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.

Public Information (2011)

This is one of my favorite records this year, partly because of the photographs on the covers and the label. The image above must be of the lobby of Robert Rathburn Wilson Hall, a high-rise laboratory that's pretty much become the symbol of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois (take a virtual tour here!). It was the world's second largest energy particle accelerator until September 2011 when it ceased acclerating energy particles -- right on time for this release by ADR, Solitary Pursuits, on the new but already baddass label Public Information.

The photo on the label, taken by Michael Vallera, quickly got me thinking about The Drowned World, a science fiction novel by J.G. Ballard in which the polar icecaps have melted, turning a lot of the great cities of the world into tropical swamps that are partially submerged and completely overgrown with vegetation. There's pirates and lagoons and dreamscapes and, yeah, it's on some dystopian type vision of the future or maybe the present. (As a related aside, in reading about Fermilab, I came across this detail: "Weston, Illinois was a community next to Batavia voted out of existence by its village board in 1966 to provide a site for Fermilab." A world literally wiped off the map...)

I could try to run through all the biography and etc. on ADR (honestly it would be info I scrounged up via DJ Google anyway) but I'm more interested in the music and images. Suffice to say these are some synthesizer jawns that's on the melancholic tip. Kinda reminiscent of Aphrodite's Child, especially the vibe of "Aegian Sea." Some of this seems to be about space, not actually interstellar, but more so in an antiquated planetarium or shuttered particle accelerator experience kind of way. The track titles include "Post PC," "Mercury Retrograde" and Jupiter Rising," which should give you an indication of what we're dealing with here. Highly recommended.