I have Meditations on LP, but I don’t have a working turntable. 
A fucking amazing record, but, as you say, you have to be ready for it.
“In the Wake of Poseidon” by King Crimson comes immediately to mind. I have a few other relatively obscure records like “Downward is Heavenward” by Hum, “God Doesn’t Care” by Instruction, and an Eric Clapton collaboration with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers that’s about pure a blues record as you’ll ever find. I think a lot of what I own is simply obscure rather than aggresively non-commercial.
I don’t think my tastes skew much toward the “extreme.” I do enjoy a lot of bluegrass but that isn’t non-commercial. It just has a relatively small demographic.
Do you mean the one post-Yardbirds and pre-Cream? I have that - I think that’s probably Mayall’s best selling record, and was quite famous in 1970 when I taped it, at least. Or do you mean the album where Mayall brought back all his famous band members, including Clapton? I had that, but I forget the name.
My least commercial record is Barnes and Barnes, one Barnes being Billy Mumy. The “commercial” song on that is Fishheads, and it gets weirder from there. It’s not on the top of my list, but I play it every so often.
Melt-Banana perhaps. Screechy Engrish vocals.
Does an album of steel drum covers of classical music count? If not, may I interest you in some Yoko Ono? I particularly like “Fly.” You can hear 30 seconds of it here.
S.O.D.- Speak English or Die
I got the tape because of the music and artwork, din’t necessarily agree with the sentiment.
Thrash, baby, thrash.
California is easily their most accessible and potentially commercial album. It’s sort of mock-pop at points, hard to describe exactly, but it’s fairly musically conventional… at least for Mr. Bungle.
Now Disco Volante would never appeal to the mainstream as California might to the fringes of it. It’s much less melodically pleasant, more experimental. A friend strongly recommended it to me years ago, and I listened and I didn’t like it. But I kept at it and eventually I started to like it a lot. It’s an acquired taste.
I’ve noticed that about a lot of really good music, actually - it’s weird and unpleasant at first, but once your brain has had some time to adjust and appreciate it, it’s quite good. Almost no one wants to put effort like that into music though.
It’s kind of strange - I see people look at an abstract painting and “get it” (or at least pretend to) and find the hidden meaning of the artist, or whatever. I mostly feel that it’s silly. But then sometimes I think that some of the music I listen to is like that weird abstract art I can’t understand, only I do understand music.
I owned it for decades and it went in the Great Album Cleanout of 1998:
Silver Apples self-titled debut album, with the silver background cover featuring the negative outlines of two apples. Got it as a promo album sent to the little radio station where I worked in 1968.
Totally unplayable on the air in that time and places. Allmusic.com describes it as. “an ingenious cacophony of beeps, buzzes and beats.” The duo consisted of a percussionist and a lead vocalist who also played (if that’s the right word) an instrument with “nine audio oscillators and eighty-six manual manual controls.”
I loved some of the sounds they made, but it and a followup album tanked. Then the duo disappeared for almost 30 years, returning with the oscillator guy, name of Simeon and some other collaborators. Made several albums, including one with original percussionist. Then on Nov. 1, 1998 — just about the time I was cleaning out the albums — the Silver Apples van crashed coming back from a gig and Simeon was seriously injured (broken neck and spinal injuries). No music since.
I’m quite aware of that, hence my mention of Mike Patton’s album. It is by far the strangest thing I’ve ever heard. I’d put it up to just about any, in terms of oddity.
Aggressively non-commercial? no, i like lots of albums that are casually non commercial but not aggressively 
I guess it’s two albums by a non-signed artist Gunflower from Sarasota, which mostly consist of remixed samples of preexiting songs and original songs with a peculiar socialist Chomskiist bent…
My favorite from them is a remix of a Dianetics tape:
“dianetics tecnhique is not hypnosis…
dianetics tecnhique is not hypnosis…
dianetics tecnhique is not hypnosis…
you are not told what to think…
you are not told what to think…
you are not told what to think…”
Other than teh stormtroopers o’ death, I’d have to go with a Children of God by The Swans and some other world music and trance tapes I have somewhere…I’d hafta go back and look.
A friend of mine bought me a Prussian Blue album as a prank birthday gift. I’m pretty sure it’s in the trash now, but it was by far the most extreme album I’ve ever owned.
The most extreme album I’m not somewhat amused/ashamed of to say I own is Beyond Life by Timothy Leary.
Ha! Children of God is easy listening jazz compared to the earlier Swans - I think the most extreme album I own is the Cop/Young God/Greed/Holy Money compilation - the Young God EP especially - colloquially know as the “Raping A Slave” EP. The aural equivalent of Brutalist architecture.
Second most extreme is probably a toss between Skinny Puppy’s Too Dark Park or The Fall’s The Frenz Experiment - each in their own way.
Crass and their label put out some pretty non commercial stuff. Crass sold over a million albumns all told by the mid 1980’s so it was somewhat “commercial.” Flux of Pink Indians was a group that was certainly an acquired taste.
An awful lot of punk albumns were pretty uncommercial and hard to listen to. Groups like the Fuck Ups would put out a 45 of pretty hard listening stuff.
**Naked City - Torture Garden - Collection of the shorter songs by John Zorn’s rapid fire jazz outfit. Can switch from hardcore noise to jazz to country to anything literally within seconds.
**
Sunn O))) - Black One or Oracle - Think of the more queasy moments from a David Lynch film.
Scott Walker - The Drift - Creeeeeeeepy.
Apocalypse Across The Sky: The Master Musicians of Jajouka Featuring Bachir Attar – It’s not my favorite record in the world.
The Bali Sessions: Various artists. It’s a 3-disk set of Balinese gamelan songs. If you’re only going to purchase 1 album of gamelan music (and I have 5), this is absolutely the one to have
OK. I guess I’d differentiate between “aggressively non-commercial” and just plain “obscure” - if my brother burnt a CD of himself farting and tap-dancing in his basement it would probably not qualify here. I’m thinking groups / performers that have had at least a little exposure / notoriety and then released something which was really in-your-face, uncompromising, etc.
If the entire White Album had sounded like Revolution 9, it would have qualified.
Yeah, this is my choice. I like this one because it fits the intent of the original poster so well. Any casual fan of the Pat Metheny Group who bought this, expecting it to be ANYTHING like the Group, immediately burned it.
It’s also the only Metheny album that has a quote from a Sonic Youth member, for good reason.
Melt Banana goes way beyond just the vocals for being non commercial. the vocals are piercing, the bass is pounding, and the guitar work is just f-n off the charts, the guy must have 80 friggin pedals down there to come up with the sounds he does.
Funny how both Melt Banana and Mike Patton/Mr. Bungle get mentioned in the same thread, I discovered MB at a Bungle show when they opened.
I love them both.
I used to have a Sun Ra album called Strange Strings that I think would qualify. It had a really long track that sounded like a door sqeaking open.
:eek: I can’t believe there is actually a sound sample of it on the internet. Scroll almost to the bottom of the page to SUN RA, Strange Strings, MPEG stream “Door Squeak.”