Kitchen Terrors

There used to be this old-timey radio program called Inner Sanctum, which is now mostly available on Archive.org. Out of all the old horror and suspense radio shows, Inner Sanctum was the grisliest. Sometimes it was just disgusting. And in my favorite ever episode, this bank robber visits a black market doctor who has a secret office in the basement of this building. The bank robber wants to get plastic surgery to change his appearance—he's worried about getting caught and executed.

The doctor straps the robber down to the operating table so he won't struggle during the surgery. He uses this opportunity to extort more money from the bank robber. Then he begins the surgery, without anesthetic.

He intones something along the lines of "There will be no painkillers for the likes of you, Rocco!"

The sound when he starts cutting, right before Rocco begins screaming, is really, really upsetting. Right after he beings screaming, the show abruptly cuts to an advertisement for Lipton Tea. But right before that commercial, it's really goddamn upsetting. Even if, like me, you were gleefully reveling in the campy opening sequence and organ cues.

I don't know about you, Dear Reader, but I often have a much more visceral reaction to sound than to film. And there's nothing quite like spending the evening slistening to a weird sound scape record whilst eating a peanut butter sandwich and staring out the window. And while I know that this shit isn't for everyone, part of me can't believe that it isn't more popular. Of course, it isn't easy to get one's head around the many, many, many albums of weird soundscapes and ambient clankings and experimental, you know, stuff . Finding something really good can be difficult unless you are already clued in to this sort of thing, which most people aren't. I'm not even, really. However, I've been listening to this album by The Sonic Catering Band called Seven Transdanubian Recipes, (or, in Hungarian, Szónikus Élelmezési Együttes Hét Dunántúli Recept)and it's one of the weirdest/greatest things I've heard in a while.


I don't know if this can officially be called experimental music, since each of these sound pieces use the preparation of a particular recipe for their source material. These sounds then get manipulated and generally screwed around with, and the end result is pretty unsettling.

From a 2003 interview for MIELE Magazine:

You could argue that what we're practicing is the antithesis of experimental music as most of our recordings have followed a very strict formula in that we let a given recipe dictate how a certain track will sound and develop. [. . .] A typical Sonic Catering session involves three phases: cooking and recording the meal in question; selecting and processing the raw sounds we want to use and finally, editing and layering. Raw sonic and culinary ingredients both become transformed into something thoroughly other both on plate and headphones.

Song titles like "Covert Feeding," "Lactic Sugar Dream," and "The Alimentary Canal by Night" may (or may not!) give you some idea of what to expect. I suppose that the easiest comparison to make would be Nurse With Wound, and like that outfit's better recordings, this album is a fully-realized, completely successful whole. Weird hissing, bubbling, gas burning howling in strange empty spaces . . . this album sounds malevolent for so long that it actually gets pretty funny, and then doesn't really seem funny, and then, after a while, you sort of give up trying to think about it and just agree to inhabit the space that it creates. Extremely enjoyable musique concrète for evil, hungry listeners.

I'll Take My Hilarity Where I Can Get It.

Dear Reader, we spent this weekend hanging out with some friends in Brighton Beach, where we got green borscht and went CD shopping. Our friends Inna and Ljova took us around the neighborhood, took us out for food, acted as translators, and basically showed us a great time.

We also learned that Potap & Nastya, a Russian hip hop duo, might be playing Brighton Beach soon. This group released an amazing video for a song about Bruce Willis which is completely insane:


The title of this song is "Krepkie Oreshki," or "Hard Nuts."

I'm thinking about going to see these guys. I'd also like to note that I took the time to see Speak the Hungarian Rapper during his first ever show at Budapest a couple years ago.



I was there.

Set Things On Fire

Japanese band GISM formed in Tokyo in 1981. Here, they attempt to set their audience on fire with a flamethrower. (The flamethrowing starts about 6 minutes in.)

YU Rock Fakebook

Dear Reader, you are doubtless aware of how much I like punk rock from ex-Yugoslav states. Well, last summer Sarah and I were in Sarajevo, and I was looking for Bosnian punk records. I went to what must have been every record store in the fucking city, but I couldn't find anything even close to what I was looking for. And since Sarajevo is an incredible place and my time there was limited, I finally gave up searching.

But I did find this really cool Balkan rock fakebook:


It's basically just a collection of tabs for popular tunes by ex-YU rock bands. Check out this page spread of two Pekinska Patka (Peking Duck) tunes:


Pekinska Patka are from Serbia, and they are one of the best punk bands ever, from anywhere, at any time in history. Period. This song, "Biti ružan pametan i mlad" (the computer translates it as "Subsist ruĹľan brainy plus adolescent"), is one of their best.



I've long wondered what Nebojša Čonkić was saying at the beginning of this song. According to my book, it's "pipipipi, kvakvakvakva, kakadakakadakakada."

This book? This thing is authoritative.

Sloopy in the Future

My friend Greg is a parts guy at a Harley Davidson dealership. In fact, his official position is Chrome Consultant. He lives in upstate New York, and spends his days playing blues rock in a band that has opened for the likes of Loudness and Pat Travers, listening to bands like Accept and Saxon, and riding his Harley around.

Besides our mutual affinity for The Dictators, Greg and I like completely different kinds of music. He frequently tries to convince me to go see bands that are a good 30+ years past their prime when they play in Poughkeepsie. Sometimes I cave in—which is how I found myself in Greg’s truck, listening to Montrose, and heading towards a motorcycle swap meet where Rick Derringer would be performing. My friend Tom, a noted Klaus Nomi enthusiast and experimental film guy, was also there.

Later on in this story, Tom has an eerie premonition.

Chances are, if you’re going to go to a motorcycle swap meet, you ought to have at least a vague interest in motorcycles. Unfortunately, I don’t know shit about motorcycles, so I wandered around the swap meet environs—a disused IBM plant—staring at, like, greasy bolts and handlebars arrayed on the floor. There were also vendors selling t-shirts, the best of which depicted a guy with a moustache and mullet riding a motorcycle, superimposed over a line drawing a of a Native American chieftain, with the caption “Brothers in the Wind.”

At events like this, Greg is like a celebrity. He’s like a cross between Bob Barker and Spiderman. As he works the room, shaking hands and kissing babies, I survey the crowd. About one-quarter have some kind of visible disability brought on by motorcycle riding—canes and braces were all over the place.

Greg introduces me and Tom to several notable scumbags who all had names like “Poochy” and “Deuce” and "Earwig," as well as one guy who also had a funny name (that I won’t list here) and a face covered in warts. He breathed really loud through his mouth and kept talking about he couldn’t get any women to show him their “pairs,” as in “man, Greg, last year everyone got all fucked up, and the girls showed me their pairs. I saw some nice fuckin’ pairs, brother. But I ain’t seen no pairs today. I’d settle for any kinda pairs, I’ll tell you that much.”

Anyways, I should mention that I didn’t actually know who Rick Derringer was. According to Greg, he was the guy who did “Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo,” which I swore I’d never actually heard until I saw the man himself perform it—at which point I said “Oh yeah, this song.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My point is, I’m wandering around this event with Tom, and the two of us have no idea what to do. We’re just waiting for Derringer. I went in there not knowing or caring about Rick Derringer—after hours of staring at crap like wires, troglodytes, and t-shirts with “English Spoken Here” printed on the front, I was desperately craving some entertainment.

There was some dink from a local radio station who made some announcements. He looked like Matthew Broderick, kind of. He really sucked, but I thought to myself, man, I wish I was born with a radio-ready voice. My voice is nasal and naturally pretty quiet, so I always feel like I'm straining to speak above a mumble. What the crap. Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I was thinking about in the interminable wait for the show.

Then, suddenly, Derringer. Tom said “watch, I’ll bet you he’s a Christian rocker now or something.” And, as Rick Derringer hit the stage in the IBM plant, the drop ceiling a mere six inches from the top of his head, a monogrammed towel hung near his amp, his hair looking perfect—he looked a bit like a shorter John Voight, to tell you the truth—and a gold crucifix dangled conspicuously down the front his shirt, I knew that Tom's premonition was correct. It was gonna be Christian rock.

Man, I’ll tell you what—Derringer wasn’t in any rush to get to the hits. He played one Christian rocker after another, the stoic audience patiently resting on their orthopedic equipment, waiting for Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo, aka The Big Song.

But before he played The Big Song, Rick Derringer announced that he was going to play the state song of Ohio. It turns out that the state song of Ohio is Hang on Sloopy, and Derringer was in the McCoys, who did this in 1965. Wow! Suddenly, everything was different. Man, I love Hang On Sloopy, you know?

Now, when I was a kid, my parents mysteriously had a copy of Heartland Music’s “Fun Rock” collection:


Which was 4 LPs of awesome songs like Yakety Yak and Purple People Eater and Sugar Sugar and stuff. Also on this collection was Hang On Sloopy. I couldn't get enough of that tune. Seriously. I played it all the time. It's still one of my favorites, and probably the best Louie Louie rip the world has ever known.

I remember it well, because for a really long time I thought that they were singing “Hang on Snoopy,” which made sense, right? But then I realized it was “Sloopy,” and I didn’t know what that was. I mean, are there any girls named Sloopy out there? It was goddamn weird. But I used to like that song a lot.

After Sloopy ended, Derringer played The Big Song and everyone left. We left too.

I told Greg about how I grew up with Hang On Sloopy and he said “Hell yeah, man! Derringer fucking rules! Let’s go get some beef jerky! Hot damn!”

Later on, I looked up some stuff on Rick Derringer, and it turns out he also worked on Weird Al Yankovic albums. Which, I guess, means that he had a fairly odd career arc, right? One Hit Wonder to Promising Blues Rocker to Weird All Cohort to Christian Music Guy.

But the funniest thing about the whole experience was that, after having seen Rick Derringer perform Hang On Sloopy, I felt mostly like I’d run into someone I’d gone to Kindergarten with or something. Like we used to be friends, and I hadn’t thought about them for decades, and they looked a lot different than I thought they'd end up looking. It’s a strange feeling.

They're the Ones With the Cut Off Hands

Dear Reader, we here at The Little Black Egg were idly perusing an old Search & Destroy zines (which later morphed into RE/Search Publications) whilst taking a break from working on a writing project. Specifically, it's Search & Destroy #7, and it contains an interview with Roky Erickson.


Roky had this to say on his reading habits:

I go for the more evil side of things. I don't really like anything unless it is evil. I go in for nightmare comics and things like that.

I like to go to old buildings that have caved in, in the darkest part of Dallas at midnight and read about people injecting printer's ink into people's veins, and someone cutting off a man's hand because he wanted his ring and then the hand kills him in jail while he's asleep.

I exist off things like that, but I shouldn't force people to print that kind of periodical just for me! It's kind of mean to make them keep printing it and have it come to my doorstep, because I know I'm the only person that reads it. I guess I'd have to be, because they're the ones with the cut off hands and the blood spurting out the little arteries in their wrists after they're cut off, and that gets real scary.

I wish I had a job where I printed a periodical solely for Roky Erickson's enjoyment. I should get on that.


Here, Roky lays down some wisdom and then plays "Creature With the Atom Brain.

Clandestine Psych

Not that long ago, I had the good fortune to see Los Llamarada at the Cake Shop here in NYC. These guys were sick, and there was loads of feedback cutting all over the place and everyone was having a great time. Also, they probably have about the coolest looking guitar player in North America.

I’ve been wanting to see this band for some time, ever since I read about them in Z-Gun. In fact, when I was Hungary I considered taking the train out to see them there when they played some festival in Europe—Belgium, maybe? But I didn’t have the money. All sorts of great music came out in 2007, and I kept getting worried that I was missing it all because I was in Budapest and when I got back all the bands would be broken up.

Anyway, Los Llamarada is pretty harrowing, not least of all because they are noisy as shit. The songs move through weird territory and defy easy categorization. They are totally remarkable and a lot of fun, and also, listening to it gives you evil psychedelic powers. Right now, Los Llamarada have two albums. The first one, The Exploding Now!, came out a little while ago and was recorded mostly on crummy tape recorders, which made it sound awesomely clandestine and caused music fans the world around to shit their pants with joy.


Their second album, Take the Sky, came out just recently. It’s recorded on slightly better equipment and may, in fact, have slightly better songs than the first one, although it’s hard to say for sure. I like it a whole lot. Retains Llamarada's invisible creepiness while aspiring to marginally higher-fi.


These guys also have a 7”, but I haven’t heard it. Both albums are insanely good, and you will love them unless, of course, you are some strange gray Stasi agent in the employ of insectile overlords, and seek to destroy every single last inch of progress that rock and roll has made since Bo Diddley was birthed. It’s very possible that there are other bands that mine similar sonic territory out there—for all I know, some guy with a beard and weird pants could tell you “These guys sound just like Dead C meets Lothar and the Hand People. Ho hum!” But me, I am not that guy with a beard. I have no beard. But I think that Los Llamarada are really fucking rad, and not enough bands sound like this.


I didn't take this photo; I took it from the Los Llamarada photo page.