record? its amazing.

never heard of most of this. i bet theyre sweet as

what do i win?

I'm so not indie.

http://www.silentagerecords.co.uk/ultraskull/ultraskull2/Dire.htm

I have several thousand records, and about 4 on that list. I feel so...so uncool. MUST TRY HARDER! :)

feeling pretty happy about it. I hate them all obviously but they impress all my Wire-reading friends that I don't have.

I'd particularly stress the genius of the Homosexuals and Henry Cow. Amazing poppy experimental punk and pretty much the best prog band ever in turn. No This Heat though is a bit (very) surprising.

I'd like to read this too if anyone has a scan.

I've got 3 of those on vinyl - fuck I feel old........

more like "100 shitty albums that didnt set the world on fire because nobodys ever heard them cause theyre fuckin gay"

... if you go to the Wire's website they have a description of these records to accompany the list- for what it'sworth- i recommend United States of America as a great cross between Beach Boys and Velvet Underground- also Betty Davis and Glenn Gould if you're feeling in a Radio 4 mood...

I had this issue a few years ago but a whole load of early (and ones I'd bought myself) issues of The Wire I'd picked up at a car boot went MISSING when I moved house.

The Reich stuff is awesome clearly, never really heard the Dead C record they mention but I love another of theirs from a bit later - didn't like them at all live last year at the Luminaire.

Everyone needs to hear the Lee Perry, Lou Reed, John Cale, Modern Lovers and Henry Cow stuff. Essential and very DiS.

Ugh. So much of this is essential.

"100 Records That Set The World On Fire [When No One Was Listening]"

Pierre Akendengue - Nandipo
(Saravah 1973)
Composer, guitarist, dramatist, poet and singer, Pierre Akendengue's influence in his home, Gabon, is huge; in the francophone world, he's made a dent; everywhere else he's barely a footnote. Graduated from universities in France (in literature, psychology and more), Akendengue went blind sometime in his twenties -- which may have turned his remaining senses toward the sound of language, the way musical parts fit together, and the contrasts in songs from different countries. Nandipo, his first album, becomes a play -- each song a dramatic act made of miniature scenes. Complementary voices (tight harmonic choruses, Akendengue's own thrilling tenor and emphatic reading voice) arc above a collection of individual instruments, each running their own rhythmic line. The album is accented by soft acoustic guitar, shakers in stereo effect, slicing flexitone, berimbau and cuica, deep cello. With the assistance of Brazil's Nana Vasconcelos, Akendengue seamlessly incorporated the French popular melodic vocal style, brisk Amazonian percussion, and solid, soulful African themes, words and energy: a 'Fourth World' styling several years early. RE

Kevin Ayers & The Whole World - Shooting At The Moon
(Harvest 1970)
The real Canterbury sound, for all its supposed sophistication, is often stodgy and constipated. These are descriptives that could never be applied to Kevin Ayers's second post-Soft Machine LP. The group Ayers assembled for this project was outstanding. Composer David Bedford played keys, avant garde street agitator Lol Coxhill played sax, a virginal Mike Oldfield played strings, there was a drummer named Mick, and Ayers's fucked-up romanticism overlaid the whole thing. Everyone sounds stoned and the results are a beautifully syncretic mess that reminds me of nothing other than recent Sonic Youth. Unlike all other like-minded projects of the Progressive era, Shooting At The Moon actually achieves a balance between the extremist proclivities of each of its session's participants. It drew up the blueprint for a merger of free jazz/pop/rock/avant grade whomp that should have been used as a roadmap for the revolution. Alas, it was not. BC

Albert Ayler - In Greenwich Village
(Impulse! 1967)
Recorded in two sessions, one late 1966, the other early 67, Ayler had by this time assembled the ultimate collection of ecstatically inspired freedom-chasers: brother Donald on trumpet, Beaver Harris on drums, Grimes/Folwell both on bass and the phenomenal post-Ornette sawtooth violinist Michael Sampson. Word is that Sampson, previously a mainstay of classical orchestras, had such a moment of revelation during a chance encounter with Ayler's music that he packed in his previously cushy career to join him in the back of a van on its way round Europe. The 1966 European tour has since taken on mythic proportions and In Greenwich Village catches them on their triumphal return. Side two's "Truth is Marching In" still stands as the perfect synthesis of Ayler's concerns: joyous whooping, marching band refrains, mass ensemble levitation, pig-throttling solo blurt -- the OM that reverberated quietly round the base of Coltrane's skull until he saw Ayler fully articulate it. Ayler would go on to perform "Truth is Marching In" at Coltrane's graveside the next year. Albert wasn't long for this planet either; his body was fished out of the East River in New York in November 1970. As he himself explained: "I can't be confined to an earthly plane even though I was, like, born here and everything." Amen. DK

Bad Brains - Bad Brains
(Roir 1982)
You think you're all worked up? Let this album be your yardstick. You saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan? We saw Bad Brains at A7 and up became down. This ineptly recorded, completely relentless music justifies every cliche thrown at it -- runaway train, water shot from a hose, Coltrane as a rock, whatever. The group's unexpected changes and catchy riffs may be the product of their fusion background, but in 1982 who knew where the hell four black (belt) punks came from, much less what they listened to? Singer HR channeled the putdowns of Johnny Rotten through pro-Rasta positivity and local concerns and, just to make his point, danced for the hearing-impaired like James Brown, Original Punker. The dub numbers (hardly a fashionable move back then) give you chance to catch your breath before the next hayride to righteousness. There may be faster, harder or louder punk music somewhere but it doesn't levitate like this utopian shitfit. SFJ

Derek Bailey - Aida
(Incus 1982, Reissued Dexter's Cigar 1996)
Variously provoking delight, amazement, embarrassment or rage, this, the finest of Bailey's solo recordings, serves as a test of one's entrenchment in tradition. The guitarist plays his instrument like a found object, treating it as though it lacked any previous history and had simply descended from the sky. With all the intensity of a child playing or an expert tinkering, these three pieces reveal a relentless exploration of the instrument's possibilities. To the listener straining for points of reference, slices of Japanese koto, punk rock, Country blues, flamenco, and folk guitar might seem to surface momentarily only to dissolve again, as Bailey draws his lines of escape from all habit, cliche, and resolution. CC

Louis & Bebe Barron - Forbidden Planet OST
(Small Planet 1956)
By the time MGM got around to asking Louis and Bebe Barron to compose an electronic soundtrack for their prestige sci-fi presentation, Forbidden Planet, the husband and wife team had already worked with John Cage, Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley and Maya Deren. Mimicking Norbert Weiner's experiments involving negative and positive feedback in stressed animals, the Barrons had learned to make electrical circuits literally 'shriek', reprocessing the results through careful tape manipulation into extremely rich and varied electroacoustic soundscapes. Having supplied not only the film's music but its alien sound effects as will, the Barrons had to abide by the studio's decision to list their contribution as 'electronic tonalities' in the credits out of fear that the Musicians' Union might sue. This unfortunate trivializing of their pioneering work might explain why the Forbidden Planet album became such a relatively rare and neglected item. Harsh, metallic, and cavernous, the future never sounded this good again. KH

Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band - Bat Chain Puller
(Unreleased; recorded 1976)
Few rock artists as washed up -- and seemingly past it -- as Captain Beefheart was in 1974 have come back with new music as dazzling as that on Bat Chain Puller. Having flirted disastrously with commercialism, the nadir of which was Bluejeans and Moonbeams, he took a lengthy sabbatical, returning two years later, aged 35, with an album legendary for the wrong reason -- it has never been officially released. Occassionally it harks back to the complexities of Trout Mask Replica but is more measured, with a vivid, plangent, colourful sound. The remit is as wide as anything Beefheart had attempted before: pop songs, poetic narratives and recitals, chamber-style instrumentals and songs in fantastic new shapes. Some material was later reworked as Shiny Beast, but the original album is the more vital example of this late(ish) flowering of Beefheart's creativity. MB

Joey Beltram - Places
(Tresor 1995)
Former graffiti artist Beltram's place in Techno history is assured through the sheer bombast and snotty energy of his teenage releases for Belgian label R&S, but on this less-lauded LP he traded in his tough keyboard stabs for intricate lattices of percussion, which build and shimmer like a cyborg samba school. The cover shows Beltram with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, the striking and unusual elongated bone structure of his face complementing the arching pylons. Sonically the architecture emulates the wired rhythms of urban life, with funky syncopated drum lines broken up by the odd heavily reverbed splash of sound, or a percussive synth riff. Places is a classic example of Techno's ability to keep itself indecipherable and let the listener give it meaning. Beltram is resolutely determinist about his work and refuses to see it in any narrative or evocative form outside of the dancefloor. Tracks like "Floaters" and "Set Ups", which initially hint at dark underworld references, are in fact graffiti slang - Beltram had begun to pine for his spray cans when making the LP. MSh

Steven Jesse Bernstein - Prison
(Sub Pop 1992)
"Didn't do well in school, but handled pharmacy and the tools of street crime instinctively." So runs a self-penned epitaph on the sleeve of Steven Jesse Bernstein's only recording, the posthumously released Prison. It's an over-concise summary of his concerns which typically sacrifices literal truth in favour of high-octane impact; Bernstein's poetry was turbulent, bruised, confrontational and complex, building on the legacies of influences like Ginsberg and Bukowski. He agreed to have a selection of that poetry recorded and augmented by Sub Pop midfield general and Pigeonhed mainstay Steve Fisk during the last two years of his life, and Prison was the result. Fisk matched Bernstein's exhilarating, rasping and achingly self-aware delivery with smeared HipHop, smudged atonal samples, and snatches of Latino loungecore; creating an uncannily coherent union of words and music which deserves to ensure that Bernstein's 1991 suicide will not consign his work to oblivion. CS

Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum
(Philips 1968)
Named after a particularly potent brand of street acid, Blue Cheer were the 60s progenitors of Heavy Metal. A group who played so hard and loud that, so rumour persists, they inadvertently caused the early demise of a dog which strayed on stage while they were improvising. Vincebus Eruptum, their seminal debut, snarled rabidly in the face of hippy innocence and soon became a Hell's Angels party stomper. 30 years later, the record would inspire a horde of suitably impressed Japanese noise trios to pay mutated homage to the group. Vincebus Eruptum may have failed to impress the Woodstock generation with its full on sonic rock attack and textured silver sleeve, but without its raw power both High Rise and Musica Transonic would have remained mere twinkles in Nanjo Asahito's eye. EP

The Blue Men - I Hear A New World
(RGM White Label 1960, Reissued RPM 1991)
A profound influence on artists as diverse as Steven Stapleton and Saint Etienne, Joe Meek's magnum opus was destined to languish in obscurity for several decades. Aside from a couple of highly collectable EPs of the material, and a few white label copies, it didn't get an official release in Meek's lifetime. Having developed an obsession with transmundane sounds when working as a radar operator during his National Service, Meek had his passion further inflamed by the Russian and American satellite programmes Consequently, he resolved to create a record which would explore life on the Moon. Aware that this was going to be "a strange record", Meek brought his entire gamut of unorthodox recording techniques to the fore. Speeded-up tapes, rattling washers, combs dragged across ashtrays, etc, were thrown into the mix, along with the clavioline and all manner of home-built effects. The results are at times an adumbration of techniques used in later electronic music; at other times the record is undeniably quirky with its risible speeded-up voices. But undoubtedly, it was a significant work, suffused with exquisitely simple melodies and genuinely strange intros that still sound way ahead of their time. JE

William S Burroughs - Call Me Burroughs
(ESP-Disk 1965)
One man, one voice, one microphone. It sure don't come much better than this: Uncle Bill alone in the studio, reading extracts from The Naked Lunch and Nova Express with the libidinous detachment of a research scientist in a toxicology lab. The sound of a man who loves his work. Routines include "The, Complete All-American De-Anxietized Man", "The Buyer" and the crazed ramblings of the Death Dwarf going on the nod in Nova Police custody ("My power's coming! My power's coming!"). Not since the Raven first croaked "Nevermore" have things sounded this grim. What makes these recordings unique, however, is the way Burroughs tackles some of the more abstract of his cut-up sequences, his sepulchral drawl imbuing their fractured syntax with a distant, mournful poetry that has never been equaled. Call Me Burroughs demonstrates just how powerful a listening experience text can be. One of the hundred records you should hear before you die. Just before you die, in fact. KH

John Cale - Paris 1919
(Reprise 1972)
After a musical training programme that included playing alongside La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Terry Riley and The Velvet Underground, John Cale's solo career finally found its feet with this, his still glorious third album. On Paris 1919 Cale's confident piano playing and vibrant Welsh vocal provide the perfect vehicle to carry this selection of spectral songs which, once heard, refuse to be exorcised from the memory. Cale wisely chose members of LA boogie unit Little Feat to complete his chamber ensemble. It seemed an eccentric choice at the time, but it works beautifully, especially on "Macbeth", where the hooves of post-Velvets improvisation thunder through Cale's haunted castle of a song. Several fine albums for Island Records would follow before punk rot briefly set in, but Paris 1919 remains John Cale's most satisfying avant rock statement to date. EP

El Camaron De La Isla, Con La Collaboracion Especial De Paco De Lucia - Al Verte Las Floras Lloran
(Philips 1969)
No one whose funeral was televised with thousands of people fainting over his coffin can really be described as neglected, but Camaron, the tormented duende of contemporary flamenco, is too little known outside Spain - and flamenco itself too little understood. Camaron helped restore the form's rawness and authenticity after decades of operismo and Franco-inspired dumbing down, while his tousled, rebellious image appealed to the young. On the first of several collaborations with Paco De Lucia, the master technician and seminal innovator of modern flamenco, he tackles classic forms, from the belting buleria to the wasted intensity of the siguiriya. Camaron's famously rasping voice, not yet ravaged by drugs or alcohol, still sounds pure, liquid, almost feminine, while De Lucia's guitar has a mercurial lightness And however tender and lyrical, there's an ever present tension and attack. A truly exalted recording that opens up another world. MH

Chrome - Half Machine Lip Moves
(Siren/Beggars Banquet 1979)
The core duo of Chrome, Damon Edge and Helios Creed - aided by various musicians who fleetingly joined the project - created music that deserved something more than the cult audience it inevitably engendered Half Machine Lip Moves was a curious and powerful hybrid, which fused a stooges-style aggression with a sci-fi and LSD-inspired otherworldliness, reflected in titles that evidenced their interest in aliens and contemporary technology. This album was arguably their finest moment (Alien Soundtracks was their other meisterwerk): Creed's searing, heavily FX-laden guitar (Electro-Harmonix Bassballs?) and Edge's eerie Moog and vocals, underpinned by metallic drums, came together to create what could have become a radical new departure point for a nascent form of post-rock. Their influence may be discernible in the sound of Big Black and a few others; but the extent of their neglect can be measured in the month that Damon Edge's corpse remained undiscovered after his death in 1995. JE

Cluster - Cluster 71
(Philips 1997, Reissued Sky 1996)
Cluster 77, the album Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius recorded in 1971 for Philips before moving to the Brain label, has been unduly neglected. Even the recent Krautrock revival overlooked it. Dismissed as too heavy and Teutonic, it prefigures Illbient by about 20 years, parts of it sounding uncannily like DJ Spooky. Engineered by Conny Plank, the three untitled tracks form dark tunneling echoes around icy repeated synth bleats, soaring electronic drones in winding and diving pitches, and sporadic alert signals fusing the new possibilities for electronic noise production with the repetitions and resonances of dub. Space music with a severe hangover, its blaring synth sounds coil and flange into the depths through a blurry rotary motion of sound, while patches of regular thudding pulse conjure up a malformed Techno. MF

Ornette Coleman - Dancing In Your Head
(A&M 1977)
A fan recently proposed Muhammad Ali's youthful boxing style as the stylistic equivalent of Coleman's 60s free jazz. Both were, he said, "intricately related to (and a profound expression of) a militant flowering of black American identity." Always look to the second act. In 1974, the 'Rumble In The Jungle', bankrolled by Zaire's murderous, CIA catspaw Mobutu, saw poor George Foreman, Ali's opponent and thus by implication 'un-black' and 'un-militant', vilified and humiliated before all the world. In 1977, Dancing In your Head with Bern Nix, Charlie Ellerbee, Rudy McDaniel and Sharron Jackson, was a music recasting the urban Babel as a visionary free-pulse funk, less 'on the one' (as James Brown would insist) than 'on the many'. Coleman also went to Africa - in "Midnight Sunrise" he and Robert Palmer played with Morocco's Joujouka musicians - but this dense, shifting 3D of jittery atoms, this hermetic yet pushy dreamscape juju couldn't be less Ali-like, whichever way you look at it. MSi

Alice Coltrane - Universal Consciousness
(Impulse! 1972)
In 1972, jazz mysticism was vigorous and holding, not yet bleached out into the whiter-wash purity of Keith Jarrettism. Having explored the small group exoticisms pioneered by her late husband, Alice Coletrane went for broke with Universal Consciousness. This album clearly connects to other dyspeptic jazz traditions - the organ trio, the soloists with strings - yet volleys them into outer space, ancient Egypt, the Ganges, the great beyond. The production is astounding, the quality of improvisation is riveting, the string arrangements are apocalyptic rather than saccharine, the balance of turbulence and calm a genuine dialectic that later mystic/exotic post-jazz copped out of pursuing. Her lack of constraint was dimly regarded by adherents of 70s jazz and its masculine orthodoxies, yet Alice deserved better credit for virtuosity, originality, and the sheer will power needed to realized her vision. DT

Comus - First Utterance
(BGO 1970)
Named after the god of revelry in classical mythology, Comus emerged around 1969 during the polystylistic ferment of British Progressive rock, and fell apart in 1974 after a disappointing second album. Two songs on their extraordinary debut First Utterance draw on mythology and Milton's poem Comus, about threatened female chastity; others describe brutal murder, Christian martyrdom and mental illness. Roger Wooten's contorted vocals (echoes of Family's Roger Chapman) forcefully convey the terror and hysteria in the lyrics, supported by atmospheric arrangements which veer from poignant partoral to turbulent workouts for acoustic guitars, violins, hand drums, and electric bass. Folk rock at its most delirious, devilish, and dynamic. CBL

Tony Conrad - Four Violins
(Table of the Elements 1997)
Utterly neglected by all available histories of Minimalist music, Conrad's contribution to that aesthetic has only recently gained widespread acknowledgment. Much of the responsibility for this historical void lies with La Monte Young, who has actively suppressed tapes of the Dream Music he recorded with Conrad and others in the early 60s. Conrad's music has also been overshadowed by the more agreeable, rhythmic Minimalism of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Reilly. In contrast, Conrad's dense, abrasive drones, and his commitment to unscored, long-duration playing remained at odds with the New Music establishment. The 23 years separating its recording in 1964 and its release last year have done little to diminish the force of Four Violins, the only recording of Conrad's early solo music. On and between the layers of his overdubbed violins, Conrad invents a new musical language of buzzes, rasps, and flutters, amassing a whole that is, by turns, unbearably intense and gloriously ecstatic. CC

Lox Coxhill - Digswell Duets
(Random Radar 1979)
The tireless British saxophonist and maverick explorer in a brace of live duos with fellow one-time members of Digswell Art Trust, a pioneering multi-arts hothouse before its transformation to a residential care home for the elderly. Coxhill's meeting with pianist Veryan Weston could easily pass for a tragicomic soundtrack of the 1950s, and is itself worth the steep secondhand asking price; but it's the meeting with electronic music exponent Simon Emmersonthat guarantees it a place in this list. Making on-the-fly sound processing a credible partner in a free improvising context has become integral to much of Pauline Oliveros's and, recently, Evan Parker's work; but here are the first flowerings of that experiment. Knife-edge reactions from both players test the technology to its limits - other than during the opening seconds where Coxhill's reeds set the pace, this is seamless music making that is as gripping as it is innovative. DI

Betty Davis - They Say I'm Different
(Vinyl Experience 1974)
Miles Davis met Betty in 1969, when she was Betty Mabry, still in her very early twenties and hanging with Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. Betty Davis's photograph appeared on the cover of his Filles De Kilimanjaro album, but their marriage lasted not much longer than a year, finishing when Davis discovered she was sleeping with Hendrix. By the trumpeter's own admission, however, she turned him on to the funk rock that revolutionized his sound forever. Her own music was a pressure cooker of sex and adrenalin, equaled in guts by only a handful of her husband's records. They Say I'm Different contains the much sampled "Shoo-B- Doop And Cop Him", the tough fetish-funk "He Was A Big Freak" ("Pain was his middle name... he used to laugh when I made him cry"), and a title track that remains one of the decade's overlooked funk masterpieces. In Davis's own words "If Betty were singing today she'd be something like Madonna; something like Prince... She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis. She was ahead of her time." LC

Miles Davis - On The Corner
(Columbia 1972)
Miles Davis once said that On The Corner was the product of a period of listening to Sly Stone, Bach, James Brown and Stockhausen, and was part of his bid to reach black youth. Jazz musicians hated it, critics bemoaned Miles's fall from grace, and since Columbia failed to market it as a pop record, it died in the racks. Even now, when Davis's jazz rock recordings are being reissued to great acclaim, On The Corner remains lost in time. Still, this record might well be the most radical break with the past of all of Davis's many breaks. Dense with rhythm and conceptually enriched with noises, his trumpet's role mixed down to that of a journeyman, the melody reduced to recycled Minimalist patterns, Davis broke every rule enforced by the jazz police. Yet heard today - especially in the Bill Laswell remixes on Panthalassa - we hear that Davis was laying the foundations for drum 'n' bass, TripHop, Jungle, and all the other musics of repetition to come. JFS

Dead C - Trapdoor Fucking Exit
(Xpressway 1990, Reissued Siltbreeze 1993)
Trapdoor Fucking Exit is the sound of three newly freed New Zealanders wrestling with the implications of punk-primitive aesthetics in the wake of US/Euro free jazz ground leveling. Two broken guitars and a rapid-firing drummer, playing lead, singlehandedly redefined the concept of garage punk without any considerations of melody, rhythm or fidelity. Originally released as an ultra-limited cassette recorded on a damaged Walkman, the fact that there isn't a Dead C tribute group in every small suburban town the world over is still utterly perplexing. Guitarist Bruce Russell has since become the Southern Hemisphere's premier disseminator of outward-bound sound, courtesy of his Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum imprints. DK

Bill Dixon Orchestra - Intents And Purposes
(RCA 1967)
One of the architects of the 1964 October Revolution and the short-lived Jazz Composers' Guild, Dixon was an outspoken critic of the conservative factions in jazz - musicians and industry figures alike. He has good cause. Though his early 60s groups were among the most original of the time, his few recordings for Savoy were shamefully neglected, and this lovely, prophetic 1967 session for RCA has been out of print for three decades. Dixon's eccentric trumpet style, with its grainy microtonal bite and often melancholy edginess, remains intact on 8Os and 90s releases. But what's been ignored is his individual approach to scoring for larger ensembles - the 11 piece 'orchestra' is heard on the dark, moody "Metamorphosis 1962-66'. Dixon's combination of composed lyricism and propulsive energy, wrapped within his shifting tonal colours and textures, still sounds contemporary and cutting edge. AL

Paul Dolden - L'Ivresse De La Vitesse
(Empreintes Digitales 1994)
Canadian electroacoustic composer Dolden champions a 'theory of excess', a belief that the intoxication and seduction of information overload is a desirable condition, one that frees us to perceive the world afresh. L'Ivresse De La Vitesse compiles nine devastating sonic manifestos to make his point. Several hundred painstakingly scored and multitracked solo acoustic instruments collide to produce a super-dense musical black hole that even Iannis Xenakis would have shied away from. Trying to actually follow the impossible complexity drags you across the event horizon into a world where consciousness survives but meaning has been obliterated. Futile relief comes on a few tracks where virtuoso soloists battle in vain against the taped chaos. Nirvana or nihilism? No matter, you can listen to it a thousand times without wanting it to make sense. BD

Dr John The Night Tripper - Gris-Gris
(ATCO 1968)
Now acclaimed by everybody and their dog, Gris-Gris has been neglected for 30 years in the psychedelic waiting room, overshadowed by lesser obscurities. Part of the problem was the fact that this was a warped R&B record of ungraspable originality. The instrumental combinations were inspired. Combined with electronic treatments that owed much to post-Spector LA studio trickery, they constantly unbalanced the ear's efforts to place the music within a continuation of music history. Plus Johnson's playing in particular sounds more like steam powered organ played at a lizard funeral rather than conventional reeds. Partly fuelled by drugs but consummately skilled, the album created its own self-contained mythology out of the recording studio. A good proportion was flummery and vaudeville, but enacted with sufficient conviction to come across as real magick. DT

The Electric Eels - Cyclotron/Agitated 7"
(Rough Trade 1977)
An unbelievable slab of primitive art damage from the deep Cleveland underground. Recorded in 1975, the incredibly itchy-scratchy quality of the vocals, instruments and recording give the songs a crumbling edge that is the mark of only the best sub-underground murk. When this single appeared (on Rough Trade of all places) it challenged every outsider notion of the American pre-punk scene. If Pere Ubu was avant garage, what on earth was this? Could it really have been recorded in 1975? The primitive instrumental raunch dynamics combine with Dave E's aggressive sissy-boy vocals in a way that should have made every dada-loving teen start a group immediately. If not sooner. And it seems to me that the versions of these songs on subsequent archival issues of Eels material are not as raw and disturbed as the ones on this single. Jesus, what a sound. BC

Esquivel And His Orchestra - Other Worlds Other Sounds
(RCA Victor 1958)
In January 1958, Juan Garcia Esquivel drove from Mexico City to Hollywood, California, at RCA Victor's invitation, to record an album that would feature American musicians playing some of his startling 'Sonorama' arrangements in stereo for the first time. The result, the company decided, was to be a gentle little affair entitled Beguine For Beginners. Esquivel thought otherwise. Claiming that all his sheet music had been stolen, he suggested they tackle "Granada" instead. The producer had a fit. The ensuing session, however, included reworkings of Cole Porter, Sammy Kahn and Kurt Weill of such stark exuberance and scintillating orchestral muscle that, 40 years on, they still have the power to amaze Esquivel's passion for drawing new sounds from conventional instruments shines through in the taut dynamics of Other Worlds Other Sounds, a tribute to the arranger as an unacknowledged force in 20th century music. KH

Chaha Fadella & Cheb Sahraoui - N' Sel Fik
(Factory/Mango 1985)
While N' Set Fik is probably the closest that raj, or any other form from the Islamic world, will get to approaching the verities of Western pop music, such a dizzying, swooning record could never have emerged from the Anglo-American tradition. Chaba Fadella's comeback record after a sabbatical raising her children, N' Set Fik expresses commitment with a drive that has only ever signified wandering lust since Charley Patton and Jimmie Rodgers first claimed that they were pistol-packin' daddies 60 years ago. Needless to say, the closest you will come to hearing such a complete surrender to ecstasy in Western pop music is a Massive Attack or Bally Sagoo remix of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. PS

Faust - The Faust Tapes
(Virgin 1973)
"We made tons and kilometres of tapes and The Faust Tapes is only the best," is how the group's Jean-Herve Peron assessed this epochal album. When the group produced the raw musical material, they were holed up in a converted schoolhouse near Wumme in Germany, growing their own dope and tomatoes and living naked. Assembled by their producer Uwe Nettlebeck, this 26 part opus showcases the art of sonic collage at its best. The editing forms a brilliant narrative structure, wrenching the listener through psychedelia, motorik, quirky pop and musique concrete. At a time when the label 'Krautrock' is often erroneously applied to any spliff-riffing that goes on for longer than it should, The Faust Tapes reminds how in their hands it meant the whole world in sound, encompassing all music from the daftest to the fiercest. MB

Fingers Inc - Another Side
(Trax 1988)
The first, and still the best, House album ever released. Up to that point, House music had centred on the body, drawing its influences from disco, Electro and soul, all musics centred around the dancefloor. The music of Larry Heard, together with vocalist Robert Owens, seemed to exist outside of any earthly reference point whatsoever. It was as if they had fallen out of the sky. Slow, spacious dreamscapes drifted by, while Owens's voice recounted tales of dark sexual intrigue, whose emotional brutality were at odds with both the music below and the purity of his delivery. The whole thing was underpinned by Heard's sense of musicianship and his belief in House as a musical form capable of sustaining a prolonged, varied vision over the course of an album. That he achieved this with a set comprised largely of previously released singles is further testament to the quality of the originals. PM

Fire Engines - Get Up And Use Me
(Pop Aural 1980)
This mini-album offers the freshest of the various inspired rethinks of the electric guitar that came out of post-punk Scotland. Guitarists Davey Henderson and Murray Slade spooled off writhing, dissonant lines of energy that spoke of obsession and entanglement. The music claimed the riff back from bad rock - all the pieces work on nagging, repeated bass and guitar lines. But there was no truck with regular rock rhythms - the group rode on the tightly wound, oddly paced bounce of Russell Burns's snare hits. Henderson's vocals are frequently shrieks ("Get up!): the 'songs' are essentially guitar instrumentals. The group's interest in the warping neuroses of consumerism was reflected in the packaging (the record came in a plastic carrier bag) and titles such as "Plastic Gift" and "New Thing In Cartons." Listening back to the lo-fi, 'live in the studio' approach, it's striking what an unusual sound the group achieved - the harsh, electrifying prickle of the guitars (Rickenbackers, as I recall) and the trashy fatness of the drums. Speedy, delirious and unrepeatable. WM

Family Fodder - Monkey Banana Kitchen
(Fresh 1980)
A loose collection of friends and, more often than not, wanderers, Family Fodder reached their apex (or at least one of them) with Monkey Banana Kitchen. The music took the ferocity of contemporaneous British punk and scaled it way back. They also eschewed the giant pop hook, replacing it with the hoop jumping of songs in three languages, instruments played for only four seconds, harmonic call-and-response motifs and opaque but symbolic political lyrics. Multiple reprises of phrases and fragments result in a much more subtle and effective memory-tickle. I can't count how many instruments finally made it onto the album, though piano (providing much of the rhythm), melodica, sax, synth and cowbell dominate. Their integrated eclecticism is actually layer after thin layer of dub, jazz and New Wave - peering down into this multi-ply music, you detect traces of structural complexity, and the pop that's there blurs. Lesson No 537 from Fodder members: participate only when absolutely necessary - knowing when to pare down makes it easier to transcend. RE

4 Hero - Parallel Universe
(Reinforced 1994)
Before Goldie took drum 'n' bass into the realms of 'conventional' (ie album-oriented) music with Timeless, there was Parallel Universe. These days, drum 'n' bass albums are almost the norm, but back then, the idea of not only moving beyond the darkcore dancefloor style prevalent at the time, but sustaining that vision over the course of an album, was groundbreaking. Dissolving Jungle's tunnel-visioned rhythmic matrices and reassembling them into sonic collages of beats and loops, threaded through with saxophones, guitars and female vocals, the greatest strength of Parallel Universe lay in its ability to touch on all the disparate bases of the breakbeat scene and make it appear totally natural that they should all be sitting there together. No single track stood out; it was the wholeness of the album that was so staggering. To achieve this required a quantum leap of ambition, light years beyond the grasp of those simply content to trace over the 12" template of Jungle. That would only come later. PM

Robert Fripp - Exposure
(EG/Polydor 1979)
Most of Fripp's recorded output showcases his talent as a guitarist, but only Exposure offers any serious insight into the man himself. Returning to music after a four year break studying with Gurdjieff disciple JG Bennett, Fripp's psyche had veered from frustrated hostility to enigmatic good humour, and his first solo album captures every aspect of a many-sided personality. Angelic electric guitar drone in the form of Frippertronics serves to frame a sparse, moving reworking of Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes The Flood". Tape recordings of Fripp's argumentative New York neighbours jostle for space with cryptic spoken comments from Brian Eno. Terre Roche and Daryl Hall sing gorgeous, gentle ballads over mildly unreliable rhythms, but the highlights of Exposure see guest vocalist Peter Hammill chewing glass, barking with grisly charisma over cracking rock riffs. There's no stylistic consistency, and no need Fripp is resplendent in divergence. It's the Sergeant Pepper of avant punk. BD

Lewis Furey - Lewis Furey
(A&M 1975)
Previously known to the world only by a session violin credit on Leonard Cohen's New Skin For The Old Ceremony, Lewis Furey established himself as nothing less than Montreal's answer to Lou Reed on this, his first (and best) solo album. Cohen's producer John Lissauer created the sound of francophone cabaret trapped in a bell jar, the perfect showcase for Furey's piano - and banjo-driven tales of obsessive love and betrayal. Those who currently thrill to Rufus Wainwright's debut need only hear a few seconds of Lewis's torchy, nasal vocals to know that there is nothing new under the sun. These tales of Quebec's demi-monde are laced with imagery drawn equally from Blake and Burroughs, brutal metaphors and sly, devilish arrangements. And speak of the devil, The Rocky Horror Show's Tim Curry turns up as backing vocalist - along with Cat Stevens. RH

Fushitsusha - DBL Live
(PSF 1991)
It was the emergence of Keiji Haino in the early 90s that really opened up the contemporary Tokyo scene to the West, a scene primarily concerned with glorious guitar reinvention; pushing individual and group expression to the extreme; and making huge leaps of rock imagination. Their geographical position alone gave them, like the Krautrockers, much more of an outsider's view of the 'classic' Western rock canon. Here, the likes of Blue Cheer or Arthur Doyle - not exactly household names - figure as the most influential artists for new Japanese music. DBL Live still stands as the scene's crowning document - a sprawling double CD set that sounds so otherworldly and unprecedented, the rest of the world is still trying to catch up. From static and forlorn proto-Gregorian howl, minimal feedback hiss and spectral six string tremblings through ridiculously overdriven guitar destruction in the space of 50 minutes, Haino's power trio redefined the leftfield forever. DK

Michael Gibbs - Michael Gibbs
(Deram 1970)
For the debut album by composer (and reluctant bandleader) Mike Gibbs, youthful passion and intensity burst every seam. Listening to it is a heady experience - it's packed solid with music whose structural, melodic and harmonic language was way ahead of its time. There's also an unstoppable personal timbre, something Gibbs's 'straight' contemporaries talked about, but rarely achieved to this degree. It should have changed orchestral jazz forever (it's hard to believe anyone could churn out conventional charts after hearing this record), yet anonymous big band music has trundled on much as before. What makes Michael Gibbs an essential jazz record is the relationship between great composition and improvisation. There has rarely been a finer setting for Kenny Wheeler's glittering solos, Tony Oxley's fractured swing and John Surman's explosive baritone. Phil Lee, Jack Bruce and Chris Spedding are superb. And the brass chorale that kicks off "Family Joy, Oh Boy", crowned by John Wilbraham's piccolo trumpet, is one of the great opening moment in recording history. JLW

Glenn Gould - The Solitude Trilogy
(Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1967, 1969, 1977)
Glenn Gould's decision to abandon live concert performances for good was three years behind him when he accepted an invitation to make an audio documentary for Canadian national radio. Gould accepted with alacrity and subsequently devoted hundreds of hours of research, travel, editing and mixing to the project, which he called The Idea Of North. Like its two successors (The Latecomers and The Quiet In The Land), The Idea Of North edits a collection of monologues into a complex, shifting meditation on solitude and isolation. Voices advance and recede, questioning, theorizing, wondering, describing; the whole could be described as an oral tone poem, with Gould counterpointing the rhythms of words and emotions with the rattle of a northbound train, the seas off the coast of Newfoundland, and carefully selected snatches of music. The various thoughts, textures and visions fuse into a moving whole - and the climax of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony which closes The Idea Of North is breathtaking. These documentaries mirrored Gould's increasing withdrawal from the world and were clearly born out of his own intense preoccupations. As one of the voices in The Latecomers says, "People are ecstatic about getting into the mainstream. I think it's a little bit stupid since the mainstream is pretty muddy..." CS

Bob Graettinger - City Of Glass/This Modern World
(Capitol 1953)
Graettinger's entire body of work consists of about a dozen original compositions and song arrangements commissioned by Stan Kenton from 1947-53, but it was enough to briefly shake the foundations of big band jazz before sliding into obscurity. Such aggressive dissonance, jagged polytonality and clashing rhythms, in scores like "Incident In Jazz", "House Of Strings", and his four movement "City Of Glass", were previously unheard in the jazz world, and quickly confused and alienated critics and even the musicians themselves. Graettinger's unorthodox compositional methods were drawn in part from Bartok, Stravinsky and especially Varese in his collision of dramatic blocks of sound, but his own unusual psychological/acoustic theories - plus the undiluted intensity of their presentation - turned them into a musical Rorshach test for listeners. They're just as shocking and breathtaking today. AL

Al Green - The Belle Album
(Motown 1977)
A pivotal record for Green, launched from somewhere between Memphis and Valhalla, it was pop sensibility infused with Pentecostal fire, and the last gasp of soul passion before the adolescent cool of the post-Jimmy Carter years suffocated the US. These were songs not intended so much to rattle the pop cage as to find Green himself a new and sanctified place in the music. But the shift was too much for anyone in 1977 and left even the cognoscenti confused. And no wonder "Belle" proposed a menage a trois with God; "Country Boy" was an apologia of Southern life, skillfully hidden in part by the hieroglyphics of Southern dialect; there was the spirited eschatology of "Chariots Of Fire"; the ethereal spun gold of "Dreaming". Even by 1977's production and technical standards, it sounded like a field recording, especially with Green playing his own lead guitar. But it had real down home power. As Green himself once said, this was music as strong as death. JFS

Bernhard Gunter - Un Feu De Neige Salie
(Selektion 1993, Reissued Table Of The Elements 1997)
Gunter's debut album is a masterpiece of radical restraint. It's a compact disc with every last trace of the music seemingly surgically excised, and all that remains are the minute glitches of the recording, mixing and mastering processes. Microscopic pops and buzzes flicker across the surface of nearly imperceptible high frequency tones - unless you listen to it in a quiet space or on headphones, it may seem at first to be completely silent, and the CD pressing plant at first returned the master tape to Gunter as 'faulty'. Its humility is beguiling - once attuned to their subatomic universe, the sounds become strangely compelling. The disc heightens awareness of your immediate surroundings and the rarely tapped full potential of the human eardrum. BD

Herbie Hancock - Sextant
(Columbia 1973)
One of the charges against electronic music is that it's cold, alien, deadly serious. As pioneered by academic serialists at Cologne Radio, it certainly invites those adjectives. However, when The Herbie Hancock Sextet recorded Sextant they'd been using clavinets and mellotrons and ARP synthesizers on the road for three years. This gave their burbling sonics a hands on, funky spin that still causes smiles today. Buster Williams's groovesome basslines and Hancock's boogie figures float over polymetric layerings that recall Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch and Miles Davis's ESP. Trombonist Julian Priester supplied the umbilical link to The Sun Ra Arkestra. Uncushioned by the harmonic conventions that padded out later, more saleable fusions, the players' lines glisten over deep black space and tangle into multicoloured collective improvisations. BWa

Kip Banrahan - Desire Develops An Edge
(American Clave 1983)
Hanrahan, a former film student turned audio auteur, was pushing the envelope even by New York standards. Different musical camps were already checking each other out, but the dolly mixture he picked for 1983's Desire... looked flamboyant to the point of foolhardiness. This was where Bronx met East Village; Latinos and Haitians doing the bump and skronk with No Wave art punks, free improvisors and jazz's contemporary cool. Rhythmically luscious, it oozed sensitivity; Jack Bruce sang a blinder (his relationship with Hanrahan still bears fruit), while the likes of Elysee Pyronneau, Arto Lindsay, Steve Swallow, the three Johns - Stubblefield, Scofield and Zorn - Milton Cardona and Davis's producer (and Hanrahan's idol) Teo Macero gave themselves completely to the mood. Next to this, Bill Laswell's pick 'n' mix ventures were crude patchworks. DI

Joe Harriott - Abstract
(Columbia UK/Capitol US 1961)
When conjuring up the name of the UK's greatest jazz musician, all of whose records are out of print, the temptation is to list every one of them. And truth be told, almost anyone of them would qualify for this list: the two with double quartet of Indian and jazz musicians (Indo Jazz Suite and Indo Jazz Fusions, both 1966), and the 1954 records with Buddy Pipp's Highlifers, would put him on the WoridMusic list; then there are the poetry and jazz record with Michael Garrick; the Afro-Cuban recordingswith Kenny Graham; his Dixieland work with Chris Barber; blues recordings with Sonny Boy Williamson and Jimmy Page... But his heritage will probably rest with Free Form, Movement and Abstract, all three of which have been compared to the best of Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman. In fact, with Abstract, the effect is that of Coleman playing with a group with the cohesion and compositional unity of Mingus. Except that - dare I say it? - Harriott was a more passionate alto saxophonist than Coleman, and the compositional feel of the Harriott quartet evades the cliches which Mingus often relished. If Harriott's records are ever reissued, or better yet boxed together, the UK's stock in the history of jazz will go through the roof! JFS

Jonathan Harvey - Bhakti
(NMC 1984)
Harvey fits the profile of the 'academic composer' in a New Music ghetto. Yet the British composer has written some of the most stunning electronic music since Stockhausen, with dazzling combinations of synthesized sounds and real-time orchestral forces. Born in 1939, he underwent a "Stockhausen conversion" in 1966: "Here was a man who was quite explicitly seeing in music the language of some greater consciousness." Harvey's best known piece, Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, was created at Ircam in 1980. A second Ircam commission, the electroacoustic Bhakti, is probably his masterwork, inspired by hymns from the Rig Veda, "keys to transcendent consciousness". Harvey's precise but sensuous aural imagination particularly favours bell - like sonorities, and transitions from tape to orchestra in Bhakti are remarkably seamless. Its first recording inaugurated the NMC label, a vital showcase for contemporary composition in Britain. Still an underrated figure, Harvey is one of the most exciting composers writing today. JLW

Henry Cow - Concerts
(RER Recommended 1976)
20 years after their demise, British avant rockers Henry Cow continue to inspire those who seek the outer limits of rock. Signing to the enterprising Virgin label in the early 70's enabled their uncomprising LPs to reach the provincial high streets of Britain, as well as more far-flung places. Concerts, recorded live at various European venues during 1974- 75, showcased the remarkable span of their eclectic experimentation; from Weill/Eisler influenced songs, hauntingly sung by Dagmar Krause, and complex instrumentals that absorbed free jazz and avant garde chamber styles, to ambitious non-idiomatic free improvisations like "Oslo", which, for the young teenager I then was, became the gateway to the wonderful and rather frightening world of Improv. Legendary stuff. CBI

Ram John Bolder - Black London Blues
(Beacon 1969)
In this Windrush anniversary year, it is salutary to revisit this 1969 release. Holder, now known as an actor in films (Lester's Cuba) and TV comedy (as 'Porkpie'), is the son of a music loving Guyanese preacher. In 1963 he came to London, where Rachmanism flourished. The blues, big in white suburbs like Richmond and Ealing, were rarely used to express black experience in Britain. Holder's ten trenchant short stories, including "Notting Hill Eviction", reflected life as he had lived it in the years when, after decades of economic depression, world war and austerity, thousands of people, black and white, were trapped in slum conditions while prosperity grew around them: "Regent Street is out of bounds/Unless you have a hundred pounds". Though musically mainstream - electric Chicago with James Brown seasoning - Holder's songs fixed the picture of a crucial part of British social history as evocatively and potently as Roger Mayne's North Kensington photographs. BWi

The Homosexuals - The Homosexuals' Record
(Recommended 1984)
The greatest lost first generation punk group never made a legit album. This 16 song compilation, released six years after the fact, collects singles and work tapes, and omits as much as it includes. It's still dazzling. The Homosexuals were very smart, very weird and very intent on striking out on their own path; they hid behind multiple pseudonyms and embraced obscurity. Their songs have a million hairpin turns, and they'd stick a big roaring chorus out front - "MY NIGHT OUT GREAT FUN GREAT FUN!" - while they snuck around to kneecap you from behind and leaned over to ki