Writer Andrew Earles contributes with an article on Househunters, the band whose place in the fringe punk and squatter scenes of 1980s London went overlooked. Front man Jowe Head reflects on this time and the potential of a band whose talents are now becoming more well-known.

New York City, 1979. The radical post-punk movement that would be known as No Wave is in full swing. Mars, DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Contortions, Theoretical Girls, Ut, and many more are playing noisy, tradition-destroying music at CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, and the Mudd Club. No New York, the Brian Eno-produced No Wave compilation, was just released the previous fall. Two years later, almost all of these groups were gone. But in Manhattan in 1979, it might have felt like you could see a No Wave group every night. If you did, chances are you also saw Blinding Headache,...

Galactic Zoo Dossier's Steve Krakow chats with singer songwriter Steve Tilston about his creative origins, influences, memorable performances, and recordings that shaped this legend's unique musical career.

To say the discovery of Simply Saucer in the late nineties was epiphanous for me would still be some sort of understatement. Here was the promise of everything great laid down in the late sixties made good; the UK free-fest roar, the Velvets’ street-tough chug, Syd’s early exploratory jams, even Krautrock’s primordial dirge—even the immediate influence of Eno’s oscillations were felt—and this was from mid-seventies Ontario?? The story was too good to be true—from-the-day obscurists with names like “Ping” totally out of touch with their contemporaries, in virtual isolation, morphing the best...

Spend enough time with a favorite album and over the years you will find that it has worked itself into your life, in a way that transcends the immediate appreciation of the music. Private memories will be attached to the record, and they will enhance the listening experience as you grow older.

Pau Riba has been making music and working in film and theatre for almost 40 years - wowing audiences with daring performances that push artistic boundaries. Catalayan born, Riba's life has been littered with awe-inspiring experiences, from his times as a law-breaking Catalayan musician during the fascist Franco regime to his days living with an island-bound hippie commune in Spain. Interviewed by resident WFMU DJ, Rob Hatch-Miller, we are allowed this rare glimpse into Riba's artistic motivations while taking a look back at two of his classic albums.

And I’ve heard them all. The mid-six figure rarities like The Search Party and These Trails, the variously evil things like Graham Bond, Black Widow, Coven and Monument, weird old metal, PiL’s The Flowers Of Romance, The Raven by The Stranglers… unsettling wyrd folk like Trader Horne, and then there’s Nick Drake. Well… The Ghost’s When You’re Dead – One Second makes them all wilt like girlie flowers (or as Shirley sez, “Hearts and flowers died today”).

I guess it took me a little while to realize Turkey had some of the finer psychedelicists on hand in the day, it really should have been obvious, as their indigenous sounds were already tripped out enough with acoustic instrumentation, but when electric flavors were added a heady stew was all but guaranteed. A few key compilations hipped me to the plethora of frequencies that came out of Turkey in the late 60’s-mid-70’s--Yes, there was a whole blasted scene, especially once English and American vibrations entered the fray, Anatolian or Andalou rock was born. Headed largely by singer/svengali...

It was a mad, bittersweet revel. Catharsis curbed. The Longhorn filled to the brim with a cult of close to a thousand rock n’ roll ravers writhing ‘round ‘n’ round, turning crazed little circles, bouncing up and up, throwing fists in the air, while all power sources wailed full force in a numbing finale as wacky and wonderful as Verdi’s Requiem scored for a battalion of kazoos blaring out through a mile high bank of Marshall stacks. “We can fly so high, yeah, we’re never gonna die…and there’ll be fun, you bet, even more when you get to the junction, Petticoat Junction. Toot-toot!” - The...

Hailing from Brooklyn, New York, Sir Lord Baltimore are one of the best kept secrets of early heavy metal; a band whose business acumen (or lack thereof) derailed the promise of their talents, and whose music was therefore cursed to decades of obscurity before being rediscovered – and often recycled into new songs – by many stoner rock bands of the 1990’s (whose shall remain nameless to save them face). If anything is fair in the mostly unfortunate SLB story, it’s that the commercial success attained during their existence was as modest as the band’s inner city roots. Vocalist/drummer John...

In the summer of 1976, after over 3 years of home recording, SHOES was in a bit of a jam. We had recorded more than 3 albums worth of material and we still hadn’t achieved our goal of signing to a major label. To top it all off, our then drummer, Barry Shumaker had informed us that he was leaving the band and moving out of the small, one bedroom flat that he and I shared amidst the array of amps, instruments, PA and recording gear. Barry was a great guy and drummer but, with the prodding of his girlfriend, he was persuaded that he was wasting his time in the band and needed to move on to...

With the advent of the conformist nightmare that consumed most of America in the 1950s, something eventually had to break. By the middle of the following decade, it most certainly had – and the shattered evidence was plain to see. Under a California sun, the shards of Technicolor brilliance, dazzling the eyes of those who dared to look toward new frontiers. The old rules were dispensed with, scorned and abandoned as anachronistic restraints. Dividing lines between art and life melted away, and for a few fleeting moments – or even years – anything seemed possible. Once the dark mirror...

At long last the mysterious saga of Father Yod and Yo Ho Wa 13 (or sometimes “Wha”) has come to light, and the most important thing is that this was not some hidden fringe freak-cult or anything, but an essential chapter in counterculture history—or better yet, a chapter in humanity’s history as a whole. For years, collectors marveled at their privately pressed album covers waxing poetic on how such images could have taken shape—like the messianic, robed and hairy Father Yod howling while beating a gong on one LP, yet decked out in a white pimp suit adorning a Rolls Royce on another. The...

In 1969 SAINTE ANTHONYS FYRE was the ultimate hardrock powertrio from Trenton, New Jersey. Band leader, guitar wiz and vocalist Greg Ohm was heavy into music since childhood, having played classical music in elementary and high school (1st violin Trenton High’s Orchestra). He also took some music classes in college and ended up with the group Peter's Precious Soul, who were very popular locally. But Greg grew tired of playing Top 40 cover songs and decided to start his own band. While cleaning his grandmother's attic one day in 1967 he found an old newspaper with the headline, "Ste. Anthony's...

Each side of this album is a suite of related pieces. The underlying conceptions of the two sides are quite different, as were the means of executing the music. Rainbow Delta consists of 4 pieces composed at different times and under different circumstances. What unifies them was the intention to describe a kind of ecstasy. At the times of composition I felt a strong connection between myself and the natural world. The first piece composed, “Take the 5:10 to Dreamland” came to me on a beautiful spring afternoon while I was sitting by a flume in Dutch Flat, California, listening to a...

Achieving mythic status o’er the years, Sir Lord Baltimore’s debut album Kingdom Come is well deserving of it, this hastily assembled band of wild brothers unwittingly coming up with some of the earliest heavy metal ever. If we were to namecheck everybody we’re supposed to, one would still tilt to the British, as 1970 gave us two Black Sabbath albums, Uriah Heep’s debut and Deep Purple’s seminal In Rock. Over on these shores, the wobbly stuff had come along and predated – Stooges, MC5, Blue Cheer – and then one had more of a cogent comparative in Mountain. Still, one would have to give the...

You can’t keep great music down. No matter how humbly recorded, or how obscure its first appearance, anything truly creative and original will survive and in time reach its audience. Few LPs illustrate this phenomena as well as “Inside The Shadow” by Indianapolis band Anonymous. Originally released as a very limited pressing in 1976, and briefly made available again in 1981, its dazzling contents weren’t really discovered outside the hometown borders until the 1990s. In the last 15 years the Anonymous legend has grown slowly but steadily, nourished by a couple of reissues, but even more so...

The Swedish band Trad Gras Och Stenar (formerly Harvester, formerly International Harvester, formerly Parson Sound) is a true beneficiary of the CD era. Their late 60s/early 70s albums are world-class examples of dark, lo-fi psychedelia with a foot in the avant garde, but were hardly heard by anyone until they were reissued on CDs—and those releases were supplemented with bonus tracks, most of which were too long to have fit on an LP side, which were just as good if not superior to their extant output. Founder and guitarist Bo Anders Persson was originally an aspiring modern classical...

Few musicians have been able to reinvent themselves without losing some, if not all, of their mojo. Commercial aspirations are usually to blame. Kim Salmon, conversely, took his Scientists in a far less marketable direction when they reemerged in a different city less than a year after breaking up in early 1981. But that’s another story for another day and another reissue; here Salmon discusses the Scientists’ self-titled debut — better known as