a r t i s t : Moolah
t i t l e : Woe Ye Demons Possessed
d a t e : 2005
l a b e l : EM (EM1051CD)
g e n r e : Avantgarde
r l s. d a t e : Jun/2006
t r a c k s : 06
b i t r a t e : VBRkbps
s i z e : 52,8 MB
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*Ripper's note: Track 4 is listed on the disc and the back
cover (and by AQ below) as 'The Hatd Hit', but the inside (see
scans) includes the original vinyl information which clearly
labels the track 'The Hard Hit', so I went with that.
YESS!!! Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod! Those are direct quotes
from Allan the day he discovered, totally out of the blue,
that this album had been reissued on cd by the Japanese label
EM Records (same folks who put out the Symphony of the Birds
reish reviewed elsewhere this list). Kerry and Andee were both
in the office that day and can attest that Allan just about
jumped out of his skin, his voice positively yelping with
excitement. And now we're ALL going ohmigod, ohmigod too since
the box from Japan that Allan ordered arrived and Moolah is
among us.
Ok, so what the heck is Moolah?? Well we're talking a super-
obscure psychedelic/experimental Holy Grail album here. Allan
only knew about it 'cause he'd heard some of it on a cd-r burn
that our pal Loren Chasse had gotten from Jan Anderzen of
Finland's Kemialliset Ystavat. Totally weird, damaged,
krautrocky cosmic psych with electronic drones, haunting
classical piano, and fucked up rhythms! According to Anderzen,
it was an ultra rare LP from the '70s by a band called Moolah,
entitled Woe Ye Demons Possessed. Wow. Allan found it hard to
believe that was really true, and that it wasn't just
something recorded by some genius Finnish forest freak friend
of Anderzen's directly for the cd-r. But some diligent
research revealed that the mysterious Moolah was indeed a band
from New York who released an album on what was probably their
own label, Druidstone (!), in 1974. But it was still pretty
much unknown and almost utterly unobtainable. It didn't seem
to have ever been reissued. And even our most '70s
knowledgable psych-rock reissue supplier in Sweden hadn't
heard of it at all. But we never lost hope. And now, thanks to
the extremely strange and cool Japanese label EM Records, here
at last we present to you Moolah on cd! We're still left in
the dark about a lot of the details of this mysterious
record's history (EM's sales info is mostly in Japanese*) but
from the album cover notes reproduced in the cd package we can
tell you that the men behind Moolah were a duo named Walter
Burns and Maurice Roberson, who recorded this, "their
paranormal concertwork ...a cosmic rock relaxation creation"
at a "secret studio in New York's Greenwich Village". There's
also some amazing pagan poetry on the sleeve, here's a few
lines: "Licking BLOOD Drinking TEARS Sacrificing LOVE on the
Altar of Tomorrow Eating FRUITS of Stolen Vineyards With
Withered Young Mouthes That Sing The OLD SONGS WHICH WERE
FORBID".
And the music is as amazing as what Allan remembered. Dreamy,
beautiful ambience -and- disturbingly chaotic, claustrophobic
sounds. Shimmery, murky, distorted, primitive... is it even
rock music? For the day, about as far out as you could get.
Indeed, ahead of its time. Such tracks as "Crystal Waters",
"Terror Is Real" and "The Hatd Hit" are lo-fi jams full of
dubby echo effects, indistinct voices intoning New Age ideas,
crazy backwards percussion, and insectoid squiggles of
electronics. And we think we heard a purring cat in there too.
The question is: did the Moolah duo simply inhabit their own,
messed-up, mystical little world (which seems likely, judging
by those sleeve notes of theirs), or had these guys heard
records by early Kraftwerk, Amon Duul, Kluster, and Neu!? We
wonder. But either way, the krautrock scene's freakiest had
nothing on Moolah. File with such rare, eccentric, outsider
psych artifacts as the Cromagnon's Orgasm, Yahowha 13's
Penetration, and Comus' First Utterance. What a find. If you
like weird, lost, lovely, maybe a bit frightening music THIS
IS FOR YOU.
http://www.aquariusrecords.org
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01-Crystal Waters [05:33]
02-Terror is Real [04:15]
03-Courage [08:26]
04-The Hard Hit [06:02]
05-Mirror's [07:06]
06-Redemption [06:52]
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38:14 min