Album Notes

"Eddytor's Dozen" - 1994, Chuck Eddy, Music Editor, Village Voice

Review in Dead Angel:

Kwisp -- TERIYAKI VEST ODYSSEY [Pinephone Recordings]

A bold assertion in the liner notes proclaims, "WARNING: THIS IS NOT NEW AGE MUSIC!" Well, no shit -- those moony New Age yahoos aren't anywhere this weird and entertaining. This is not wallpaper music for listening to while polishing chakra stones, to be sure. The band is actually a new-school psychedelic band composed of former members of Fifty Foot Hose with guests from Gong (Daevid Allen) and Mandible Chatter (Grant Miller), among others. The core consists of multi-instrumentalists Walter Funk and Reid Johnston, who have been playing with Fifty Foot Hose since the band reformed in 1995; FFH founder Cork Marcheschi plays on the title track here as well. Fifty Foot Hose were a huge influence on bands like Pere Ubu, Chrome, Throbbing Gristle, and the eternally godlike Angel'in Heavy Syrup, with their peculiar penchant for turning gadgets into oddly listenable tools of psychedelic sonic mayhem. The better-known Gong were probably an influence on seventies psych rock second only to Amon Duul (take your pick of which version), but FFH -- who released one brilliant album, CAULDRON, in the late sixties and then didn't bother to get around to putting out a second one until 1997 (perhaps they were too busy eating "special" brownies and building new noise-making gadgets, eh?) -- were always a much weirder band, and the bands they influenced have in turn been a huge inspiration to tripped-out noisemakers from the late seventies onward.

This album makes it obvious they haven't lost their fondness for freaky and often homemade gadgets; following in the footsteps of Sun Ra and his Cosmo-everything tone tools, this album boasts sounds generated by such quirky items as the Cupid, the Ulysses, and the Hologlyphic Funkalizer, not to mention perverted uses for soda straws, jaw harps, sousaphones, and spark machines. (The Cupid is played by Fred "Spaceman" Long, which makes a deranged sort of cosmic sense.) The ten songs here -- with titles like "Dragon Titties," "Surrealistic At Large Domino," and "Ether Bunny's Music for the Massless" -- are deeply surreal and frequently hypnotic exercises in psychedelic funk that bridge the gap between Sun Ra and Funkadelic with lots of windowpane acid. Needless to say it's all incredibly swell, and anybody who was ever a fan of the above-mentioned bands (or just a fan of psych / devolved music in general) should want to hear this. The outer (and inner) spaceway monorail is boarding; come get your psychedelic hypnogroove on with the boys with the best toys.