The Bizarre Music Thread

Cafe Society
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The Ironic Covers thread got me to thinking about all the bizarre music I’ve enjoyed over the years, and since this is the Dope, I’d toss out the ones I know of, and hopefully get some that I don’t know of in return. For the point of this thread, we’ll consider “bizarre music” to be anything that’s either so horribly ghastly that it defies all logic that it ever got recorded to begin with, or music that’s good, but doesn’t have much of a prayer of ever getting serious airplay. So this means that things like Golden Throats, featuring William Shatner “singing” Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds to Frank Zappa’s entire output are welcome.

Here’s some of the bizarre music I’ve enjoyed over the years:

Doubting Thomas The Infidel: A couple of the members of Skinny Puppy have been putting out albums under the name Doubting Thomas for years now. The music combines samples from films, documentaries, and TV shows to great effect. Some of it’s meditative, and some of its not.

Laurie Anderson. Yea Gods, is this woman talented! She’s done everything from spoken word to performance art. She’s hung out with William S. Burroughs, and last I heard was doin’ the nasty with Lou Reed. Got to see her perform on the Strange Angels tour, and it definately ranks as one of the best concerts I’ve been to.

Happy Flowers: Disturbed punk music from the perspective of a little kid. Songs like Finger In My Crackerjacks and Let’s Eat The Baby (Like My Gerbils Did) are just some of the whacked out songs in their catalog.

His Name is Alive: I really don’t know how to describe this group. Their music is dissonant at times, but at other times, quite beautiful. Worth a listen, if nothing else.

Laibach: It’s weird, it’s good, it sounds a lot like Rammstein, but it’s bizarre!

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: Sort of bluesy, sort of old-fashioned rock and roll. His cover of Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby (Yes, it is the song from the “Tom and Jerry” cartoon.) is one of my all time favorites!

Daniel Johnston: Supposedly, he’s mentally ill. I don’t know, but it would explain a lot about his music and his album cover art if it’s true. Not for the faint of heart.

Pizzicato Five: I don’t know if all Japanese pop music is like this, but it’d be pretty cool if it was. Their Twiggy Vs. James Bond is a great song!

Negativland: From what I understand, they peaked with Escape From Noise. Strange, and sometimes inflammitory songs (Christianity is Stupid springs to mind [not an anti-Christian song, BTW]). If you know “Bob,” but don’t know Negativland, you don’t know what you’re missing!

The Benzedrine Monks of Santo Domonica: A parody album, featuring Gregorian-style covers of We Will Rock You, Losing My Religion, and Smells Like Teen Spirit, to name but a few of the tracks on the album Chantmania.

Vangelis: Invisible Connections: This falls into the “What the hell was he thinking?” category. This album sounds more like a ball bearing rolling around in a coffee can than it does music.

Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music: Lou Reed lost a lawsuit with his record label and was told that the only way he could get out of his contract was to record either a double album, or two more albums. Lou Reed decided to buy a bunch of power tools and use them in place of instruments to record this double album. It stands a testiment to what one pissed off man will do to fullfill the letter of his contract.

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One of my favorites, which has gotten no airplay as far as I know isPop Will Eat Itself: Cure for Sanity. Infectious beats, bizarre lyrics, and a very skewed sense of reality. Great album, released in 1991.

And of course there’s the entire Dead Milkmen catalog.

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Negativland, Pizzicato 5, Happy Flowers, and D Johnston are all worth seeking out. Pizzicato 5 (who recently disbanded) have 3 excellent new singles comps covering different eras of their career, but sadly are only available on import at the moment.

One of my fave bands who are a bit odd is Half Japanese- they started in the late 70’s and are still putting out music now. Half Jap revolves around Jad Fair, who veers between dissonant screech and rockabilly/roots rock with jazzy overtones. Hunt down their 69 track “greatest hits” cd for a great overview of their prolific career.

Then there’s the one and only Nina Hagen, her albums “Nunsexmonkrock” and “Unbehagen” are Teutonic masterpieces. Her voice can go from a rumbling growl to a piercing shriek, and her lyrics…well, let’s say she has a unique worldview. She is, believe it or not, a household name in Germany.

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The Bonzo Dog Band, of course. No one ever topped their eclectic mix of weird musical styles. Other than Spike Jones, they are the only people to be able to make you laugh on instrumental pieces. Very successful in the UK, but never caught on in the US.

There’s also Lol Coxhill’s extremely bizarre version of “I Am the Walrus,” chanted by shoolkids. Coxhill’s album “Ear of Beholder” is mostly avant garde solo saxophone that was too weird for anything resembling airplay, along with strangeness like “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” (Hmmn. I should mention this in the ironic songs thread – the sense is quite opposite than what the song says).

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Raffi and His Rise & Shine Band

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Anal Cunt. Certainly “so horribly ghastly that it defies all logic that it ever got recorded”.

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Looking through my record collection, there is some odd stuff there…

Sonic Youth’s Silver Session for Jason Knuth EP is the first that comes to mind. The story goes that once when the band was recording stuff for A Thousand Leaves, some unnamed funk metal band started playing REALLY loud in the neighbouring studio and wouldn’t shut up. So they cranked all their amps to ten and leaned all the guitars they could find against them, and for some reason they started recording. Then they went for coffee, and after a while they went back and chopped the cacaphony into small, digestible songs. For some reason they thought it was a good idea to release this on their own label. For some reason I’ve actually listened to this.

Then there’s Mr. T. I have no idea who thought it’d be a good idea to let him make an album, but someone must’ve. He made the album Mr. T’s Commandments some time in the mid-80’s - and I own it! There’re some excellent songs there about not talking to strangers, not doing any drugs, and respecting your parents. Hardcore.

Faust’s The Faust Tapes is another oddity. It’s Krautrock at its most inaccessible, it’s a 43-minute continous song made up of cut-and-paste snippets of… well, random stuff. It goes from ambient droning to art-rock jams or spoken word samples. Most of it sounds like they do whatever idea they get, then after running with it for a minute and a half they play something else. The cool part is that it managed to sell 50,000 copies, because it was sold for half a pound.

The Langley School Music Project is another one. It was hyped to death last year – I still really don’t know why – but it’s basically just recordings from two concerts made by the Langley Elementary School. They play Beach Boys, Wings, David Bowie, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and similar songs, arranged for a large children’s choir and some really odd instrumentation (the teacher plays guitar and piano, but the best parts are where the children go loose on cymbals, xylophones and whatever they can get their hands on.) It’s a pretty fun album.

If you haven’t listened to The Residents, you should.

And then there’s an odd album from the Tigerbeat6 label, called the SIDplay C64 Massive Party Mix. It’s party music, made with C64, simple as that. It’s made as a continous mix of pre-existing SID loops, all with the distinct C64 sound. It’s really just an exercise in how much you can get out of one of those chips, but it’s fun and stupid to listen to. And their cover of Van Halen’s Jump is amazing.

Max Tundra is fucking great, and probably the only act in the post that I’ll seriously recommend to people. It’s manic, insane, subverted pop music, played at total breakneck speed. It sounds like he started with a simple, catchy song, then added oddball tempo changes, over-the-top breakbeats, glitches, squeling trumpets or accordions or violins (all played by Max himself.) It’s impossible not to love this, seriously.

Wesley Willis. He’s an obese black schizophrenic man. He’ll headbutt you as a way of showing that he likes you. He makes three-chord music on his shitty casio keyboard or on electric guitar, and sings about fascinating subjects as Casper The Homosexual Friendly Ghost. All to get the voices in his head to shut up. :smiley:

Whew, that was a long post. Read it ya bastidges.

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I go in and out of listening to weird stuff.

I agree if your taste runs to the bizzarre, you need to check out the Residents, particularly their first two or three albums from the 70’s.

Also, there is the previously mentioned, incomparable Nina Hagen. She leaps right into the sex-religion connection in ways that Madonna wishes she could dream about.

If your tastes run more on the light side, I recommend “Aloha”, a double album by guitarist Henry Kaiser, one whole side of which is a solo improvised over part of the soundtrack of an old “Gamera” monster movie, complete with shrieks.

Speaking of shrieking, the scariest thing I have ever put on my turntable was “The Litanies of Satan” b/w “Six Women with Steak Knives” by Diamanda Galas. Headphones are a must.

I hear Psychic TV is rather “interesting”, as well.

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As I understood it, they only put out that one album and one single circa 1990-91. It may have been re-released with extra tracks on Metropolis records, as well. Unfortunately, in 1995, Dwayne Goettel (half of Doubting Thomas and 1/3 of Skinny Puppy) died of a heroin overdose, so they didn’t do anything further with this project. Cevin Key’s project is Download, which has been going since just before Dwayne’s death.

There is also word that Cevin and Ogre are working on a new Skinny Puppy album … weird! They might also tour and if they do … I’m on it like white on rice.

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What? We’ve gotten this far and nobody’s mentioned The Shaggs?

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My favorite music genre is video game music. I suppose that counts as bizarre.

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Well, I’ve got an album and an EP by 'em and searching Amazon for them produced a few CDs other than the ones I’ve got, so I presumed that they were still recording.

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Check out “Stairways to Heaven” if you’re able. (I just checked on Amazon and it’s selling for $75! Wow! I guess I should put mine on eBay.)

It’s a collection of “Stairway To Heaven” performed by various artists. In addition to Rolf Harris performing it with the same instrumentation and style as his old song “Tie Me Kangaroo Down”, there are tribute groups that do renditions a la the B-52s, the Beatles, the Doors, Elvis, etc.

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Thanks, Shmoe: I was reading this thread preparing to scold participants for their oversight, but you beat me to it.

This is one of my own personal favorite “genres,” to the extent that I made a mix disc a few years ago title Outsider Music, and included, if I remember, such, um, artists as Wesley Willis, Daniel Johnston, and the Shaggs, along with such indisputably great but odd artists as Serge Gainsbourg, Jaques Brel, Victoria Williams, and Mary Margaret O’Hara. (I didn’t include, e.g., Diamanda Galas or Nina Hagen, because though they’re “odder” than all the above combined, they’re classically trained, and therefore not “outsider.” But surely they belong in this thread.)

Mrs. Fun: Lesbian avante garde jazz duo from Milwaukee.

Daniel Johnston: in and out of mental institutions, if what I hear is correct. Personal favorite tracks: “Speeding Motorcycle,” “Funeral Girl”

Johnny Dowd : one of the greatest practitioners of a genre I have named Hillbilly Goth. Twisted twang; swamp rock. Dark, bizarre stories that sound like something David Lynch would have come up if he’d grown up in–and never left–a Louisiana swamp.

There are many more I could mention, but I just got this new job, see, and so I should try to look a little busier . . .

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Oh, and who can forget about The Fugs? They’re even **Cecil Approved!**

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No one’s mentioned Dread Zeppelin! Imagine Elvis and Bob Marley doing Led Zeppelin covers. I have Un-Led-Ed and 5,000,000, both of which I highly recommend. I especially like “Stairway to Heaven” (5,000,000) in which Tortelvis and Bob Knarley switch off on the vocals. But overall I think that Un-Led-Ed is the best album of the two. Check out some of the samples on Amazon. I’m not familiar with any of their other work but I really like these 2 CDs. (Now that I’m thinking about them, I’ll have to dig them out and put them in my car CD case. My girlfriend will hate me…)

Since we’re discussing bizarre music I think I should mention Song Poems. Perhaps the most infamous is John Trubee’s Blind Man’s Penis.

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Leslie Fish is pretty awesome and on the fringe. I particularly like Carmen Miranda’s Ghost (is haunting space station 3).

Hell almost any other filker would rank up there on the bizarre end. Chaos does a song called “Do You Hear the Pipes, Cthulu” to the Abba tune of Fernando. It makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Miles and Karina are also quite interesting. They have a 60’s spy music sound. They tend to orchestarte things with banjo and accordian. My favourite song by them is “I have a friend who has three long nose hairs.”

A friend turned me onto Ed’s Redeeming Qualities. They are like a garage folk band with lyrics that seem quite literate and witty. Here is a snippet from one of their songs…“If I leave it behind me it’s left, but that don’t make it right…”

The Holy Modal Rounders were a great 60’s psychadelic folk band. According to one of their album inserts they were the first band to use the word psychadelic in a song. I don’t know if I believe that but that is ok. They do a lot of “traditional” music with new lyrics. They also seem to have had major drug problems and just reading about them is interesting with the messed up situations that they get into. Snippet of lyrics… “Superman’s on the can, some call it synergy, Lone Ranger on the range, it’s kinda strange, it’s synergy, Even cool heads certainly agree it’s synergy, rabbis, Liberace’s momma, Donald Duck, and Dahli Lama, yes sir.”

The Digable Planets are an interesting rap/hiphop/jazz combo. Snipet of their lyrics “Travellin through space with the funky funky beats, Stopped at pluto to cop some petrol, Met some klingons and got our things on, Cruisin warp 6 with mr. wiggles in the mix, Hendrix passin peas star child get the fix…” They also actually play jazz on real instruments, unlike most of the rap bands who do samples.

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Yep, The Fugs and The Residents are faves here. Not in the horribly ghastly range at all, just no-way airplay.

In that vein, Hasil Adkins, wild hillbilly rock from West Virginia. He’s in a legendary class by himself. Also, Hildegard Von Bingen,(a medieval abbess way before her time) for some ethereal high-range spine tingling music. http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/composers/hildegard.html There was a bit of a vogue about her five years ago, so some new recordings. Beautiful, eloquent, and visionary. Be forewarned!

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To shorten any search from the previous link, here’s a nice one:

Incredibly worth it.