zero information albums

Very rare in the age of the internet - find a vanity pressing at the Goodwill, Google it, the mystery dissipates. But at Philadelphia Record Exchange in October, depressed and shopping for stuff so I wouldn't stay in my room and brood, I found a record to which I can only find one reference on the internet: Preston Harrison's "The Man Behind the Mist."

It's plucked-guitar-and-supplementary-percussion singer-songwriter stuff with added pan-flute sounds here and there, and songs have horror themes running throughout them, but very mildly so. There's no gore. It is very, very weird - it reminds me of the folk music I used to hear in cheap 60s and 70s horror movies, stuff that sounded like it was by the director's cousin or something. Here are the lyrics to the opening song, "The Puzzle":

I'm not here to be your crystal ball
I'm not here to be anything at all,
but down inside I know for sure that you can use me.
I'm not here to dance in your dreams
I'm not here to be more than I seem,
but you can use me.
Like some puzzle piece that doesn't seem to match,
you can put me aside, but you'll bring me back,
beause sooner or later I will fill in the gap
and you will use me.

Immediate points of reference are Cat Stevens and, like, early Strawbs maybe. Not that complex but. It's weird and there doesn't seem to be any way of learning more about it. I LOVE THAT KIND OF THING TELL ME ABOUT RECORDS YOU HAVE THAT ARE STILL MYSTERIES.

that mad music inc. thing that drag city reissued last year seems to be steeped in mystery.
also, this one weird track on tompkins square's work hard play hard box set -- "beyond the starry plane."
Among the most compelling tracks here, of those that belonged to Wahle, is the hard-to-hear, vocally droning “Beyond the Starry Plane,” by the hyper-obscure Red Brush Singers, object of one of my favorite discographical notes (from Tony Russell’s monolithic Country Music Records): “This group may be the same as, or associated with, the Fruit Jar Guzzlers.” Look up the Fruit Jar Guzzlers: “One of the most mysterious old-time groups to ever record.”

you know that you are just about to disclose that secret by posting that thread, do you?

ok I think I found a little something - same region, same name, 15+ years earlier. the melodies and singing on this are pretty late-sixties ornate-folk; it's very mannered. "Send inquiries to Adamsound, P.O. Box ---, Trenton, NJ" says the insert. Google "Preston Harrison Adamsound Trenton NJ" and get this

way cool imo

aero : any use? http://www.allmusic.com/artist/river-styx-blues-emporium-preston-harrison-mn0001756224

beat you there by 51 seconds

?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugOtTkUxNXA

this thread is just a plug for rovi isn't it

lol

that is the same dude!!

Hope this counts.

When I was little we had a record kicking about the house I used to listen to a lot, it was written and recorded by my Dad's work colleague sometime in 1976, a fella named George Grant. I remember it as being very plaintive, kinda Roy Harper-ish and a lot of it seemed to be about trains. It was released on some local Scottish micro label called Deeroy, its called 90768.

Sometime in the mid-nineties I'm wandering about at one of those massive Wembley Record fairs on a gloomy Saturday with my Pink Floyd obsessed housemate and I see George's record on the pin board at the stall of a Psyche/Folk/Prog seller guy, It was fun to chat with him and his wife about the record letting him know what little details I could, cause he knew nothing about it. It was on sale for £75 iirc.

One day, years later I searched for it on the net to see if how much it might be worth, I get only a couple of hits but one of them is from an Italian Psyche/Folk collector's wants list, offering 500 euro for a copy.

I get the word back to George through my Dad as I thought he'd be tickled by the info, he was of course and I even idly chatted to a guy from Cherry Red about a reissue one time. Nothing came of it as I didn't have a copy of the record to send him, George still has the 1/4 inch masters though.

fuck that is so perfect yes more stories like that

think ian recently sent me some bluegrass stuff that would qualify, but I'd have to go home and look it up

neighbor tried to sell me a DJ crate full of this kind of stuff a few years ago but I couldn't meet his asking price - tons of italian/european late 60s/early 70s folk and prog stuff with zero info on it. but I wasn't about to pay $100/record

(crate had clearly been traded for weed and/or stolen)

a lot of it seemed to be about trains

nice

Les Rallizes Denudés kinda fit in here, no?

Also there was that clutch of anonymous psych LPs that appeared out of nowhere a few years ago under the names Tommy Roundtree, Terry,
Jim Collins and Arian Sample. IIRC no-one could work out where they came from but it was believed that they had all come from the same label.

All the same person in fact (apparently) : http://rojvi.blogspot.co.uk/

Not an album, but a promo 45 I have on Scepter Records: the group is called See, the songs are "Bicycle" and "I Hear You Whisper." The only thing I've found is a Scepter discography (which I then received credit on for a correction. They had the artist and A-side transposed.) It's a nice little piano-led pop-rock song that reminded me of Speedy Keen.

fellow collector friend recently found a double album for a dollar by a guy named Maxwell Stanback. dreamy, sad acoustic folk and the occasional stab at blues and instrumental whistling songs. pretty much every original song is really sad. lovelorn laments. homemade recordings. released in the early 70's. here's the kicker: it was put out by his family. he died at the age of 18 in 1971. i doubt anyone outside his family (maybe they gave it to friends and family at a memorial service of some kind...) has ever heard this stuff. it REALLY doesn't exist. he gave me a nice cd burn of the vinyl. should definitely be put out even on a limited basis. has a track called "sing myself to sleep" that is a true double bummer of a song.

This is not an album, but a single, but I think it's worth mentioning:

Miracle Mike & The Ladies of the 80's - Outta Control

I first heard "Outta Control" on an old school rap compilation; it's an awesome, "The Message" style political rap single from 1985 with a rough, rocking beat. It has three (I think) women rapping about various social problems of the era (sadly there's some homophobia there too, as they complain about guys looking like girls, otherwise this would be a perfect tune), and they sound tougher and (in my opinion) better than Sequence, the most famous female rap group of old school era. Apparently this single was the last one Sugar Hill Records ever released, and it's pretty hard to find any info on the people who made it.

It seems Miracle Mike has a few other production credits to his name, though I still can't find any other info on him besides that. As for The Ladies of the 80's, there's nothing. The single credits say it was written by Mike and someone called Nancy Negron, but I don't know if this Negron was one of the Ladies, or someone else involved in writing the single. (And if it's the former, who were the other Ladies?)

There was another, Roy Ayers related group named Eighties Ladies, who released an album called Ladies of the Eighties back in 1980, but I doubt they had anything to do with The Ladies of the 80's, as they were singers and not rappers.

I've got an 12 inch EP by a band called Blind who I can find absolutely nothing about on the net. I bought it for 50p in 1994 simply because the word Blind on the cover was in exactly the same font as that used by Main. The EP had four songs and they were rather good, in a post Curve shoegazing way - drifty male / female vocals, drum machines, layered delayed guitars. I'll have to dig the vinyl out to find more information but I couldn't find anything on discogs, and google searches don't give much help. But it's a great record if you like that sort of thing.

Six song EP of death metal from 1990 by an upstate New York band called Unsane, that I thought might be the fantastic opening act Unsane that I'd see a few months previously. But not the band that later showed up on Matador.

that one seems to have been posted on a few blogs in recent years fwiw

One CD I took out of the New bin back in the Ole Miss student radio days was something without many identifying marks other than "Analogue" and "AAD" -- I couldn't tell which was the band name and which was the album title at first. No full names, just first initials and last names. Song titles inside the booklet, without track numbers or times. Track numbers on the back of the booklet with times, but no titles. The whole thing was intended to be as unclear and unhelpful as possible, but the music was OK Tortoise-esque postrock and I still have the disc. Did a little searching yesterday and apparently Analogue (the band) had a few albums, not quite as obscure as I thought.

not exactly zero info, but that hermann szobel LP from the 70s is kinda mysterious. was he zappa?!!! from wiki:
Hermann Szobel is/was a pianist and composer. He produced and recorded one Jazz Fusion album, titled "Szobel," at the age of 18, demonstrating, in the words of a "Down Beat" reviewer (9 September 1976), "a conception and technique far in advance of most musicians twice his age." According to the artist biography included with promotional copies of the album, Szobel was born in Vienna in 1958 and was "a child prodigy who began his classical training at the age of six" who "spent the majority of his practicing hours on pieces by Chopin." The bio states that pianists Martial Solal and Keith Jarrett were two major influences on his work. Szobel is a nephew of the late rock-concert promoter Bill Graham. "Szobel" features extremely complicated compositions comparable to those of Frank Zappa. The music is jazz-based but contains elements of rock and Western classical music. Szobel's impressive piano virtuosity is noticeable throughout the album. The other musicians on "Szobel" are Michael Visceglia on bass, Bob Goldman on drums, Dave Samuels on percussion including marimba and vibraphone, and Vadim Vyadro on tenor sax, clarinet, and flute. Obscure even when it was released (on Arista Records) in 1976, "Szobel" was issued on CD by Laser Edge in 2012. Hermann Szobel disappeared from the music world after this album and has never been heard from again

I bought an LP by someone called Chris Babapulle for £1 purely because there was zero info about it. this is probably because it's a Lowrey organ demo album (he was an employee of the manufacturers) featuring him playing various standards. can't say I've listened to it. Chris gave it as a gift to 'Ken & Marlene' in 1982 so if they're googling their friend from back in the day, sup guys (and uh he died in 2004 it would seem)

good thread

with each passing day more and more stuff appears on the internet about albums that i had previous given up searching for

i still have a few LPs that just don't exist on the internet, they are either private press gospel LPs from chicago or african 45s

Jonathan Halper's "Puce Moment" soundtrack (two tracks, "Leaving My Old Life Behind" and "I Am A Hermit"). Literally cannot find out anything about this music apart from Kenneth Anger's vague and predictably mysterious comments. Don't know if it was ever even released as a single independently of the film or what. Very proto-Velvets/Syd Barrett stuff, p incredible. Recently covered by Franz Ferdinand for some reason.

er, i guess i mean i have a few /records/ that don't exist on the internet

this thread isn't the same but

your top ten albums ... that haven't yet been mentioned on ILM

not sure the internet is destroying this, perhaps for the subset of records generally of interest to record collectors but there are some previously-cdbaby or otherwise self-released albums whose digital footprint no longer exists.

I have some albums I bought in Peru that fit this criteria, but the only ones in my "regular" collection are:

a 7" single by Lizard Water

and

a cassette by related band The Dragon King's Daughter

the housing works near me regularly gets CDs like this and I am always too chicken to pick them up, maybe I should start

This is the most obscure record I own (I bought it for a few bucks, years ago, b/c I thought it looked cool... it’s not): https://www.discogs.com/Machingbyrd-The-Road-To-Forbidden-Ecstacy/release/3788519

There’s basically no info on it online, just blurbs on a few blogs... tho obviously it’s on Discogs and I see copies are being offered for $$$.

It sucks? Can’t listen now what’s it like

If I recall, it’s heavily indebted to the style of Don McLean (indeed, the mystery dude included this note in the artwork—“Dedicated to my heroes: Mark Twain, Walt Disney, and Don McLean”).

I've got a professionally recorded and pressed CD that I received for free from a radio show in 2001. The artist is Partyfinger and the album is entitled either Ugie Chile (according to the picture on the front) or Uggie Chile (according to the spine). The music is kind of like the Residents-with-a-sampler meet alt-country, and I believe the pseudonymous musicians were part of Toronto's free improv scene.
The only indication online that this group or album ever existed is a mention in a radio playlist from 16 years ago. I'm mostly making this post on the off chance that someone else will search for it someday.

There must be any number of CDs from the CD Baby / MySpace era that future generations will marvel over, god knows how you find out which ones though.

Hope this counts.

When I was little we had a record kicking about the house I used to listen to a lot, it was written and recorded by my Dad's work colleague sometime in 1976, a fella named George Grant. I remember it as being very plaintive, kinda Roy Harper-ish and a lot of it seemed to be about trains. It was released on some local Scottish micro label called Deeroy, its called 90768.

Sometime in the mid-nineties I'm wandering about at one of those massive Wembley Record fairs on a gloomy Saturday with my Pink Floyd obsessed housemate and I see George's record on the pin board at the stall of a Psyche/Folk/Prog seller guy, It was fun to chat with him and his wife about the record letting him know what little details I could, cause he knew nothing about it. It was on sale for £75 iirc.

One day, years later I searched for it on the net to see if how much it might be worth, I get only a couple of hits but one of them is from an Italian Psyche/Folk collector's wants list, offering 500 euro for a copy.

I get the word back to George through my Dad as I thought he'd be tickled by the info, he was of course and I even idly chatted to a guy from Cherry Red about a reissue one time. Nothing came of it as I didn't have a copy of the record to send him, George still has the 1/4 inch masters though.

― MaresNest, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 21:08 (nine years ago) link

A copy of this record came through my place of employ... it's really good! Still virtually zero information out there, BUT there is a Japanese CD reissue now.
Damn I want this LP pretty bad tho.

Wow!

I still listen to the record, well the Japanese CD version, it's embedded in me from a kid. I think my Dad's vinyl copy is pretty thrashed from me playing it as a youngster.