Like many of you reading this, my MAJOR COMPLAINT with the glut of experimental, mind-altering bagpipe music on the market has long-been the fact that it just… doesn’t sound good unless it’s on vinyl.
So just imagine my tremendous combination of elation and relief when I first heard the amazing news that Japanese-born sound installation artist and Fluxus member Yoshi Wada was going to be reissuing his long-out-of-print, Michael-Jackson-rivaling album Off The Wall on VINYL this spring via the Saltern label! Yes. Thank you, Wada. FINALLY: psychoacoustic folk-instrument explorations for the discerning collector and audiophile!
Wada’s second album, consisting of two hulking sides-worth of “bagpipes, modified organ, and percussion,” was recorded in Berlin back on May 11 and 12, 1984 by a quartet featuring Wada and Wayne Hankin on bagpipes, Marilyn Bogerd on Wada’s own, hand-built “adapted organ,” and Andreas Schmidt Neri on percussion. “When we began playing the bagpipe, it was quite loud and we physically felt the strong bounce back of the sound from the walls,” Wada recalls in his liner notes. “After this sound experience, I wanted to extend the search in the meticulous variations of the timbre and to build up the sound spectrum in constant transformations to its maximum density… I somehow managed to build a five octave range homemade organ for this ensemble composition.”
The record was initially released back in 1985 by free-jazz label FMP. But alas, its popularity at the time was ever-so-slightly eclipsed by the more “commercial” experiments in loudness and psychoacoustics being undertaken by the likes of Huey Lewis and the News, and it tragically slipped into near-obscurity… until now.
The new and improved reissue, mastered by Rashad Becker, officially hits the market May 13 and will come “housed in an old-style gatefold jacket” in a nice little edition of 750. But while you’re waiting for the profound combination of extra-planetary harmony and internal grounding that only wave-after-pummeling-wave of transcendentally maximal bagpipes-and-organ-drones can provide, you can check out a snippet of “Off The Wall I” down below.
Off The Wall tracklisting:
A1. Off The Wall I (20:27)
B1. Off The Wall II (20:02)
More about: Yoshi Wada
