ALAN
DELL
A:
Sympathy
(Rare Bird) B: Blue Sound of Love (Peram/Iser)
7" 45rpm Mono Single - Egg 640 008 (France) 1969-70?, style: psychedelic
pop/experimental
listen to 96k mp3 (right-click
to save): A: Sympathy
B: Blue Sound of Love
If you're an obscure vinyl junkie you are used to going long stretches of buying strange records with no real winners. But every once in a while you hit that hidden nugget and it just deepens the addiction! This record is that hidden nugget-- a totally uncompiled piece of studio psychedelic wizardry from 1969 or 1970.
Going through a stack of 1 euro records recently here in Portugal, I picked this one out because of the PS (which is kinda cool) and the fact that the A-Side was credited to "r.bird" -- which, the single being French, I assumed was connected to Ronnie Bird (of French garage-rock and psych fame). Funnily enough, it turns out to be a cover of the UK Rare Bird's 1969 hit "Sympathy". A pretty decent pop song, this version has excellent drums which are masterfully produced for the times (they sound like drums on much later releases... hmmm...)
So that was cool enough for me, although I was slightly disappointed. Then I thought "Might as well play the B-Side" and sat down to clean other records I had purchased. I looked up at the turntable after a few moments. What the hell was that?! I started it over and listened carefully... It begins with voice saying "To make love, I just need a song... a song of love" ... after that we get electronically echoed piano (or is it early analogue synths?) then a great bass line... and then fuzz guitar with piano keys on top, plus bizarre samples of handclaps and someone going "cha ki chi" (this truly must be heard to be believed!).
There are all kinds of strange vocal samples coming in, wails and moans, the drums beating out standard 4/4s and then strange fills... the song has many peaks and valleys... a key moment of lyrics includes the lines: "I really don't hear red, I really don't hear yellow, I really need green, the sound of love I mean... the sound is brilliant!" After which we get echoplexed sampled vocals, the drums galloping away with flashes of fuzz guitar and piano keys...
And then things get even stranger-- underpinning samples of the singer gasping for breath (can you guess the subject of this song?) we hear the piano playing a simple melody, again, again, and then... it skips! But not the record-- suddenly the tape is being manipulated and notes are being stretched. All of the samples start coming back at once, the volume on the record jumping up and down until the entire song is gasping like the singer was a moment before (the PEAK moment, get it?!). To top it all off, as the fadeout begins at the 4:50 mark, we have a sampled voiced repeating "LOVE" "LOVE" "LOVE" and then our singer says "NUMBER 10... NUMBER 10" -- a nice reference to the Beatles' White Album of course.
While the Beatles reference is pretty obvious, it seems to me that this record was directly influenced by the well-known UK White Noise LP, which featured a song called "Love Without Sound" and lots of effects and tape manipulation, and was issued in 1969. Either way it is a particularly striking example of continental European experimental psych. Given the instrumentation and the cover of the Rare Bird song on the top side I have to guess this was 1969 or 1970 at the latest...
I contacted Vinyl Aficionado and general Expert Stephane Rebeschini (who also contributed to the Fuzz, Acid & Flowers book among other things) about this record and here's what he had to say: