Musica Elettronica Viva – The Sound Pool

This album was hardly new to me. My father bought a copy around 1979 when I was 6 years old. He probably bought it thinking it was going to be electronic, like Jean Michel Jarre or Tangerine Dream (or at least some early experimental Moog album), probably due to their name. Instead what he got was harsh, abrasive avant garde with screaming and shrieking voices, pounding, and blasting of trombones and saxophones. Alvin Curran was involved in this, along with Ivan Coaquette and Patricia Coaquette, Frederec Rzewski, Nicole Rzewski, Franco Cataldi, and many others, all these musicians (and non-musicians) are American, French, and Italian. When I first heard this album through my father, it scared me. It sounded like a haunted house. Those wailing voices and pounding reminded me of ghosts. And the BYG laughing Buddha that's on the label (the BYG/Actuel's trademark logo) looked a lot more sinister to me as a kid. Not to mention I didn't know what a Buddha was or of Buddhism in general. I begged him never to play it. He rarely did, mostly around Halloween. But then he probably didn't anyway, because it likely drove him nuts. The album was stolen by a so-called friend of my dad's in 1986, so I didn't miss it. Until more recently, I was becoming nostalgic for it. I found a copy, and it don't scare me any more, but if relentless noise of screaming, wailing, pounding, and blasting trombones and saxophones drive you nuts, don't buy this album. But if you like harsh avant garde, try it. By the way, I start noticing new things every time I listen to it. You'll find stuff like electronic sound effects, some people announcing things, whistles, and much more than the most obvious: wailing voices, pounding, squawking saxophones and blasting trombones. There is so much stuff buried in this wall of noise that things can be so easily missed I never noticed before!

By the way, the version I own (which is an original) I am almost certain was the one that belonged to my father. At the time we had a cockatiel who often chewed on the seams of some of the albums, and the scuff marks on my copy looks like chewing from a bird. The fact I ordered this copy from a Portland, Oregon online record dealer makes me believe it's so, because there's a chance since 1986 when the album was stolen in Eugene that it could have easily wound up in Portland somewhere between that time and now. If so, a bit of my early childhood had returned, literally, but without me so frightened now as then.