Before I went to Istanbul in 2007 to study there for half a year I did some research about record stores in Istanbul. One Ebay seller from Turkey who I asked for info just moved from Istanbul to Ankara so he was so kind to share his knowledge of good spots with me. While some [...]
The Exotic is one of my favorite finds I ever made in Asia. Except one track it’s mainly a Thai pop album with some obscure and even psychedelic moments that unlike many other Thai albums you can listen to all the way through. The stand out track though is a raw funk track with Thai [...]
If I had to distill the essence of this album down to one word, I would go with Maelstrom. If I’ve got two words to work with then it’s Shit Storm. Howard Nishioka, who plays electric and acoustic guitar and bass guitar (and vocals on a couple songs), sounds like a man tearing holes in [...]
The generic ‘sun-dial’ cover keeps delivering hits, here in the form of an early 70s club band who pack a lot more punch than expected. Straight outta Omaha, the Marquee Revue have more in common with fuzzed out hippie cover bands like Smack or Marble Phrogg than the lounge-rock acts they’re usually lumped in with. They [...]
This heavy little 45 comes from the great state of Ohio, I have to assume it dates from the early ’70s based on the sound and the lyrical content of the b-side. All I know about Captain Foam is that the guy was billed as a one man band, I guess he played live with [...]
It seems that when you start out collecting records you are magically drawn to find specimens in your preferred genre which were created by local musicians. The problem you often encounter when collecting relatively niche genres is that the local examples you find will usually be pretty sub-standard compared with what you get from overseas. [...]
Dollar bin find! Blank back cover & a stock front, the only other info besides band & title:”Produced by Sid Kleiner’s House Of Guitars, R.513, Califon NJ”. The People side consists entirely of covers: the Bee Gees (Words, To Love Somebody), Beatles (Birthday), Jefferson Airplane (White Rabbit), Monkees (Shades Of Grey), and The First Edition [...]
With it’s use of delayed percussion, eastern scales and jazzy ney (flute), this folk pop album manages to create a nice psychedelic mood, despite the release date (1984). The 10 songs featured on it are very contemplative, sung with a dark brooding voice, but still there’s a drive to the music, not in the least [...]
I was listening to this album hardcore at the same time I started reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer. They seemed to compliment each other well, each depicted a world in space so daring and different. Paul Marcano, the mind behind Lightdreams, dedicates the album to the colonization of space and this really sets the tone for [...]
Obscure acid rock stomper from Grand Rapids Michigan: fuzzy dual guitar shredding and psychedelic Leslie speaker vocals are backed by clattering drums & shaker action. An imaginative friend of mine once wrote that this group was likely “aiming for Cream, but ended up with something hipper, a band likely to appear on a 1968 bill [...]
Blerta was the brainchild of legendary New Zealand drummer, bandleader & actor Bruno Lawrence. He formed Blerta in 1971, with the name standing for “Bruno Lawrence Electric Revelation Travelling Apparition”. Blerta was held together as a band through to 1975 & it’s ever revolving membership included actors as well as musicians. It was conceived & [...]
The one-liner entry for Erdmann in Acid Archives is short but accurate: “Excellent later day hippie gets lost in eastern Acid Symphony trip. Instro guitars, sitar, kalimba, tabla, percussion, sax, even some flute.” EVEN! SOME! FLUTE! What we have is here a southwestern US getting his white man introspection on with sitar and guitar, espousing [...]
One of those bands that just really, really, really, really, really wanted to sound like Hendrix. Not that that’s a bad thing though, as there are more than a few highly enjoyable tracks on here. Take the grinding, fuzzy “Sweet Pea” for example. On the whole it’s somewhat over-exaggerated and hard to take completely seriously [...]
Before transforming himself into performance artist, westcoast scenemaker, and hippie commune godfather Wavy Gravy, Hugh Romney hung around the beat scene on both coasts, and made some recordings. This poorly documented album, titled “Third Stream Humour”, dates from 1962 and is a live recording (at least partly) from a standup performance at the Renaissance in [...]
This is the soundtrack to the Slovanian film MaÅ¡kerada (BoÅ¡tjan Hladnik). The film was made in 1971, but was banned and only shown years later in 1984, apparently due to the explicit sex scenes that it contains.  Anyway, the tripped out psychedelic “song” Hippy on the A-side of the 45 is quite spectacular. It has a great funky garage beat, wild soaring [...]
Tangerine’s first album from 1972 is the full package. From the beautiful cover art to the long-haired pose on the back, you know you are getting something great. And they deliver. One of the few albums that I can say stood up to its cover. Well instrumented psychedelic folk with the tiniest hints of their [...]
The sheer amount of non-(North) American records located in the greater Los Angeles area is mind boggling to say the least. One week I’ll come across a grip of Eastern European prog/folk records, the next week some Calypso 78s…just this past week I found a handful of Aboriginal field recordings and a stack of 20 [...]
Based on the cover I got up fairly high hopes for this one pretty much immediately as I flipped to it. Unfortunately these mid-west Christian hippies only really get it together on a couple tracks here… but those tracks are good if not a bit out of step with the rest of the album. For [...]
You’ll probably read a fair number of reviews where a record is described as sounding “wasted”, but this one really truly does fit the bill. I’ve actually heard this referred to as a “blues rock” or “guitar rock” record which I don’t really get. I mean, it’s far too sloppy and demented to pin down [...]
The Bag were a late sixties blue-eyed soul band from the New York area that made one full length LP for Decca that incorporates enough touches of psych to get mildly sweated by people who collect that stuff. Needless to say the LP sank without a trace upon release. This song is the B-side of [...]