This rare French Horror-Psych-Prog LP largely made the audio rounds about a year ago thanks to it’s inclusion on the Nurse With Wound list; and assuming you’re the kind of person who thinks they might enjoy a little French Horror-Psych-Prog in your life now & then, it’s well worth the half an hour you’ll need to invest in digesting it.
The work of Jean-Pierre Massiera (a guy behind an awful lot of interesting/ experimental audio), it can been seen as a pretty logical progression from the fantastic & spooky-themed Les Maledictus Sound project which he also helmed (and in fact was similar enough in vibe that the “Les Maledictus Sound” CD re-release even contains a “Horrific Child” excerpt). Weaving Krautrock-esque prog around a spacy horror-soundtrack atmosphere (complete with sound effects lifted from a variety of sources you’ll probably recognize), it’s a really hypnotizing and singular listen — and the guy who gave me this file even included a few giant scans of the front & back cover along with the audio. Très bien!
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A great proto-prog (okay, okay — I’m really just making terms up now) Moog album from 1971 that’s been fairly well documented elsewhere on the web, this was the brainchild of Mr. Mort Garson, working under the conceptual name of “Lucifer”. While I know it’s mostly just hard to imagine a major label running with something this “out there” today (making it an excellent companion to Louise Huebner’s “Seduction Through Witchcraft” LP from 1969), the real surprise for a lot of the folks I’ve played it for is the compositional tightness of the songs, and how enjoyably it all works as a whole. Not just a cultural artifact from the early 70’s, it’s got some genuine creepiness to it as well that could easily be seen as pre-figuring a lot of the sounds Goblin would employ only a few years later.
Note: As a bonus for folks who may already have this in their collection I’ve also included scans of the complete liner notes in with the zip file. Written by Michael Owen Jones Ph.D. (still a professor of History and Folklore at UCLA), they never seem to make the rounds when this record is shared, which is a shame as they’re almost half the fun.
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Heya chums! To aid in your downloading as we get closer to Halloween, here’s a clickable visual roundup of the spooky sounds posted so far on Scar Stuff. Collect ’em all!
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Entertainer Oscar Brand has had a long and varied career over the years, and this 1979 LP was one of the many children’s albums he recorded for Caedmon. Sounding something like a more kid-oriented take on Dean Gitter’s “Ghost Ballads” (with maybe a pinch of Wade Denning & Kay Lande’s “Halloween: Games, Songs and Stories” around the edges), “Trick or Treat: Hallowe’en Celebrated in Story & Song” aims to present a folk-song celebration of Halloween traditions, with Brand throwing in some back-story on the origins behind the holiday whenever he can. Of course the spookiness factor isn’t terribly high for the most part (I mean hey, while “Hallowe’en, Hallowe’en” might be a cool & creepy quick historical summarization, “Clementine” is just never going to sound very frightening to me no matter how grim the subject matter might’ve originally been), but since they were clearly going for more of a lighthearted “storyteller” vibe it mostly works, and would be pretty good little-kid listening I’m sure.
Quoting the liners:
“The Celts celebrated New Year’s Day on November 1st. It was a logical choice, for the harvest was in and the cold white silence of winter was approaching. The Druids began to celebrate this day to honor Samhain, the Lord of the Dead. Honoring Samhain usually meant sacrificing horses and human beings in his name. When the Romans conquered Britain in 61 A.D. they outlawed the sacrifice and the celebration. This didn’t prevent the Druids from continuing the practices, but it did cut down on the publicity.
Since those primitive times, our folk music and folk lore have been overloaded by songs and ballads of apparitions, ghosts, witches, demons, goblins, and other unwelcome personalities. […] From the thousands of old songs, we have chosen an LP-full. We’ve enlightened these by a few erudite explanations. We have enlarged these by the use of supernatural sound effects. And we have given the whole a twisted ending worthy of the holiday. If you guess the ending before it arrives, score one for your paranoia. We didn’t guess the ending — it happened suddenly and unexpectedly in the studio, and has never been explained. […]
If any of this is understandable, blame Samhain… he wrote this collection of notes while I watched”.
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Criminally out of print (after a brief digital reissue at the hands of Infinite Zero in the mid 1990’s), this amazing mishmash of spoken word narration from still-active witch Louise Huebner and electronic music pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron belongs in any collection of the arcane and unique.
Coming from roughly the same era that produced occult celebs like Anton LaVey and Sybil Leek, Huebner was media savvy enough to conjure a 1968 government-issued designation for herself as “Official Witch Of Los Angeles County”, and she followed that coup a year later with this LP. Largely adapted from her book of the same name, it’s a reverb-heavy collection of scratchily-voiced incantations centered around “charms of seduction and sexual power”, and has always struck me as a fully entertaining listen from start to finish. To be fair though, some of my enjoyment may be circumstantial as I first heard this album (via 8-track, no less!) while barreling down a highway in the middle of the night at the age of 16 or 17. I was en route to work a far-distant record fair for my job, and had been uncomfortably sleeping in the back of the van on several crates of albums before this hazily brought me out of my road-coma — to say that I was completely confused and disoriented is to sell the experience short.
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Hey all; I’ve got a heap of stuff percolating in the background for the upcoming week, but if you want to keep things “interactive” in the meantime you’re certainly free to add the site profile to your ever-expanding myspace friend list.
You know, or not.
Re-packaged a few different ways from the ’60’s to the ’70’s, these three links represent the output of the “Sounds Records” company out of Glendale, CA (where they moved around a bit — looks like their final address is now the site of an Armenian book store as well as some law offices.)
Sounds Records seemed to primarily trade in a largely homemade effects library replete with all of the usual frightening suspects; on the “Hallowe’en Spooky Sounds” single and for much of the “Spooky Sounds” LP you’ll find goblins laughing, footsteps with chains, people pretending to be cats & dogs — all the material that makes these records so great (and their stuff IS great to my ears; striking just the right balance between generic dime-store style scary, and the more primitive personal efforts that impart such a unique flavor.)
Where they really step out to shine though, is in their array of totally cool & weirdo theremin sounds, which are unique to their output. Packaged separately on a 7″ as “Music For Monsters” & then again on side two of the “Spooky Sounds” 12″ LP, these pieces are bizarre other-worldly delights that, like many of my favorite Halloween records, manage to embody an “anything goes” approach which is pretty avant-garde in its bent. Now I don’t know if that was the intent mind you (more likely someone said “Ahh, just make it weird!”), but with evocative titles like “Ghouls Glide” & “Banshee Love Call”, it sure sounds like a good time was had conjuring these tracks up, and the results are pretty singular. So yeah — functioning both as a soundtrack and an incidental time capsule, this is cool stuff all around and a more than worthy addition to yer arsenal of Halloween audio. Dig in!
Sounds Records “Hallowe’en Spooky Sounds” (192 kbps)
Sounds Records “Music for Monsters” (192 kbps)
Sounds Records “Spooky Sounds” (192 kbps)
Perhaps more thematically spooky than aurally, this 1958 entry into the Hi-Fi genre has some cool on-location recordings of genuine Haitian Voodoo ceremonies, primarily as performed by “country group amateurs”. I’ve included a large scan of the (super informative) liner notes as well, and here’s a sample to get you started:
“Haiti may be a dark enigma to most of its visitors, but if one learns the language of the drums, the life and mind of its people open to you like a flower. The drums are never silent; day and night they sound from some vague distant place, muffled but distinctly articulated like a heart-beat. […] The drum rhythms — as well as the art of making drums — came from Africa. […] From Africa also came voudoun, which is a religious ceremonial and also a deeply ingrained attitude to life and the nature of things[…] Through the boungan (the voudoun priest), man converses with nature. Through him, man supplicates for protection against impending dangers, and through him, sometimes, man strikes at an enemy.”
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A pair of LPs released in a few different formats over the years (as stand-alone albums in the ’50’s, and then as a double record set in the ’60’s & ’70’s), these recordings are culled from the popular NBC radio show that Olmsted narrated from ’52 to ’56. Largely excellent and highly literary adaptations of famous works that are allowed to unravel in 8 to 9 minute vignettes, I think Olmsted’s voice and tone will seem especially well suited to the medium among OTR enthusiasts (who will also find a familiar and more languid sense of pacing evident here). Cool stuff!
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The last installment in the “Old Witch” trilogy from Wende and Harry Devlin, “Old Witch Rescues Halloween” followed 1963’s “Old Black Witch” (sometimes remembered as “Blueberry Pancake Witch” and adapted for television in 1969 by Gerald Herman as “Winter of the Witch”), and 1970’s “Old Witch and the Polka-Dot Ribbon”. While it’s a lightweight children’s story really (and at about 9:10 or so you’ll find a skip that I missed when I was doing my audio reconstruction of side two (there were a LOT of skips), perhaps if you pretend that it’s an incantation of sorts you’ll be able to get past it more easily), I’ve run into a number of people over the years with fond memories of the series. To give you some visuals, here are a couple of representative images…
…and here’s the story in all its glory:
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