2 posts tagged “cyberfunk”

The big news is that my old pal Jeff has started his own music blog, at last.  I've known Jeff since high school; he was into cooler music than I was, and lent me records and made me tapes to get me up to speed.  All these years later (26!) we rarely listen to the same music unless upon recommendation from the other; his recommendations are always good, and now that he's blogging everyone can get them.

Since I'm reliving my high points of 80s music, I had to break out the ultimate Chrome album, 3rd from the Sun (1982).  Chrome had already made great records, cyberpunk before the term was even coined, but adding the rhythm section of brothers John and Hilary Stench added a zillion volts of power to their sound.  3rd from the Sun is seven tracks of pure, throbbing sci-fi nightmare, my favorite being "Armageddon"--

I was always really impressed with Damon Edge's cover art for this album; then one day I realized all of a sudden, it's just a picture of a lion-head door knocker with larger photos of human irises cut out and pasted on!  It's amazing that such a simple collage could be so transformative.

(See my previous Chrome post for another track.)

I've been hankering to listen to Zillatron's Lord of the Harvest again recently, and after about a week of looking I located a copy.  "Zillatron" is one of the alter egos adopted by Bootsy Collins for this 1993 album, produced by himself and Bill Laswell for Ryko's shortlived Black Arc imprint (and reissued by Innerhythmic in 2004).  The other driving force behind this album is guitar phenom Buckethead; the album as a whole achieves a weird balance between Bootsy's supremely funky bass playing, Buckethead's metal licks, and a running thread of William Burroughs paranoia and Area 51 UFO conspiracy theories, either sampled from movies or narrated by Bootsy through a vocoder.  The sound is rounded out by P-Funk alumnus Bernie Worrell's keyboard wizardry.  Frankly, all the crazy talking can get tedious when you want to hear music, so I've snipped the first minute and a half from the album's tour de force, "Fuzz Face" (another character played here by Bootsy):

This is another album from my earliest days of parenthood, when I couldn't afford to buy any music, so I would tape the new CDs that my friend Brian (a.k.a. "Tumbleweed") brought over every Saturday.  I distinctly remember listening to my Zillatron tape in the car on September 23, 1994, driving home after spending the night in a recliner in my wife's hospital room with our newborn son.  I was exhausted, but "Fuzz Face" woke me right up and carried me home.  (And when it got to the part where Bootsy says, "My speakers blown, my speakers blown," it was almost prophetic, as I'd cranked it all the way up by then.)  It also carried me home from work last week, but that wasn't quite as momentous.