whats the weirdest record you own?

flexidisc of yuri gagarin speaking (almost inaudibly)
conservative party advert on 7" single from the early 1960's (so bad it isn't even funny)
complete set of learn-to-play-the stylophone records
safety at work 7" (as in not a band called "safety at work", a spoken word piece on why one should work carefully so as to avoid injury)
finnish folk music record, "music of the far north" - music almost unbearably sweet, but includes track called "reindeer migration", which is the actual sound of a herd of reindeer migrating.

have owned in the past
"early morning cape cod" IE 73mins of the sea washing up on a beach. somewhere in there you can hear a motor boat going past. It's supposed to be soothing in a hippy-new-age sort of way, but actually it's really annoying, I'd defy anyone to sit thru more than 10mins of it. iirc it's on rykodisc

a jazz percussionists solo album. perhaps you think a whole album of drum solos is a bit much? how about a complete 12" lp, with a 20min hihat solo on each side?

"Physics and beyond" transcription disc from Radio Canada International.
two episodes from an early 70s physics radio series. great analogue synth intro music!

"The Fastest 500 - a sound report of the 1961 indianapolis classic"
genius lp of car noises. vrrrrrrrrooooooommmmmmm!

"the cat that walked by herself - boris karloff reads rudyard kipling"
i've listened to this one a lot....

"the magic circle record"
tricks explained by magic circle "stars". includes ali bongo teaching you how to "float a sausage"!!

1/ music made by plants (ie they had some apparatus to wire up leaves of various pot{eheh, not that kind of pot iirc} plants so as to get electrical current from them, and then they'd amplified this current and used it to play a modular synthesiser)

2/music for whales (ie, some individual had made electronic music to play to whales via an underwater speaker, and s/he also wanted to share this with us)

i didn't buy either of them (why not???? I must have been crazy!!!)

http://www.rykodisc.com/Catalog/Catalog_Result_List_01.asp?Action=AlbumsListGenre&Category_SubID=47

1971 mind sketchin Stooges parody

Also the DogPoundFoundSound double-CD: caged dogs barking their distress. Would not be so weird if it were only a single CD. But it's two.

1) Dan Hill - Sounds Electronic LP - Really crap lounge music with occasional synthesiser, topped off with a scantily clad woman on front cover

2) Children Talking - 1968 LP of interviews with children - used famously by Aphex Twin on one of his records.

3) Mac The Paperman - Up To The Box LP - Stories told by a Cockney paper seller from the 1970's. The tapes were recorded secretly by hiding a tape recoder under the counter of a london alternative record shop. Mac used to come go into the shop to keep warm and ogle the young girls!

4) Dexale Health Records - Relaxation and Sleep Sequence - Early 70's private pressing sold by some kranky scottish shrink. 40 minutes of "Let your legs go soft and floppy... you are feeling completely relaxed"

5) AMK - HiFi 7" - sort of a locked groove type record, but cut in such a way that the grooves cross over back and forth, giving you a different track everytime you play the record...

plus loads more that i can't think of right now....

"Pia Zadora Speaks"! On cassette. Actually she's quite sweet.

About 5 CD's of national anthems, I went through a phase of buying these a few years ago for some reason. The African anthems all sound like Elgar knock-offs.

Remko Scha - "Machine Guitars" - some Dutch artist guy puts guitars in front of home-made vibrating objects and records the results.

I've got that AMK record too! I think RRRecords released something similar with 100 locked grooves but I've never "heard" it.

i have one called 'the sounds of love A to Z" which consists of two types of songs: classical music filtered through synth modules, and strange, pulsating original synth compositions. all overdubbed with moaning and groaning, don'tcha know

-Auscultations of the Heart, a 1950's medical record of recorded heartbeats, each proceeded by a dry academic voice detailing the defects and strangeness of the following heart sound. It is, in essence, a record of broken hearts. The cover art is so cool; a friend used it for a website header:
http://www.whypop.net/rich/images/for_header_heart.gif

"Lie" by Charles Manson, some of the least listenable music I've ever heard.

http://www.endlessgroove.com/issue4/lpf12.jpg

..and it was endearingly odd and jarring.

C'mon, there's more than a few excellent solo percussion records by Andrew Cyrille, Milford Graves, and other greats. It's not that "weird" or "wacky" or whatever.

(I like Spiro T. Agnew Speaks, but it's not a solo percussion record.)

http://www.postfun.com/pfp/features/97/august/strange.html

I agree there's nothing weird about a solo percussion record, although a record of nothing but hi-hat solos would be a little bit weird - assuming Pashmina meant that literally.

I also have a flexidisc of Churchill's funeral.

if anyone can find me the name of this artist/record (i'm thinking early-mid bananafish), please do!

i have enjoyed many Sun City Girls "fake ethnic" moments. their recent carnival folklore is just the latest mop-up of various experiemnets, beyond their beginnings, those early lps, and a couple of odd singles and songs here and there (like the single "Napoleon and Josephine", fake 3rd world "rap")

i admit that sometimes i like the contrived weirdness of the likes of the girls' excessive output (which often seems like a lucky dip) or the measured austere (?) Kagel, another fake ethnics tactition, (both comedians), and sometimes that i like it a bit more than the "naivé" oddness of many things listed here and others that could be listed

"weird" for weirdness sake seems to have been the holy grail in music collecting at times over the years -- now there's so much to choose from and so many contrived contenders, which makes me cautious of y'r sonic youth or "new weird america" (uhh, much that David Keenan waxes w/lyrics of his own over actually)

the continued offerings of the "new weird america" of Wire fame, i'd like to like it, don't know too much about it, and it reminds me of the boredoms style of "collective" bordering on "hippy" that i suppose can get drippy (like the Manson material sometimes) -- how contrived is this weirdness pandering to cd buyers' markets ? one person's comedy is another's ritual, if it's good ?

books like the Re/Search weird books have categorised much of this w/out taking too much of the shock of the new out of a lot of that, but my favourite source of material on the edge of control is still reliably ur-reliable forced exposure, whose catalog is a great jumping in portal for so much of this music (so much more so than the stratified Wire on a bad day) and whose editors seem to try to keep the balance right

It's sort of very funny but also leaves me a bit queasy - i'm not sure i want to know the story of who these two people are and how their shared moment ended up in a charity shop thirty years later. It probably doesn't help that my only other cultural knowledge of this sort of disc is the one pinkie makes for his sweetheart in 'brighton rock'...

Also, The Cat -- a full-length CD of a cat purring, recorded by contact mics strapped to the animal. It's actually pretty relaxing. Brought to you by the Time Stereo people.

i'm pretty sure i still have it somewhere (=in some forgotten drawer at my parents' place in the coutry, ie).
got it, as a classmate's materialised idea of a funny x-mas present, back in secondary school.

Don't know...the only word I can really make out is Shostakovich. I found it at a libary sale for .50 cents

The thing is freakin' heavy, it has to weigh twice as much as a Shellac vinyl. It destroyed two needles, after the second one I just filed it away as curio.

the title track you can find at Irwin Chusid's Incorrect Music audio archive.

http://www.incorrectmusic.com/audio/

so i have some first day covers of two different sized 33rpm stamps issued by Bhutan, each featuring the national anthem (i've been led to believe) rather than speeches (being first day covers, it seems a shame to seperate the stamps and play them, though i have heard what sounded like an anthem off one stamp)

novel yes, but fun

cf:
Kagel used linguisticly intriguing pidgeon-german-english-spanish for his recitation of political leader (repeateing words that sounds like other inflammatory words, but all spoken using this other "foreign" language, spoken quite musically by the composer) talking to himself/ audience with siren noise for canned audience response and excerpts of 12" marches for the retreat" for the presidential pomp and caeremony band, for his "Der Tribun" (for which he won The Radio Prize of Veterans Blinded by War)

concocted yes, but so artistically enriched as to be more interesting to me than many short-wave-like found recorings (like Radio Moscow)

i would love to hear Mao-ist "little-red-book" propoganda, perhaps propganda happily consignable to history (unlike Kagel's similarly more musical/artistic and perhaps more chrono-generic nach einer Lektüre von Orwell)

(ok the current shining path like Nepalese pre-teen people's army gun songs _are_ intriguing)

Anyhow, I have a record that's meant to deter burglars from entering your house... it's a lock groove of a big, mean dog growling... he stops and whimpers halfway through. The sleeve advises you to turn the hi-fi ALL THE WAY UP when you go out of town, so nobody will mess with your stuff!!!

Christ, that must be the stuff of sheet-soaking nitemares.

1) is Me, singing "I can sing a rainbow" at approx 5 years old
2) is some girls "waiting for the beatles" and singing yellow submarine
3) is similar but different, saying hello to friends that aren't there.

Aren't these on a "Calibre" 'label'?

I have that record too, bien sur! I found it in a record shop in Athens, Greece. In fact it's called 'The Sounds of Love From A to Zzzzzzzz', because of course you fall asleep after sex (and during this record).

Harry Partsch, Massimo, BarcodeMusic, Squarepusher and Bob Marley...

Okay, maybe that's just the most bizarre.

Meet the Moon-a-tiks is creepy, and I'll add to that any of the Marcy series Christian ventriloquism records. (ventriloquism records? think about it.)

Sebastian Speaks. I like functional LPs, and this one is designed to be played on repeat, to scare away cat burglars with the sound of an aggravated barking dog. The liner notes advise purchaser to play the LP on 45rpm if they live in an apartment, to simulate a smaller dog.

A recotron home recording of a rabbi singing cantor songs and harranguing his kids.

The Blaster Bates Vols. I-V comedy series. A bawdy English comedian/demolition expert whose off-color sex jokes rely on explosion metaphors. Incomprehensible due to thick accent and poor recording quality.

to be continued...

Physics = Rob Crow of Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, Optiganally Yours and Pinback.

http://theexperiment.org/physics/