PDU / Die Kosmischen Kuriere (1975)

This has always been sort of a mystery record for me. I hooked this one up in Baltimore in the same batch that included the Dream Laboratory/Auditory Assault LP, so obviously a strange confluence of records that day. Even after doing some serious Internet sleuthing, there's still quite a bit that I don't understand or know about this one. Maybe it's all in my head, but I think part of the puzzle might have to do with this label. You have what appears to be double Don Quixote looking character (take a closer look for the facial hair and eyeball variations), an Ouroboros (snake eating its tail), stars and squiggles and stick figures, and the Die Kosmischen Kuriere with some kinda ornamented serifed font. If you know what's happening, please fill everyone in in the comments.

Mutant Sounds has a pretty decent write-up taken from the web site of Roberto Cacciapaglia, who played the head cosmic courier here, about the concepts behind the music. I'm guessing it's a translation of the Italian text that's on the inner sleeve. I thought this passage was particularly mystifying: " I am aware, unfortunately, to be late by a couple of millenniums with respect to how I would like music to be intended and that in this day and age I find it diluted in its primary powers, in a time period that destructing essential values. For this very reason, I want to search deeply and not superficially for it, possibly altering the knob of a synthesizer to that of a marranzano." The last bit is a reference to the mouth harp on the front cover. Still don't get it? Yeah, neither do I. But the synthesizer sounds are nothing less than what you'd expect to be delivered by Cosmic Couriers.

For extra listening, I'd recommend Cacciapaglia's The Ann Steel Album from 1979, which features this weird and great proto-Italo-disco clanker of a track, "My Time." Dr. Einstein, we're going supernova and there's not a single thing you can do.