Kangaroo Kourt

condition (record/cover): M / M (still sealed)

Clear vinyl.

The first of three Kangaroo Kourt LPs and the first substantial vinyl document of the collaborations between Dusty Lee (electronics, Mellotron, sound collage) and Treva Dea (wordless vocals, whispers, sampled murmur) on the Houston underground scene. Lee had been running a graveyard-shift public radio show; Dea had just moved to Houston from London on what was intended as a short trip; the two met, and the first Kangaroo Kourt sessions followed.

The Kangaroo Kourt method was side-long slabs of tape collage built around Dea's voice: creepy vocal distension in the vein of Nurse With Wound's Strange Play Of The Mouth, dropped into atmospheric beds of processed Mellotron, short-wave drift, and ghostly purgatorial synth. Dedicated listeners of the NWW family tree will hear the genealogy at once, though Kangaroo Kourt are in fact more explicitly Mellotron-haunted than any of their British cousins.

Castle Records was the Houston imprint that handled the first two Kangaroo Kourt releases. Messages In Ether and its successors (Interstellar Static From The Kangaroo Kourt, 1989; Atmospheric Distortions, 1991) would lead directly to Lee and Dea's subsequent Mauve Sideshow project and the Refraction Sound / Ventricle lineage. The beginning of a small American family of ambient-psychedelic records, and a genre corner that never quite got the attention it deserved.