Obscurantist collecting: Search & Destroy

Scarlet's Well 'Isle Of The Blue Flowers'

Well, *I'd* never heard of them untill recently, but this 'band' (actually ex-The Monochrome Set's Bid plus a bevy - is that the right word? - of chantauses) has become my new best freind.

It would be impossible to describe the music on this album without it sounding atrocious (olde worlde sea-shantys anyone? Thought not), but the impossibly catchy, restlessly inventive rythems make my heart go giddy-up.

Which can only be a good thing. Really.

Oh come on, Simone, just because Britney's now been Proved By Science to be better than anything except the sound of Dr C's hoover, there's no need to get tetchy.

I bet nobody else has got The Singing Sheep's 1981 Virgin single.

hmm, that is a tough one.

can't think of anything offhand, i've got a white label 12" by On Remand. will that do?

I'm sure everybody here has heard it but I'm throwing out World Domination Enterprises 'Let's Play Domination'. I dig it.

I also have a Culturecide LP which consists of a person yelling (complaining actually) over Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen etc tunes. Since the person who did this used the original recordings (in violation of the copyright or whatever) there isn't much info on the record. It did get old real fast, so it's not worth seeking out (he says counting the millions this rare copy will fetch).

Or how about One the Juggler? Man, what was I thinking.

The Culturecide CD gets re-pressed a fair bit. Some bits are great - "Let's Prance" for instance, and "Love Is A Cattleprod" has better mooing FX than "Meat Is Murder". I always wished they'd picked slightly less easy targets, but there you are.

I have the original vinyl! What am I bid....?

The cool thing about this thread is that I can name almost any damn Québec album and it'll be more obscure outside the province than any Hungarian bootleg of withdrawn-from-the-market art-noise album anyone here can come up with, even with other Canadians (unless it's by Mitsou). So, I'm picking Le Chihuahua by cool country-punk chick Mara Tremblay, whose show at Le Cabaret in Montréal was the best I've ever seen.

With all due respect, this thread is stupid. I got into a car accident because I fell asleep listening to Sun City Girls' "Dante's Disneyland Inferno", so I don't care how obscure it is (it isn't), the second disc is boring as hell. And Momus can go buy himself a fruit tart at a jazz cafe, cuz I own a Victor Jara record. "El Derecho En Vivir" is fucking classic.

Ummmmmm...

I'm guilty of loving original vinyl of the shaggs, napaleon 8th and the millennium.

I'd imagine you'd probably have had to be 8 years old at the time to have the Singing Sheep single. Same reason why I have the 1988 Children In Need single, "Children Are The Future", by the Children of Bridlington Area Schools, aka The Brid Kids. Oh no, probably not even that excuses me ...

I also have the 1990 Great Ormond Street single "Children of Eden" by Shezwae Powell, Frances Ruffelle and Company, which was actually credited on the cover as "A New Single". I mean, how obvious can you get? Also in my collection can be found "So Groovy / This Jazz Is New" by Wendell Williams, and "True Love" by Pat Benatar, both from 1991. I didn't actually buy the latter two, and in fact my mum might have paid for the former two ...

And then there's one of the most notorious one-off singles ever, "The Promise" by Urban Peace featuring T-Love, the charity record for the Scouts from 1992. The actual sound is quite harmless early 90s poppy dance-rap; it's the lyrics that are risible, naming the archetypal street-kid-who-has-to-be-saved as ***Johnny***, which already seemed outmoded on *that* Fine Young Cannibals record in the mid-80s, and was quite hilarious here, sounding like a 1950s suburban throwback amid the hapless attempts at conveying (cue doomladen Michael Buerk voice) LIFE IN THE INNER CITIES. Worse still, when Bruno Brookes announced Urban Shakedown's awesome (I think now; was rather disinterested then) "Some Justice" as a new entry on the Top 40 show, I clearly remember thinking it might be the Scout record when he'd just said the word "Urban". Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear ...

Oh, and I have the cassette version of the 1971 BBC Records LP "English With A Dialect", which I bought to hear a Cheshire dialect at London HMV in September 1989. Yes, I know.

Someone else who likes Scarlet's Well! Count me in, David. And, yes, like you any basic description would turn me off, but that album is, somehow, utterly wonderful. Apart from "Luminous Creatures", of course.

I bought the Singing Sheep in 1998 actually, having never heard it before in my life. It's a load of sheep doing Baa Baa Black Sheep with a disco beat.

One of my favourite CDs this year (not saying much I warn you) is by someone who will go nameless cause I accidentally nicked the CD after a live performance by them, and I very much doubt it's come out at all. For a bit I thought it might be a CD-Rom with all their unique and irreplacable computer music on, but now I know it isn't I feel slightly less guilty.

eh eh, don't worry Tom, I didn't say that the ILM Top 100 was a disappointment because of Britney being in it (that is just reverse snobbery ;-). I said it because frankly it was similar to the charts that I had already seen on magazines and websites. I was expecting something more "weird" from ILM....

Patrick: that Mara Tremblay you named sounds interesting, is the record somehow retrievable online?

Simone: You can get it on www.archambault.ca ,I'm pretty sure they do international deliveries. I'm all for spreading the word about Mara Tremblay in Europe (can't remember if you're from Switzerland or Italy ?). Onstage, she and her band are monsters, opening song when I saw her sounded like My Bloody Valentine with John Bonham on drums and a decent singer, plus she did a twangy cover of a Serge Gainsbourg song, and a french rendition of Hendrix's "Manic Depression".

The most obscure record I have is The Blades "Raytown revisited" which isn't really obscure but I'd be surprised if anyone here knew who The Blades are.

Trouble with this question is that one person's obscure classic is another person tired old dud. I like to think that Hans Reichel's 'The Death of the Rare Bird Ymir' is a pretty esoteric 'favourite', but is prob as ho-hum as 'Ruttle and Hum' to certain posters on this board. Also, people often specialise in certain tastes, ignore others - you could make up the name of any death metal alb and persuade me it was 'real', whereas in my sick universe the names Victor Jara and Sun City Girls are not a source of much headscratching. Besides, MOST music is obscure to MOST people.

Hans Reichel's 'The Death of the Rare Bird Ymir' is the first good album anyone's mentioned in this thread.

I regret to inform you all the my hoover has died. No more MBV impersonations, as it now resides on Mortlake council tip.

Speaking of Mortlake, I saw Mortlake's most famous son, Vic Napper (Vic Godard) today.

Goodnight.

Should be "...THAT my hoover has died...."

"don't go shopping when you're naked" by Cam Bull.

Don't really know if they're obscure or not, but Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon/The Wild Bull and Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba are excellent.
*waits for the inevitable, "Silly child, everyone who's anyone owns and adores those records!"*

Simone asked for a 'collection of charts' of good records no-one's heard of, so here's a list of the CDs I've gathered since coming (ahem) to Tokyo, with quality related comments:

Dymaxion: Dymaxionx4+3=39:21 I love this record. Cute sampler formalism. The Busy Signals: Pretend Hits Good clever young American hip hoppy indiepop, bit like New Order.

Brian Eno: Small Unknowns (bootleg of unreleased stuff) His experiments with vocal synthesis, Tit For Tat and Bottomliners, are the best thing he's done in twenty years, sez me.

Aki Tsuyuko: Tsuki To Nagai Yoru I fell in love with a label, Childisc. It was expensive.

Asao Kikuchi: Imaginary Landscape This has a sleeve with a log cabin and pines, like my Folktronic. I'm enjoying its cut and paste Legoscapes a lot.

Nobukazu Takemura: Sign Takemura is the boss man. Not sure if he hasn't eclipsed Cornelius in my affections. Good curator too, like a music world Takashi Murakami.

Caravan: In The Land Of Grey And Pink I've gone off this Canterbury prog. Gentle whimsy.

Daft Punk: Discovery One More Time is my single of the year. The rest has palled a bit.

Hausmeister: Unser Another label I'm in love with just now is Karaoke Kalk, out of Cologne. That said, Unser is a bit coffee table for my taste.

Fumble: Fumble Also on Karaoke Kalk. Clicky, cute, digital Koln dub. Cute.

Katerine: Les Creatures This qualifies for the thread in that Katerine is a major artist in France, but little known in the UK and US. He's very good, although this double album, with strong traces of 70s Brigitte Fontaine, seeps with a certain Montmartre bitterness, as if age and alcohol were getting to him. Anomie and narcissism together make worrying landscapes.

Joan of Arc: How Can Anything So Little Be Any More I'd never heard of this band, but they make interestingly abstract songs, emo meets the Chicago formalists (Tortoise etc).

Nobuyasu Sakonda: Clockwork Hermes He's the best thing I've found on Childisc, and his New Century Song is completely amazing, a sort of mazurka voiced by a robot. I intend to copy him shamelessly in my own work. (That's the best thing about obscure gems -- pass 'em off as yer own work, from yer own memory.)

Der Plan: Perlen A 1983 work. I want to like this band, I really do. They would make perfect forebears for my current style, I could drop their name in interviews and appear cool. But whenever I buy their records I find my teeth being gritted and my hand reaching for the remote. I think it's their German sense of humour, and that cheesy 80s synthpop sound. Maybe I should be buying Palais Schaumberg instead.

There. I guarantee nobody reading has heard of all of those, and anybody buying would be enriched by some of them.

By the way, I mentioned Brassens and Jara not to try to out-obscure anyone, but to object that so much great non-English language music goes unexamined, while we keep recycling the same little canon of approved anglo-saxon artists over and over.

I quite enjoy Aki Tsuyuko. What do you think of Susumu Yokota? I quite like Grinning Cat.

Some of the bands in Chicago's criminally underreported noise rock scene:

* Math, which split up / reproduced and became both Mr. Quintron as well as Miss Duotron. If you really like organ and shouting, you'll like this.

* The Flying Luttenbachers (particularly early stuff, like free jazz and D.C. harcore fused). Their album Destroy All Music is a pretty fair representation.

* The Scissor Girls - sadly no longer with us. Incredible songs, a lot improvisation. Alarm clocks instead of guitar picks.

* Li'l Combo

* Xerobot: Not sure if they're from Chicago but they're great.

* Magnatroid

* Bobby Conn

Bulb Records was home to a lot of this stuff. Chicago is very weird, man. My friend Kim Soss hated Tortoise because they were too "normal". This from someone who doesn't know how to tune her guitar, granted.

Howabout populist collecting?

Y'know -- Best of Bread, Aqualung, Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco", Yes, Boston, Tommy (film soundtrack), Mitch Miller and The Gang, Off The Wall, et cet.

I bet I have more opposite-of-obscure (i.e. obscenely common) albums than anyone else on this board.

yeah? how many copies of "Pl Joey" have you got?

oops thats"PAL Joey" I mean. Is that thee most common record ever everywhere else too?

"Walking On Mainstreet" by Tarras. Folk band from Carlisle, new album, a couple of really stunning songs.

Shuko Mizuno, Jazz Orchestra Vol 1 (I think that's what it's called). Imagine Buddy Rich's orchestrations at the end of The Beat Goes On in the style of a 70s cartoon theme.

tracer hand - supply me with bobby conn information! i saw 'never get ahead' on VH1 (really! it was a show called 'video nasties') and it's spectacular, but never managed to come across anything else, and i've no access to napster right now

Most obscure group I own music by is Tiger Trap. So, so sad. I'm not a very good obscranist. The Tiger Trap album is pretty good, though (submissive posture here).

Oh, wait! Hugo Largo was almost obscure. And their two albums were almost good. But any REM freak knows who they are. Dammit! Okay, I'll go buy something obscure to impress you guys.

Bobby Conn (can't remember real name right now) -- big in Chicago "demonstrative noise rock" scene, was tight w/the "Milk of Burgundy" crowd (Quintron, etc.) in Wicker Park before M.O.B. got closed to make way for yet another Alley franchise (the Alley sells mirror sunglasses, tasteless slogan t-shirts, etc.).... as far as I know he's still terrorizing young teenagers in Chicago with his malevolent supervillain alter-ego. Google turned up this among other things.

Anyone heard The Tinklers? Not sure if they're too obscure, but it's certainly the maddest music I've ever heard. Especially after a large helping of magic mushrooms.

It's pretty funny how everybody temper their answers with "it's not very obscure, I know" for fear of getting stomped on by other obscurantists.

Has anybody heard the Nihilist Spasm Band? I love those guys. The AGO had a retrospective exhibition of Greg Curnoe which I thought was fantastic.

'kozmonautz', a group consisting of key kool and dj rhettmatic, who released one self- titled in 1995 which nobody has ever heard of this record and is totally fantastic. a posse cut with ras kass (damn!) and a social conciousness track about japanese internment camps ('reconcentrated') top off some the best shit, but really it's all good. it's really one of the first underground albums of the late 90s to already be focused on the early 90s, complete with references to de la (who wish the japanese mcs on 'long island wildin' had shit like this), ice cube, and leaders of the new school.the single was 'can u hear it', which is a nice catchy summer jam about people who don't care about lyrics, people who say every joint is wack, and other bitch-ass haters. a slept- on classic.

er, 'which nobody has ever heard of and is fantastic'. i hate when when you restructure a sentence on the fly and accidentally leave part of the original. damn.

Best records that no-one's heard of but I have: my ones.

Best records that no-one's heard of, including me: I don't know. I haven't heard of them.

Other obscure records I fondly own:

1. Massey-Ferguson tractors

2. Bernard Cribbins on Hornby trains

3. Tizer 1987

aah, but Mr. Pinefox sir, I own a tape of Noel Edmonds on Hornby trains - surely this is more obscurantist in a way, as it features who for many people is the devil incarnate?

Bill

Anything by Eyeball Hurt and the Medicine, or Gigvest.

The Beatles' "White Album." Apparently pretty obscure to some members of this group! (Busy wiping the grin--or is it a grimace?-- off my face... )

Re: Der Plan: The albums are quite unlistenable, but they have their moments. A friend of mine taped me a "best of" some time ago and it was good, lots of humor on it.

Love a bit of Terry Allen (him of the Pan handle band fame) but not sure how much i really value my battered copy of his work backed by a a vietnamese gamelan orchestra