3 Of The Strangest Albums Ever Recorded

Play these at your own risk

I’ve always had a preference for music that others considered strange or weird – even insufferable.

While my classmates were listening to top 40 radio, I was seeking out radical music from the farthest fringes and the deepest underground.

Grindcore, free jazz, gangsta rap, noise rock, drill’n’bass, atonal composition – I soaked it all up.

After decades of listening to experimental music across genres, I am still on the hunt for odd sounds.

In these past weeks of early fall, with nothing but grey skies and rainstorms outside, I’ve had some fun (re-)discovering some pretty odd records.

They have been considered krautrock, free music, dark ambient, industrial or noise. These are just words though, and the musicians obviously didn’t care much about them.

Without further ado, here are 3 of the strangest albums ever recorded.

Kluster – Klopfzeichen (Schwann, 1970)

Kluster made ‘industrial’ music, long before that genre label existed.

Recorded in December 1969 in a Cologne studio, Klopfzeichen still sounds completely alien today.

Mind you, this is ten years before Einstürzende Neubauten, five years before Throbbing Gristle, and three years before Cabaret Voltaire.

Conrad Schnitzler, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius met at Zodiak Free Arts Lab, a short-lived venue for experimental live music in West-Berlin. Schnitzler and Roedelius had co-founded it in the spring of 1969, in the wake of the mid-1960s student protests.

Schnitzler had been a student of Joseph Beuys. Moebius was a fellow arts student and worked as a restaurant chef. Roedelius, a former GDR child actor, floated around the hippie scene as a barefooted, long-haired masseur. The trio recorded three records between 1969 and 1971; then Moebius und Roedelius would continue as Cluster, and Schnitzler as a solo artist.

Klopfzeichen, their debut album, was released in November 1970 on Schwann, a label focused on sacred music.

The record contains two largely improvised pieces. On the A-side, a female voice recites poetry verses in German over sparse percussion. The flipside features an instrumental suite of dark, metallic sounds.

Schnitzler later claimed the label had pressured them to add the spoken word parts; some of these poems came from leftist theologists and other progressive religious thinkers.

While they called their dark, deeply unsettling style ‘electric music’, Kluster actually didn’t use any electronic instruments. They employed guitars, percussion, organ, violin and cello, as well as tape machines and other sound processing devices.

For most of its running time, there’s a notable absence of melody, harmony and rhythmic structures. In that sense, Klopfzeichen resembles post-war art music like the compositions of Stockhausen or Xenakis more than any popular music at the time.

Lovens & Lytton – Moinho Da Asneira / À Cerca Da Bela Vista À Graça (Po Torch, 1980)

I played this in my room on speakers, when suddenly my wife stood in the door, asking me what the hell was going on.

That moment, I knew I was on to something.

Let’s not beat around the bush though: This is hardcore stuff, even for two household names in free improv circles who worked with Cecil Taylor, Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann and the likes.

Both Paul Lovens and Paul Lytton are percussionists. Moinho Da Asneira (“Mill of Stupidity”) is their second duo album; each album side was recorded live in Germany – Side A in December 1978 in Lovens’ hometown of Aachen, and Side B in November 1979 in Bremen.

Lovens and Lytton were known for using self-built instruments and early live electronics. On this album, Lovens is employing a bowed musical saw, while Lytton works some kind of furniture rack with mounted guitar strings and attached foot pedals which would change the pitch of the strings. Seriously, I have no idea how it worked.

I just know they create the most eerie noises and drones, seemingly reacting in real time to each other’s ideas. There are quiet moments that quickly escalate into complete chaos and then move back into near-silence. Both players seem to be committed to unlearning any musical training they ever had.

This comes from the far outer realms of what you’d call ‘free jazz’. Matter of fact, it bears no resemblance to jazz at all.

You could even say much of it doesn’t resemble music.

Nurse With Wound – Homotopy to Marie (United Dairies, 1982)

In 1981, the experimental musician and painter Steven Stapleton started booking himself into IPS Studios in West London every Friday night.

He did that for a whole year, saying this was “the happiest time [he] ever had in the studio.”

Nurse With Wound had recorded four albums before this one, but the group had reduced from a trio to Stapleton’s solo project at this point.

Earlier albums featured a mix of industrial noise and krauty guitars, stemming from their shared love of outsider music from Velvet Underground to Zappa to Can.

Homotopy to Marie does away with all references to rock music. You won’t even hear any standard instruments on this record, except for some gongs, rustling bells and shrieking violins (maybe).

Nightmarish noises and disorienting drones will make you lose any sense of time while listening to this. Suddenly, you will hear barking dogs or TV dialogue scraps or children’s toys or snippets of a marching band or tormented human screams.

Some moments of silence exist on this record too. But don’t get fooled – this is truly terrifying music that makes the most extreme death metal seem almost cartoonish.

I think it’s also pretty funny though.

Stapleton was deeply influenced by 20th century art movements like Dada, Fluxus and Surrealism. He loved John Cage and employed composition techniques from musique concrète, such as tape manipulation, but he also loved the Beach Boys and the Stooges.

In its very essence, Homotopy to Marie is an avant-garde sound collage. It would go on to massively inspire the industrial and noise genres for the next decades.