What is the oddest CD in your collection?

I pulled a long-forgotten one of the shelf last week and threw it in the car changer: "Zipless" by Vanessa Daou, an acid jazz CD of Erica Jong's ("Fear of Flying") writings set to music. (!?!??!?!!!!!!!!)

I made the mistake of listening to it with the windows down in my car, and it's a wonder I wasn't arrested. (It's not as profane as a lot of rap music, but in some ways its low-key approach--and the cool female vocals--make it even more shocking/arousing.) Once you get past the quirkiness of the initial concept, it's great.

This isn't about guilty pleasures: what's the just-plain-oddest thing on your shelf?

Really, I don't remember how I got it. I think it was a freebie or in the bargain bin of Tower or Virgin. Anyhow, it's rather New Age-y and interesting.

Cecil Taylor. ( drools)

Tom's Diner

There are too many great songs of his to remember. Suk a Cheetah's Dick, Cut the Mullet, I Whupped Batman's Ass, Birdman Kicked My Ass, Rock'n Roll McDonalds...

Rest in peace.

I got my ass thrown out of Church :D

Oh, and The Chicken Cow

OMG.....seriously?

On Edit: just went to the AT website......DAMMIT. That man WAS punk rock, IMHO. Loud, snotty, didn't care about being "trendy" or "cool", untrained,......he just let it rock.

Another favorite Wesley Tune (with the Fiasco):
Casper the Homosexual Friendly Ghost.

Rock over London, rock on Chicago

This is the long tunnel
of wanting you

Olivia Newtown Johns Greatest Hits

John Tavoltas Greatest Hits (with the smash hit Razamataz)



Faster Pussycat- Wake me when its over


Urban Dance Squad- Mental Floss For the GLobe

I have a bunch but those are the ones I could remember off hand

Much of what we own is kind of 'out there.'

I know! It's a record, but Lavender Jane Loves Women. Alix Dobkin - probably the cut with throat singing. Disclaimer, I do like her voice.

I have a CD by a Japanoise (sic) ensemble called C.C.C.C.-- and no, they don't tell you what it stands for. It is, literally, noise, albeit made with guitars and stuff-- it sounds like a concerto for jackhammer and subway train. (I saw them play live once, and I try to support touring bands by buying their records.)

I have a CD by a guy who calls himself Eddie the Rat, cut-and-splice assemblages of radio propaganda and little snippets of tunefulness, kinda like Negativland with ADD.

That Smithsonian CD of Tuvan throat-singing deserves mention here. Tuva is next door to Mongolia, and the Tuvans are traditionally nomadic yak herders and caravan drovers, and they have evolved a vocal technique whereby an individual can sing two, sometimes three, notes at a time. They say it's because their work is so solitary, they needed a way to sing duets by themselves. It's a weirdly beautiful sound.

John Oswald's Gray Folded (say it fast, with the accent on the last syllable), for which Oswald spliced together over 100 different performances of "Dark Star" into one ideal Dead show spanning 25 years. I wish I also had his Plunderphonic CD, where he manipulates popular music from Beethoven to Count Basie to Michael Jackson, but that record was destroyed by the evil forces of the record industry.

I have two CDs by a guy named Hans Reichel, who carved these wooden tongues he calls Daxophones, which he can play with a cello bow and get oddly organic sounds like flatulent kazoos. He arranges these sounds into weird Tyrolean drinking songs.

A guitarist and composer named Scott Johnson made a record called John Somebody, where he taped people talking on the telephone and used the melodic contours of their speaking voices as his musical material, imitating (and harmonizing) their inadvertent melodies with his guitar. A related item is Steve Reich's Different Trains, which also extracts melodies from spoken words, but since the text in Reich's piece is about the trains taking European Jews to the concentration camps during World War II, it's a lot creepier.

Those are the ones that come to mind. Maybe I can also mention one CD I played on, the Judas and Natasha Experiments. Natasha wrote these songs, and Judas and half a dozen other people accompanied her, without necessarily knowing how the songs went, or even how to play whatever instrument they were playing. I was the bass player. We thought of it as psychedelic, but copies of this CD now turn up in the $1.98 bins at Boston's better used record shops.

which I thought would be good to do yoga to. Actually, I heard it sold pretty well. I also have "Liverpool Sound Collage" which is strange, but it has it's moments.

floresta atlantica

It's heavy metal songs (Nirvana) played by a quartet of cellos! Really!

I also have the Ramayana Monkey Chant from Bali.

--IMM

Someone already mentioned Japanese noise band C.C.C.C., and I've got albums by them and a few other bands in that genre such as Solmania and Merzbow. Yes, folks, "Japanese noise" actually is a whole subgenre, and it is very literally noise.

I've got quite a bit of world, avant-jazz, experimental, and alternative music which is pretty offbeat, including Tuvan throat-singing, southeast Asian chants and bells, avant-jazz by Sun Ra and Anthony Braxton, and experimental and industrial stuff by bands like Test Department and Throbbing Gristle.

I'd say the oddest individual selections of all, though, would be CD's I own by David Koresh, Charles Manson, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner.