Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: April 25 2005, 18:14 |
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I started writing a post about this a few days ago...probably about time I finished!
This could potentially have been difficult for me, as I have a good number of albums which aren't by 'commercial' artists, and which you'd never hear on mainstream radio.
However, a few shine out as being uniquely uncommercial. The first is Automate by Das Erste Wiener Gemüseorchester. Those of you who understand German will no doubt already be scratching your heads and wondering if I wrote that right, but it's for real...The First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra. This is a group of people who play music on vegetables. Seriously.
The vegetables are used mostly as percussion and wind instruments, with the resulting sounds being a collection of highly organic thuds, squeaks and gurgles. Occasionally other non-organic objects like food processors and graters are also used. The album title is a play on words - the album itself is inspired by robotic, mechanical electronic music, while the title track was played using tomatoes. That's a particularly messy one when they do it live (they're well worth seeing if they're ever in your area).
The second would be the albums of Oskar Sala playing the Mixturtrautonium. Though that might sound like something you'd find fuelling a nuclear power station, it's actually an electronic instrument (an early synthesiser, really), which had its biggest moment of fame when Sala used it to create the soundtrack for Hitchcock's film The Birds.
The least commercial of his works would have to be "Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, dass es kein Gott sei", based on a reading of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter's text of the same name, the reading of which is enhanced by Sala using multiple speed voices and sinister, often metallic effects from the Mixturtrautonium. The bizarre-factor is very high...
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It's not easy to decide but for now and as a topic starter, I will plump for an album I too have mentioned in another thread - 'Rainbow Dome Musik' by Steve Hillage. 
Also, I doubt that anyone who's not an affectionate Trekkie has bought Bill Shatner's "Has been" CD. 
, Never really been able to listen to it, too far out, man 
