Review to follow eventually
Recorded live in 1986, released in 1996. Why the delay? Chaotica is an exuberantly dotty mix of cut-up space age bachelor pad music and mysterious soundscapes. Cuts like "Doomed Ships" and the bossa nova-like "The Drinking Doctor" owe a lot to Esquivel who, sure enough, is thanked at the bottom of the liner notes.
Much of the turntable manipulation on this disc is in the vein of Christian Marclay (Record Without A Cover & More Encores), but less manic. "The Final Fattening" and "The Perpetual Motion Clock" have the tinny sound of a toy orchestra a la Nurse With Wound's "Creakiness." "Space Ship" and "Floating Cans" sound like nighttime on the Forbidden Planet with Hal Holbrook standing a lonely watch outside the ship, bemusedly contemplating the distinctly non-Terran desertscape.
A fun listen.
In 1971, Sandoz sponsored recordings of Shakespeare plays like Coriolanus and King Lear, whose principal characters perhaps could have been helped with with Sandoz's product, Serentil, and their tragedies thus averted (but then they wouldn't have had plays written about them, would they?). Each record had selected soliloquies on one side and a discussion of the character's presumed mental disorder on the other, and came in a box with a brochure for Serentil (220k) and a letter on Sandoz stationery.
Review to follow, eventually
The sleeve says this is a recording of highlights of the history of technology with a slant toward aerospace, the record having been made sometime in the Space Age, maybe 1966. Raybestos-Manhattan, Inc. was entirely of the Asbestos Age, so all its works have since been destroyed, like the monuments of a previous pharaoh. Whatever, I have to use my imagination since the sleeve had no record inside it. I got it anyway, for the pictures. These are supposed to be *positive* images. Call it Space Age Gothic.
