykdahl, who used to be in a band called Idiot Flesh, and also featured members of Tin Hat Trio, Skeleton Key and a dance company called InkBoat. To give you an idea of how friggin weird these guys were, here are the names of some of their other projects: Vacuum Tree Head, Immersion Composition Society, Thinking Plague and Moe!kestra. Wonder which one is “replacing” them?
Supposedly the band was named after an actual museum that burned down in 1916, one founded by a futurist and a “black mathematician” and one that did not allow human visitors. Among the many odd instruments featured in their shows were something called a sledgehammer dulcimer and something else called a “popping turtle.” One of their songs, “Helpless Corpses Enactment,” features lyrics based on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; another, “FC: The Freedom Club,” uses texts from the Unabomber. It’s all very intellectual stuff, even if it’s being delivered by guys in topknots and what kinda look like neo-pagan prom dresses.
Although SGM have sadly played their last gig, we supposedly haven’t heard the last from them. The same email that announced the last shows also promised some new studio material, a short film and a live DVD compiled of performances from the past six years. So maybe they haven’t been totally replaced after all.
Anyway, here’s their totally bitchin’ and (we think) mostly tongue-in-cheek ode to Satan (or Lucifer, if you wanna get all techincal), “A Hymn to the Morning Star.” Never has pure evil looked so silly.
Links:
- Sleepytime Gorilla Museum official site
- Sleepytime Gorilla Museum on MySpace
- Charming Hostess official site (band featuring Dan Rathbun and Nils Frykdahl)
- Faun Fables (band featuring Nils Frykdahl)
- Polymorph Recording Studios (Rathbun’s audio house)
Ghedalia Tazartes
One of the hazards of doing a blog like TWBITW is that you tend to get pretty jaded. Jake and I sift through so much oddball music that after awhile, we start to get a little hung up on the dog and pony aspect of the whole thing. It’s like–yeah, okay, you guys sound kinda weird, but do you wear goofy costumes or claim to be from another planet? No? Next!
But every so often, someone introduces us to a piece of music that’s just so downright bizarre, so totally unlike anything we’ve ever heard, it really doesn’t need any kind of wacky backstory or WTF visual accompaniment. Such was the case with French musician-composer Ghédalia Tazartès and his 1979 masterpiece, Diasporas.
We got wind of this completely wackadoodle album thanks to a cool little reissue label called Dais Records, who have only been around since 2007 but have already rescued a shit-ton of weird music from the scrapheap. Apparently it’s not quite available yet–we’re not sure what the release date is–but we got an email with a download of the track “Un Amour Si Grand Qu’il Nie Son Objet” and it pretty much knocked us on our asses. You can hear the whole sighing, moaning, nine-minute monstrosity in the YouTube clip below. Trust us: Don’t listen to it alone after dark or in an altered state of consciousness. Actually, listening to this will probably alter your consciousness all by itself.
We haven’t been able to find out too much else about Tazartès. We do know that he still occasionally does concerts (and he and his music are as bizarre as ever) and, according to his French Wikipedia page, he still releases music. He also apparently operates out of a home studio in Paris that looks like something out of a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. He was interviewed in the September 2008 issue of Wire but as far as we can tell, the interview’s not available online. The only other English-language article we could find on him is this unreadably pretentious mess. So he remains a bit of enigma, at least to us poor Americans. Hopefully the Dais reissue will help to change that.
We could attempt to describe Tazartès’ music–French avant-garde gypsy trance minimalism?–but really, there’s not much point. You just have to hear it. This guy is attuned to some other frequencies, for real.
P.S. We originally embedded a YouTube clip of this track from a YouTube channel called Undergroundedful, but the whole channel has since been taken down due to copyright claims. While we totally recognize the right of copyright owners to protect their work, we also think it’s a bummer when obscure and hard-to-find music gets taken off the Internet and put further out of the reach of potential new audiences. Anyhow, hopefully the above YouTube video stays up a while longer.
Links:
- Ghédalia Tazartès discography (from Forced Exposure)
- More info on Ghédalia Tazartès (from Julie Tippex)
Hi God People
They may not have democracy in Egypt, but here at Wierdest Band in the World, we’re getting democratic all over this bitch. Yes, you readers (all 11 of you…thanks y’all!) cast your votes and once again, a band on our Submit & Vote page has been elected to a spot on the hallowed Weird List. That’s three straight Submit ‘n Vote candidates who have made the cut. You guys aren’t getting soft, are you?
But this time, we gotta hand it to you…Hi God People are indeed the real shiz when it comes to weirdness. We’re not even sure how to describe them exactly. Experimental noise ensemble? Hippie tribal performance art? Modern dance troupe that’s done too much acid? We’re stumped.
What we can tell you is that Hi God People are from Melbourne, Australia, and that the two main guys involved are named Greg Wadley and Julian Williams. Wadley teaches computer science at the University of Melbourne, specializing in the study of virtual worlds, and plays in a buncha bands, including one called New Waver that does satirical songs like this reworking of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Williams is a musician and playwright who also has a solo album out called Liquidambar that might actually be even weirder than Hi God People. His label says it reflects “influences from the Beach Boys to John Cage” and judging from what we just heard on his MySpace page, that’s about right.
Other Hi God People people include Dion Nania, who also plays in a band called Panel of Judges, and Dylan Martorell, who makes “improvised electro acoustic music and sound installation” with a group called Snawklor. Then there’s a bunch of folks on the band’s label website who are just listed by first name: Sophie, Jason, Marcus, Nathan (the other half of Snawklor, possibly), etc. It’s just one big happy family of freaks, really.
Oh and one last note: They apparently “borrowed” their name from an old Christian group who released a few children’s singalong albums back in the 60′s or 70′s. We thought they might be making this part up, but we did a little digging and uncovered a few of the original Hi God songs, most of which seemed to have been written by a dude named Carey Landry. Who probably spins in his grave everytime Hi God People does one of their arty hippie freakout shows. To which we say: Amen. (Oh wait, actually, he might not be dead yet. Sorry, Carey! You probably just get really bad stomach cramps every time Hi God People does one of their arty hippie freakout shows.)
Hi God People have done a few wacky music videos, but really, their live shows are where the serious craziness ensues. The clip below was supposedly broadcast on an ABC TV “experimental music series,” although when the fuck ABC ever had an experimental music series, even in Australia, we can’t really imagine. Maybe Desperate Housewives never really took off down there.
Links:
- Hi God People official site
- Hi God People on MySpace
- Julian Williams official site
- Greg Wadley official site
- Hi God People interview on Cyclic Defrost
Mr. Bungle
Another year, more weird bands! The fun never ends.
So it was exactly one year ago today that we finally owned up to our huge man-crushes on Mike Patton and wrote up what we considered to be the weirdest of his many bands, Fantomas. To which pretty much every single comment has been: “Fantomas? No way! Mr. Bungle is way weirder!” Did any of you people actually watch the Fantomas video we posted? But okay, fine, Bungle is pretty weird, too. So why not make it a tradition and declare Jan. 1st to be Mike Patton Day here at TWBITW? We’ll pick another of his projects to write up on Jan. 1, 2012. Start casting your votes now.
As for Mr. Bungle…if you’re not familiar, this was actually Mike Patton’s first band, started in Eureka, California with his childhood buds Trevor Dunn, Trey Spruance and Theo Lengyel. (The band’s original drummer, Jed Watts, quit before they got big.) The band’s early demos were a mix of metal, ska and free jazz, and their music just kept getting weirder from there; by the time they released their self-titled debut album in 1991, they were creating a mish mash of sounds unlike any other band in existence. They released two more albums in the 90s, Disco Volante and California, then finally called it quits in 2004, as Patton went on to his zillion other projects, Dunn went on to play bass with folks like Fantomas and John Zorn, Spruance carried on with his experimental rock group Secret Chiefs 3, and Lengyel went on to, as far as we can tell, drop off the face of the earth.
What’s particularly odd about Mr. Bungle is that, because their music included some elements of metal and because Mike Patton was also recruited to be the vocalist for funk-metal pioneers Faith No More, their fan base early on consisted mainly of headbangers. This led to a few shows in which the Bungle boys would turn on their own fans or vice versa (as described in this article, for example). It also means that, to Mike Patton’s eternal regret, Mr. Bungle was a huge influence on various, mostly crappy nu-metal bands like Korn, Slipknot and Limp Bizkit. (Patton once said of such bands, “It’s their mothers’ fault, not mine.”)
They also had a long-running feud with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which led to this awesome parody performance at a Halloween show in ’99. Mike Patton does Anthony Kiedis better than Anthony Kiedis does, doesn’t he? (Say that 10 times really fast.)
Mr. Bungle only made one official music video, which was banned by MTV because it featured members of the band hanging from meat hooks and severed dolls heads flying around and various other images that, honestly, seem kinda tame now but were apparently too disturbing back in the days before anyone had seen a Saw movie. That video, for the song “Quote Unquote” is pretty great, but for a true taste of what made Mr. Bungle so wacky, we’re partial to this live video from a 1995 concert. They’re like the masked satanic hotel lounge band from hell. This must’ve sent the few remaining Faith No More fans in attendance scrambing for the exits.
Links:
- Mr. Bungle official site
- Bungle Fever (fan site)
- Mr. Bungle on MySpace
- Mike Patton fan site
- Mimicry Records (Trey Spruance’s label)
Caroliner
So a couple weeks ago, a guy we blogged about called Justice Yeldham posted something about us on his Facebook page and we were like, “Sweet! Thanks, Justice!” Then one of his fans commented, “That list is lame, they don’t even have Caroliner up there.” Which is kind of an annoying thing to say, but we’re used to it. There are many weird bands in the world and we’ve only listed 79 so far…the chances that we overlooked your favorite one, whoever you are, are pretty high. It’s a work in progress, people!
But then…THEN, Justice Yeldham writes back and goes, “good point they have little idea for a webblog called worlds weirdest bands.” Et tu, Justice? This is the thanks we get for blogging about your silly, glass-eating ass? That hurts. Probably not as much as eating glass, but still.
All that being said: we take weird band suggestions from all comers, fans and haters alike. We’re not proud. And it’s true–we had never heard of this Caroliner band. So we Googled them, and guess what? They are indeed far and away the weirdest fucking band we’ve encountered in some time. So thanks for the tip, Matthew Williams of Melbourne, Australia! You have proven yourself to be useful, despite your negative attitude.
Anyway, Caroliner…where do we even start on this one? Caroliner is, according to their Wikipedia page, “an Industrial Bluegrass/Experimental/Noise conceptual art band,” based in San Francisco and active since the mid ’80s. The band members have never revealed their real identities, preferring to operate under a bunch of wacky, Captain Beefheart-ish pseudonyms like Mittens Samdrags, Crap Hat Carson, Obsidian Skeleton and The Cretin Finfetter. In concert, they perform wearing elaborate, carnivalesque costumes and play a variety instruments, both familiar and homemade. And they cover everything–costumes, instruments, and most of the stage–in fluorescent paint. The overall effect is somewhere between Yo Gabba Gabba, GWAR, Chinese opera and that really bad acid trip you had at that college blacklight party back in 1989, where you were sure all of your friends’ pastel parachute pants were trying to kill you. (That happened to you, too, right? Really? Just me? Moving on…)
Caroliner have released a number of albums over the years, all in limited-edition form with homemade packaging ranging from burlap bags to canvas paintings to cardboard pizza boxes. The band’s name changes with each album and possibly even with each performance: It’s been everything from Caroliner Rainbow Hernia Milk Queen to Caroliner Rainbow Stewed Angel Skins to Caroliner Rainbow Wire Thin Sheep Legs Baking Exhibit to, more recently, (deep breath) Caroliner Rainbow Rotting De-Mastered Schooner Atop the Horse Corsery. On their MySpace page, they’re currently known as Caroliner Rainbow Blumebiegh Treason of the Abyss. “Caroliner Rainbow” seems to be the only constant. Their fans pretty much all just call them Caroliner.
But wait…we haven’t even gotten to the really weird part yet. According to band lore, lead singer Mittens Samdrags (aka Grux…or they may have had different lead singers at one time or another, we’re not really sure) doesn’t actually write his lyrics–he channels them from the spirit of a 19th singing bull named Caroliner. Or maybe he just reads them–in one interview, an anonymous Caroliner member notes that the band owns a book containing transcriptions of the bull’s songs. Either way, this explains the old-timey, bluegrass/Appalachian elements that sometimes turn up in their music, which otherwise is pretty much just a mad cacophony of psychedelic noise.
The identities of Caroliner’s members are sort of secret and sort of not. According to their Allmusic.com bio, they share members with fellow Bay Area weirdos Thinking Feller Union Local 282, although Allmusic.com neglects to specify exactly which members. They are also “rumored” to occasionally feature members of Mr. Bungle. Two confirmed (we think) members of Caroliner, Chris Cooper and Jess Goddard, have worked with Deerhoof–another band we really should get around to blogging about one of these days. Caroliner records never include personnel credits, and since they always appear onstage masked and in costume, it’s hard to say who all’s involved. Over the years, probably quite a few members of the Bay Area’s experimental rock scene have donned the day-glo monster suits–which doesn’t exactly narrow it down much. You can’t spill a cappuccino in San Fran without hitting at least one experimental rock guitarist.
Anyway, here’s a clip of Caroliner in action in their hometown. Wonder if they’re available for kids’ parties?
Links:
Einsturzende Neubauten
(Photo copyright Thomas Rabsch)
It’s been awhile since we blogged about an oldie but goodie here on TWBITW, so we thought it was high time we give a shout-out to Einstürzende Neubauten. While these German art punks didn’t actually invent industrial music, they probably influenced its development as much as earlier acts like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire–maybe more, actually. Guys like Trent Reznor and Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy definitely took a few style tips from Neubauten’s tormented, black-clad frontman, Blixa Bargeld.
Einstürzende Neubauten–whose name means “Collapsing New Buildings”–started in Berlin in 1980, and right away, they brought a scary intensity to their music and their live act that made the British industrial acts seems almost polite by comparison. Blixa and his co-conspirators, N.U. Unruh and Alexander Hacke (the most constant members in a rotating cast), liked using power tools and found objects as percussion, and they sometimes took their use of such objects to some pretty wild extremes. Early Neubauten shows tended to look more like construction sites than rock concerts: band members would drill holes in the stage, set fires, swing huge oil drums suspended on chains out over the audience, maybe do a little arc welding–oh and play some distorted, detuned guitar and yell a lot, too.
Eventually, Einstürzende Neubauten’s sound became a little less chaotic and by the mid ’90s, they were producing records like Ende Neu that employed actual recognizable melodies and instruments–though always with plenty of weird noises created on specially made instruments (like the “bassfeder,” a giant steel spring struck with sticks to create a twangy, bass-like sound) and always with Blixa’s distinctive, cadaverous vocals. But it’s those crazy early live shows and wildly experimental, almost unlistenable albums like 1981′s Kollaps that earn them a spot on The Weird List.
Speaking of Kollaps: here’s a video from that album for the Kollaps song “Sehnsucht” from a 1986 film called Halber Mensch, shot while the band was in Japan, that pretty neatly sums up the early Neubauten vibe. (Thanks to reader “tertius” for pointing out the source of this video…our research dept. was clearly falling down on the job when we originally posted it.)
Links:
- Einstürzende Neubauten official site
- Einstürzende Neubauten on MySpace
- Blixa Bargeld official site
- Alexander Hacke official site
- N.U. Unruh on MySpace
Edmund Welles
Ever since Kronos Quartet tackled Hendrix back in the ’80s, classically trained musicians have been trying to prove that their cellos and oboes are more than just museum pieces, good for wheezing out dusty old “Concertos in B Flat Minor” and not much else. So they trot out string quartet versions of Radiohead, or even Lady Gaga medleys for bassoon, and…well, okay, the Lady Gaga bassoon ensemble, the Breaking Winds, is actually kinda cool. But they’re the exception. Most of this stuff just sounds like a slightly classed-up version of Muzak.
So when a friend and reader named Josh (sup, Josh?) suggested that we check out his buddy’s “heavy chamber music” quartet, we have to admit, we were skeptical. Classical musicians doing heavy metal covers? Apocalyptica covered that territory 15 years ago. Moving on.
Then we actually heard Edmund Welles–which is a band, not a person (the name is a Monty Python reference…I mean, not that I would know that without having to look it up…okay, maybe I would)–and, well, let’s just put it this way: The bass clarinet is an inherently weird instrument. Put four of them together in one group, and it sounds like a chorus of demon cats in heat fighting over a chicken bone. A demon chorus whose eerie caterwaulings just happen to occasionally assemble themselves into passages from Pixies and Nirvana songs.
Edmund Welles is the brainchild of one Cornelius Boots (his given name? if so, his parents rule), who first conceived of the idea of an all-bass clarinet ensemble back in 1996, the same year Apocalyptica was giving Metallica the all-cello treatment. Boots liked heavy metal, too, but he also liked alternative rock, jazz, traditional American folk music, and even good old fashioned baroque classical music, the stuff the bass clarinet was invented to play in the first place. And he was determined to combine all his affections into a single, pulsating mass of bass clarinet awesomeness. This was such a uniquely weird concept that Boots worked on his Edmund Welles project in solitude for several years before finally assembling enough fellow bass clarinetists to begin staging public performances.
In 2004, the group released its first album, Agrippa’s 3 Books, which Boots himself has described as “Muzak for conspiracy theorists,” “inspired by occult philosophy and heavy metal music.” In addition to an original multi-part movement with titles like “Asmodeus: The Destroyer, King of the Demons,” the album also featured covers of songs by Black Sabbath, Sepultura and (no, really) Spinal Tap. They’ve since released a second album of original material called Tooth & Claw, which has cover art that would’ve made the late great Ronnie James Dio smile. Is the bass clarinet the Woodwind of the Beast? Well, now that you mention it, that’s kinda what it sounds like.
Inevitably, Edmund Welles have gotten the most attention for their covers, especially a very solemn reading of Radiohead’s “Creep.” Their original stuff is weirder and ultimately much more interesting, but we’ll give you their version of “Creep” here in the hopes that it serves as a gateway to some of the harder stuff. Sort of the way your local Philharmonic does “The Nutcracker” every Christmas in the hopes that you’ll buy season tickets and come back for some Bartok and Stravinsky.
P.S. Did we mention that Cornelius Boots has also released an album of “sound, not music” called Sabbaticus Rex, featuring “spontaneous, sustained sound structuring” with Japanese flutes, gongs and Tuvan throat singing? Well, he has. Just thought we’d throw that in there.
Links:
- Edmund Welles official site
- Edmund Welles on MySpace
- Cornelius Boots clarinet instruction (yes, he gives lessons)
