Author: Jen Monroe

Einzelgänger – Einzelgänger, 1975

One of the early electronic masterpieces from the wizard himself, Giorgio Moroder. Einzelgänger (roughly “lone wolf”) was a one-off experiment. Moroder says that about a year after its release he realized that he didn’t like the record at all, and personally bought all the remaining LPs to prevent anyone from hearing it. He seems to be warming up to it these days, in light of “some of his friends liking it very much” and “a fan once telling him that it was very futuristic and way ahead of its time” (that Moroder needed a fan to tell him this is very sweet; thank you Facebook).

Einzelgänger is sonically unrecognizable from the disco that made Moroder famous–the record lovingly riffs on German electronica, and unsurprisingly could easily pass for early, slightly rough Kraftwerk, replete with wandering synth noodles, sputtering vocoder, hazy cabbagescapes, and schnitzeling aqua beats. (“Ich bin der Einzelgänger/Habe keine Fans/es macht mir aber Spaß, Spaß, Spaß…”, roughly “I’m the lonewolf/having no fans/but I’m having fun, fun, fun…” is presumably a play on Kraftwerk’s 1974 “fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn,” oft misheard as “fun fun fun on the autobahn” and probably a Beach Boys reference, so there you have it.) Only Moroder could pull off an experimental joke this skillfully. Make sure to bump this on your skateboard during your next underwater pastoral road trip, smoggy sunset viewing, automaton-themed biergarten, or post-dystopian wasteland picnic.

King Sunny & His African Beats – Aura, 1984

Aura was the last album from jùjú music pillar King Sunny Adé before he left Island Records, purportedly because of increasing pressure to westernize his sound. You can hear it, too–Aura is much beefier than his other two Island releases, the classics Juju Music and Synchro System. It’s plumped up and pulsing with drum machines, electro beats, and synth samples–arguably not a bad thing. King Sunny Adé was the first to introduce the pedal steel guitar to Nigerian pop music, and it shines here on top of a dense flurry of percussion, thanks to six percussionists and plenty of talking drum. Featuring a Stevie Wonder harmonica solo on “Ase,” and Tony Allen on drums in “Oremi,” this is not traditional jùjú music, but the endlessly rolling, meditative grooves and the joy are still there in full force. A perfect summer record. Thanks for playing this for me in your car, Kat!

David Hykes & the Harmonic Choir – Hearing Solar Winds, 1983

“This recording was made in L’Abbaye du Thoronet, a 12th-century Cisterian monastery in Provence, where I had previously brought the choir in 1978. The simple harmonic geometry of the abbey seemed perfectly proportioned to magnify the choir’s music and let it resonate within its sacred space. Working there was an incredible challenge: our sensations, our breathing, and even our thoughts and emotions became intensely amplified.”

–David Hykes, liner notes

Hearing Solar Winds is a milestone for the human voice. Much of Hykes’s work originates from Tantric Tibetan Buddhism and western Mongolian khöömi, or overtone singing. Yet in this context, recorded live in a French abbey over the course of two evenings, it’s a completely different beast from traditional throat singing. It’s less active and more drawn out, less human and more ghostly. It shimmers–did a songbird get trapped in the abbey, or was someone playing an unimaginably tiny glass flute? “Telescoping,” and of course “Rainbow Voice,” quite literally sound like light being split through a prism: when producing harmonics, “the voice acts as a kind of sonic prism, ‘refracting’ sound along a frequency spectrum which extends upward from the fundamental tone.”

Elsewhere, Hearing Solar Winds is as much about sonic illusion as it is overtones. Several tracks employ the Shepard scale, which is a “sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves, with the base pitch of the tone moving upward or downward. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. It has been described as a ‘sonic barber’s pole.'” Upon first listen, the effect is disorienting and even a bit nauseating, as it’s difficult to understand where you are, tonally. If you don’t mind losing track of your body, Hearing Solar Winds becomes less of an album and more of an hour long meditation–cosmic not because of shimmering synth pads or floating arpeggiation (there are none) but because of its direct sonic verticality. This is the real deal.

Incredibly, Hearing Solar winds is David Hykes’s first album. He went on to release five more albums with the unbelievably precise Harmonic Choir, and five more without them. (Side note: “Rainbow Voice” was featured in the soundtrack for Dead Poets Society.) He’s worked extensively with sound healing and spirituality, developing a comprehensive approach to “contemplative music” called harmonic chant, about which there’s a nice interview with him here. I would highly recommend a rainy day listen of Hearing Solar Winds on good speakers, without doing much of anything else.

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Arto Lindsay – Noon Chill, 1997

Arto Lindsay made a name for himself as a founding father of the New York no wave scene with his project DNA. He went on to work with the Lounge Lizards, Ambitious Lovers, and the Golden Palominos before producing a slew of solo records. Though American, Lindsay’s parents were missionaries and he spent his teenage years in Brazil at the height of the tropicália movement. This Brazilian influence emerged more and more throughout his 40 year long career, spawning a trilogy of records dense with Brazilian sound: O Corpo Sutil (1996), Mundo Civilizado (1996), and finally, Noon Chill. Lindsay has also done production work for Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Vinicius Cantuária, and Carlinhos Brown, to name a few. (Side note: he’s also responsible for the weirdest/best cover ever of Prince’s “Erotic City.”)

Noon Chill sounds like a well-intentioned poolside afternoon gone on a codeine bender. Most of the songs are bossa nova at heart, but they continuously slip down dark, trip-hoppy rabbit holes and spiral off into ominous drum and bass riffs. It’s like Tanto Tempo‘s sinister older brother. Combined with Lindsay’s trademark disinterested vocals and lyrics like “I do love your lack of all expression/I find it not at all distressing,” you can’t help but see Noon Chill through heavy eyelids.

Λένα Πλάτωνος – Γκάλοπ, 1985


Greek musician Lena Platonos (Λένα Πλάτωνος) has an impressive discography ranging from dark electronic rabbitholes to post punky pop to the straight-up bizarro theatrical. She’s an electronic music pioneer (and an aesthetic genius, having designed the cover above), so it’s really exciting that Dark Entries has recently reissued her second solo record, Gallop (Γκάλοπ), which she wrote, performed, and produced. Gallop is an exercise in dark minimalism, consisting mostly of analog synths, a Roland TR-808 drum machine, and her voice, speaking and singing her own surreal poetry. It’s Greek to me, but I’m told that “lyrics deal with heartbreak, dreams, desires, and astutely predict the way that computers and technology would infiltrate our society in the years to come.” (A word to the ASMR-wise: listening to her softly-spoken voice in headphones might trigger some particularly tingly feelings.) Alternating between spiky techno beats and long stretches of unpunctuated dreamy synth sprawl, Gallop is a haunting and very progressive record. Enjoy!

Wally Badarou – Echoes, 1984

Wally Badarou is a legend. Paris-born and Benin-raised, he was part of the Compass Point Studios in-house recording team in the Bahamas; was a session musician for Grace Jones, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Herbie Hancock, Level 42, Black Uhuru, Gwen Guthrie, Robin Scott, Talking Heads, Tom-Tom Club, Robert Palmer, and Manu Dibango; and produced for Fela Kuti, Salif Keita, and Marianne Faithfull, among many, many others. Echoes is an entirely instrumental, almost comically smooth piece of electronic funk wizardry. You’ve probably heard the single “Chief Inspector” in a million DJ sets, but the whole album is mixtape ready. Take it to the beach, y’all.

Eddie Kendricks – People…Hold On, 1972

People…Hold On makes me excited to have kids so they can remember growing up hearing this around the house. A former frontman of The Temptations, this was Eddie Kendricks’ second solo record and cemented his solo career: the (slightly problematic) “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” was widely circulated in east coast clubs, and Kendricks went on to release 13 full-lengths and record a live album with Hall and Oates. People…Hold On is an immaculate classic. Funky, disco-flecked soul, bathed in sunshine and wah-wah, with a slow-burning politically charged title track. Eddie Kendricks’ trademark falsetto is effortless. A perfect spring soundtrack. Enjoy!

LFO – Frequencies, 1991

Arguably one of the most important UK techno LPs ever. Just as happy to be heard in headphones as in a grimy warehouse. Gorgeous, heart-skittering, crunchy sci-fi futurism rendered in perfect detail. Perpetually surprising and joyful throughout. A fully-realized prediction of two decades of electronic dance music. Mark Bell died six months ago and I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently, partially because of the Björk retrospective (he co-produced Homogenic, among many others), but largely because of this record, which is a gift.

Dorothy Ashby – The Rubáiyát of Dorothy Ashby, 1970

Singular! Alongside the likes of Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby was one of the first to bring the harp to the jazz scene. Most of her work is generous, harp-centric, free-flowing soul jazz, sans vocals (totally enamored of her take on “The Windmills of Your Mind“); the kind of music to make any social gathering feel like a movie, and any poolside feel like the swankiest lounge.

Rubáiyát was a radical departure from all of that, and not just because she sings throughout (a shame she didn’t sing on more records; her vocal delivery is terrifically elegant and ghostly). Ashby composed Rubáiyát around the poetry of Omar Khayyám, a twelfth century Persian philosopher, and the resulting sound is a sweeping, psychedelic global mash-up, only occasionally veering into kitschy territory. Koto, mbira, flute, timpani, vibraphone, a few searing streaks of guitar, and of course, heavy harp throughout. Swirling, heady, and expansive. Good speakers a must. Also a personal favorite album cover.

Van Dyke Parks – Song Cycle, 1967

Another one from the canon. Song Cycle is deranged. It riffs on all things Americana: gospel, bluegrass, orchestral ballads, folk, show tunes, marching bands, movie scores, ragtime, waltzes, girl groups, and pop rock, but it never settles into any of these shapes. People call it impenetrable, but I think it’s, ahem, too penetrable, too open and slippery and rife with forks in the road. It’s psychedelic insofar as every measure seems to want to tug away and break off into several different songs, leaving the listener in many places (and times!) all at once, volatile and hanging off of a musical precipice. It’s nauseating, beautiful, and a tiny bit misanthropic.

As a teenager, my first dozen listens left me unable to remember anything about what I had just listened to, what had just happened, and yet despite it being so elusive, you can’t stop listening, trying to grab hold of it. I’m sure this is a pretty typical response, and Parks himself sums it up best in this anecdote:

When I played the album for Joe Smith, the president of the label, there was a stunned silence. Joe looked up and said, “Song Cycle”? I said, “Yes,” and he said, “So, where are the songs?” And I knew that was the beginning of the end.

A massively expensive commercial flop, the record was originally supposed to be entitled Looney Tunes, and it does feel cartoonish and larger than life. Most of it is accompanied by Parks’s reedy, androgynous vocals–he sounds like a jaded, aging chorus girl who’s smoked a few packs too many, singing sardonically to an empty theater. Clearly he’s amused by this whole thing. The opener, “Vine Street,” is Steve Young covering a Randy Newman song, and it fades in midway through the song and fades out before it’s finished. Track six, the cheekily titled “Van Dyke Parks,” is a minute long clip of a gospel hymnal, almost completely masked by what sounds like a helicopter making a water landing. The closer, “Pot Pourri” (probably another joke title, given that it’s the least hodgepodge track in the cycle), finds Parks alone with a piano, padded by a thick hiss of room tone, and the song doesn’t exactly end so much as stop–presumably leaving it open-ended and the cycle unbroken, ready for another go round.