★Lion Productions
Wapassou
"With their first album, legendary French art-rock band Wapassou found a distinctive musical voice: well-developed melodies, rhythmic organ, prominent droning violin, and guitar doubling-up as a rhythm instrument. They often conjure up what it might have sounded like had John Cale and Stereolab formed a band in 1974, the year this album was released. The five tracks are highly original, varied and inventive, steeped in post-psychedelic rock. Although Wapassou are noted for playing without …
This Forest and the Sea
Excellent 1976 private press acoustic album, self-recorded at various places in Colorado, and filled with beautiful fingerstyle acoustic guitar, plus some atonal bottleneck slide, string scrapes and drones (at times, very Ry Cooder/Paris, Texas about six years before that soundtrack existed). Although almost completely instrumental, what lyrics there are tend towards the dark and the satiric. The obvious points of comparison are John Fahey and Leo Kottke, although Scott Key certainly has h…
There Is A Universe
"Rare private press jazz/space rock album, on reissue wish lists for years.This masterpiece crawled up my spine like a kundalini snake and proceeded to take the top of my head off. Probe 10 are unquestionably linked to a very specifically American form of proto-prog-into-jazz-rock synthesis of the precise sort Elektra Records used to specialize in, from Tim Buckley's Starsailor to David Stoughton's Transformer. Toss in trumpet fanfare laden acid psych straight out of the C.A. Quintet songbook, t…
Visitors
Visitors was the brain-child of French producer/composer/genius, and enfant terrible Jean-Pierre Massiera. In 1974, he recruited a group of nineteen musicians (most notably jazz violinist Didier Lockwood, who made an indelible mark on Magma's 1975 live album), to record his latest compositions. Massiera had been impressed by violin-fronted jazz-rock acts such as the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jean-Luc Ponty. He decided that his new psychedelic nightmare should be a concept album on the theme of ex…
Galaxies
Laurence Vanay is the pseudonym for Jacqueline Thibault, wife of producer and musician Laurent Thibault (Magma). Her debut album "Galaxies" (1974) is pure genius: almost all instrumental, with gorgeous keyboards of many types, acoustic/electric guitar, even a little Zeuhl bass. There are wordless vocals on many of the tracks, although she occasionally sings in a soft, seductive manner. Incredible, spacey “avant-garde progressive chanson,” a Holy Grail for most collectors of 70's underground Fren…
The News Is You: The Sacred & Secular Music of Nick Freund
"Recorded at the San Francisco Theological Seminary's own Montgomery Chapel, acid-folk-rock psychedelic gem Search Party Montgomery Chapel was the brainchild of (then Reverend) Nicholas Freund. Having left Wisconsin in the late 1960s to join a burgeoning west coast religious scene, Freund spent considerable time in Sacramento before making their way to San Francisco in 1968 to lay down this one-off with some students of his. The result is a spooky, metaphysical trip that's equal parts God a…
Drones
In the beginning there was the piano. As soon as he had mastered the basics, Jean-Philippe Goude discovered the spell of melancholy while working on a little musical piece: an etude ringing out in the style of a somber hymn. Not the dead meat smells of somberness that, according to Picabia, serious people emit, but the earthen gravity of an abyss dug by life itself. Everything is the result of this bedazzlement. At 11 years old, Jean-Philippe Goude closed his eyes. When his eyelids finall…
An Acoustic Confusion
An instantly captivating, all-original acoustic album of great depth and incredible maturity, the debut album (1971) by acoustic guitarist and songwriter, Steve Tilston. As for the making of the album: 'It was Ralph McTell who very kindly contacted Ian Anderson of Village Thing on my behalf,' Tilston explained. 'I followed it up and secured a meeting with Ian and a gig at the Troubadour Folk Club. I'd met Ralph through Wizz Jones at Les Cousins in Soho, and he'd been very complimentary abo…
Tomorrow Come Someday
(1969) from the home studio of future BBC RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP composer PETER HOWELL & his musical partner JOHN FERDINANDO, makers of legendary albums under the names Alice Through the Looking Glass, Ithaca, Agincourt, & Friends. This private press album was recorded as the soundtrack for an underground film production by (later to be) renowned television director Ian Hamilton
Up From the Sewers
A Chicago act was responsible for this underground album - sometimes referred to as Euphoria Blimp Works Presents Yama And The Karma Dusters Up From The Sewers, although Euphoria Blimp Works and Yama and The Karma Dusters were both alternate names for the group. An excellent album of varied musical styles, it includes high energy rockers (Revolution (not The Beatles song), CTA and the excellent Evolution, with its environmentally conscious lyrics). There are also folk-rockers (Don't Kill The Bab…
Lord Krishna Von Goloka
In 1973, Rolf Ulrich Kaiser's visionary powers acted as a catalyst for an authentic combination of acid, music and spirituality: the mystical LSD-fueled musical project Lord Krishna Von Goloka. For this adventure into Indian and Oriental mythologies and legends, Kaiser asked esoteric Swiss artist (he was a friend of Giger's), poet, specialist on Alpine folklore, and friend of Timothy Leary, Sergius Golowin, to join a group of musicians including Klaus Schulze and members of Wallenstein and Witth…
Mexico
Along with the two records by Nurse With Wound favorites Moving Gelatine Plates, Ergo Sum's weird and wonderful album Mexico is an unusual portal into the intense creativity of early 1970s French music. True, the bands are not musically similar; yet these three albums are distinguished not only by their instrumental richness, but by their unceasing sense of adventure. We'd go so far to say that Ergo Sum presents one of the most distinctive experiences in a rock idiom (apart from Zeuhl music jugg…