- You don’t play the ANS synthesizer (Russia, 1938) with a keyboard. Instead you etch images onto glass sheets covered in black putty and feed them into a machine that shines light through the etchings, trigging a wide range of tones.
- I am slightly horrified and fascinated by the This Exists channel on YouTube. For a starter, here’s a survey of the history of Scientology music.
- Terrorizer: Heavy Metal Is Gay: Why we need to tackle our homophobia.
Re: scientology music – I’ve heard the Space Jazz album that the youtube video mentions. My experience went something like this:
I read a blog post reviewing it and it really waxed lyrical about how spectacularly awful it was. I downloaded it expecting it be pretty bad but thinking it sure couldn’t be as awful as it had been made out to be.
The album starts. Cliched brass fanfares played with painfully basic brass samples. Yep, OK this is pretty awful.
Then the vocals: a couple of girls insincerely shouting “Superman!! Hooray!!!” like a couple of stage hams. What the fuck?
Another minute or so of appalling brass fanfares and then the girls are back. “Buck Rogers!! Hooray!!”. At this point I started laughing and didn’t stop until the song finished. My god, it really is that awful. But surely that’s just this opening song – the whole album couldn’t be that bad could it?
Then the next song started and I immediately collapsed in laughter again.
I listened to the first 4 or 5 tracks in full and the first few minutes of all of them. A couple of tracks have genuinely talented Jazz musicians playing amazing solos on them, but they only serve to highlight the uniform stark dreadfulness of every other aspect of the album.
I laughed and laughed until my sides ached. The “Plan 9 From Outer Space” of music.?