Introducing ASDF

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While I've only been actually reading blogs for a couple of years, I have my out-of-control RSS feed that harvests posts from more than 500+ blogs, the bulk of which are wordless entries that simply link to a Mediafire or Rapidshare of one or more albums. Most of these recordings are painfully obscure and never achieve virality, in spite of actually kicking ass and being way better than a lot of the crap that comes out nowadays. Not that I don't like new music, but, you know.

Let's just jump on the boat and see what floats, shall we?

The Petticoats was the solo project of punk-feminist Stef Petticoat, who played in a slew of equally obscure bands like Necessary Evil, Amy and the Angels, and 69 LIES. Petticoat self-released a self-titled 7-inch in 1980, the b-side of which is a punk manifesto that sounds as rough around the edges as any punk ideology would. You can try singing along to her tongue-twisting lyrics, but you'll probably just fuck it up, fail, and come off really awkward – sort of like that period when all you wore was that stupid leather jacket and that feather earring. Via Killed by Death Records.

The Petticoats, “I'm Free”

The Residents have been killing it since the early '70s, inspiring a large assortment of popular weirdos like Animal Collective, Mr. Bungle, and that band that was in the first Tony Hawk game. However, I'd say the Residents' may have influenced even more unpopular weirdos, like Renaldo and the Loaf. Some saw RatL as Residents contemporaries (they shared the same label, Ralph Records) while some saw them as shameless rip-offs who drew from certain techniques that the Residents' used on their earlier Duck Stab-era stuff, like recording at different tape speeds and detuning acoustic instruments to give them a pseudo-electronic, other-worldly sound. Via Musica en Mediafire la Idioteca.

Not much is known about the East London synth-pop trio Solid Space. They recorded their only release in 1982 – an eleven-track cassette dubbed Space Museum – and were obsessed with a not-so distant future on the brink of apocalypse. I jumped from my chair when I was listening to Nicholas Bindeman of Eternal Tapestry and Jackie-O Motherfucker's latest project, Tunnels, and heard the out-of-phase wave of one of my favorite Solid Space jams, “Tenth Planet”. I now have a shred of hope that maybe someone else will pick up on these brooding nihilists and re-issue this great cassette. Anyone? Via No Longer Forgotten Music.
The bulk of Gil Trythall's work walks the same road paved by Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach, album – an ernest attempt to expose the public to electronic music outside of sci-fi movies. Born and bred in Tennessee, he thought that country music would be the most palatable way to ease the masses into the alien electronic sounds and recorded his Country Moog and Nashville Gold albums. Maybe predictably, Trythall was written off as a total goofball, despite the fact that he was a serious electronic composer – his Luxicon II / Echospace 12-inch proves it. After studying electronic music and composition for about two decades at three universities, Trythall appears before us with thick glasses, gray hair, and a mean unibrow to present some seriously mind-blowing modular synthesis. Via Holy Warbles.