The weirdest album you've ever heard

WEEN's Pure Guava is a must for those seeking out the weirdest of weird!

Slapp Happy/Henry Cow - 'Desperate Straights' (creepy)

Faust - The Faust Tapes (creepy/out there/ etc.)

Pink Floyd - a 71 European bootleg I bought on a school trip (far out)

Hi,

Tago Mago, according to Holger in CAN's website a few years ago, was culled from at least 20 hours of IMPROVISATIONS, and according to him, a lot of it was taken without any look at the music and then just glued together.

There is no doubt in anyone's mind, that the two long cuts are improvisations, specially the kind of improvisations that most musicians are afraid of ... because it is obvious that there is no rhyme, or meter, to go by and everyone is on their own. 

The question is ... is an improvisation weird ... well to me it isn't and it is a factor of each person's ability to do something that normally would not be done, but in the case of CAN, it shows how well they were AWARE, and knew WHAT an "improvisation" was all about and had seen  enough samples on the street (Damo was picked up from busking on the streets!!!) and everywhere else, with many folks doing different things, and only Archie Patterson's EUROCK book is capable of giving us a really personal view of those days in his book, a collection of all the magazines he had put together from his first days. It is amazing that so many folks did this, and we completely IGNORE IT, and are even more afraid to say anything, since it means that what you might want to say has no relation whatsoever to the whole thing. 

In the Krock special, one of the bits that are crazy, but valid, is one of the members of FAUST going around with various sticks hitting some cement drums and machinery ... and calling it music. In the PA sandlotkidgrounds, we are not ready, and likely NEVER will be, to accept that as music and then help define it.

I have not heard the VU album in its entirety yet and am reserving judgement, but in my book, nothing that the VU ever did was weird ... it was very NY, and quite candid about its life, loves, and every thing else, including Andy meant nothing! I may have heard it before but did not "register" it in my mind and I will fix that before saying much about it.  However, I will state that VU is not weird, and probably, more than many, is actually very personal to each member's experience at a time when we were not exactly ready to face the raw nature of many of these comments, and even the literary/artistic side of this movement is very scary and strange for many of us. By comparison, Krock was much more open and really about the improvisations, and it did not concern itself with words for a long time. 

(PS: A book that has a lot of this, is Patti Smith's book about her time and specially Mapplethorpe. Highly recommended, and you can read a different book, almost leaving all that behind in Kin Gordon's book, which is more about the art scene, than it is about her band's music, except how her and her boyfriend/husband made the music.)

(PS2: You can see by the choices that many people here are not comfortable with improvisation at all ... FAUST, CAN and most of the Krock folks, do not fit into a weird thing at all ... they all are very well done extensions of the improvisational scene at the time. Might as well consider a recording of the old drum circles in a Grateful Dead concert, weird ... they were not weird ... they were neat events that brought a lot of folks together to enjoy a communal moment. A lot of Krock is about that, and eventually, AD2 rips into it with their first album!)

Hi,

I was thinking that Christopher Lee's screams when Peter Cushing was about to do him in, were always the best guitar solo EVER ... I'm not sure that Paul has imagined that before!