Trout Mask Replica
| Trout Mask Replica | ||||
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| Studio album by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band | ||||
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Publication |
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Straight Records Reprise Records (Re-Release) Third Man Records (Re-Release) |
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Format (s) |
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Blues-rock , experimental , art-rock , spoken word , free jazz , avant-garde |
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Title (number) |
28 |
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running time |
77:38 |
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Studio (s) |
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Trout Mask Replica ( English " Trout Mask Replica ") is the third studio album by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band and was released in June 1969. The double album was produced by Frank Zappa and released on his label Straight Records .
Trout Mask Replica combines musically radical and unique influences from blues , avant-garde , free jazz and other genres of American music with polyrhythmic sounds and atonal harmonies . In addition , Captain Beefheart (real name Don Glen Van Vliet) sings and recites his surrealistic , often deliberately absurd texts ( spoken word ), howling, screaming, whimpering and shouting . Trout Mask Replica is widely considered to be Beefheart's best album and a milestone in rock and experimental music. It had a strong influence on the emergence of styles such as alternative rock or ( post ) punk .
Rolling Stone magazine ranks the album at number 60 on its list of the best 500 albums of all time . Pitchfork Media voted it 54th on the top 200 albums of the 1960s. The Italian music critic Piero Scaruffi tops the album on his list of Best Rock Albums of all Times .
History of origin
Trout Mask Replica was released as the third album by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band after Safe as Milk (1967) and Strictly Personal (1968) . Mirror Man , created in 1967/68, was only released in 1971, but in retrospect it clearly shows the development of Captain Beefheart and his band from an idiosyncratic, but basically conventional blues with foreign influences to the experimental sounds on Trout Mask Replica . Legal disputes, artistic differences and changes that were not agreed by the producer Bob Krasnow to Strictly Personal later led to the fact that Beefheart distanced himself from his previous releases.
Only the offer of his old school friend Frank Zappa, who assured him full artistic freedom and control and wanted to release the next album on his newly founded label Straight Records , kept Beefheart from a - in 1984 final - withdrawal from the music business and complete dedication to painting. Zappa produced the album and acted as a narrator on several titles.
The rehearsals in a small, rented house in Woodland Hills (Los Angeles) dragged on for over a year under conditions similar to exams and determined by financial difficulties. The musicians John French and Bill Harkleroad describe the situation as "cult-like" and one visitor describes the situation as "downright mansonesk " Beefheart, who composed his pieces in no time - but without mastering any form of notation - sang the relevant passages to the musicians as soon as possible and rehearsed until the finished arrangement in his head was perfect. The actual recordings in the studio then took less than five hours.
The album
The music on Trout Mask Replica combines minimalist rhythm and blues with free jazz and avant-garde , garage rock with new music , field recording with polyrhythm and atonal music with folk songs interrupted by spoken word inserts. The characteristic sound of the album is (in addition to the usual rhythm section with electric bass and drums ) characterized by two slide guitars - one played with a glass bottleneck , the other with a steel one. In addition to various saxophones, unusual wind instruments such as bass clarinet and musette oboe are used.
Of the 28 titles, many take no more than two minutes. But these are often packed with changes in tempo and rhythm. The traditional scheme of verse and refrain does not matter. Scraps of conversation and other noises can be heard in the background and Beefheart's voice spanning several octaves can be heard in the foreground, apparently trying not to hit the right note or beat, howling and howling, screaming and roaring.
The recordings for Trout Mask Replica were an acid test for the friendship between Beefheart and Zappa. The strictly structured and well-organized Zappa “... actually had difficulties, because such adventurous recording techniques as singing in a room with the door closed while the microphone is in the next room ('China Pig'), or the entire vocal part of a song ('The Blimp ') were to talk over the phone for the Studioperfektionisten Zappa really too much. " Beefheart's refusal in the recordings monitor - headphones to wear, had the (perhaps) unintended effect means that he rather the reason to echo and reverberation sang of the dungeon than to the actual musical accompaniment.
The cacophony of the music on Trout Mask Replica is adequately complemented by the lyrics of Captain Beefheart. Matthias Leitner writes on on3 "... that the texts oscillate on a scale between cryptic and incomprehensible, that the music - once let go - robs you of the last nerve ..." . They are “… completely absurd and somehow out of this world, sometimes very controversial. Titles like 'Dachau Blues', 'Old Fart At Play', 'Neon Meate Dreams Of An [sic] Octafish' speak for themselves. Pure nonsense , but sometimes also mysterious, surreal poetic transcendence . "
The well-known, brightly colored album cover of Trout Mask Replica was designed by the graphic artist Cal Schenkel , who had previously worked for Zappa and its labels Straight Records and Bizarre Records - as he did again and again later . A person in a green jacket with a fur collar and a blue scarf poses in front of a red and pink background . On her head she wears a conical hat with a shuttlecock on the top . In front of the face, the person holds the head of a - according to Schenkel - real carp .
Track list
All songs are written by Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart.
Page 1:
- Frownland - 1:39
- The Dust Blows Forward ´N the Dust Blows Back - 1:53
- Dachau Blues - 2:21
- Ella Guru - 2:23
- Hair Pie: Bake 1 - 4:57
- Moonlight On Vermont - 3:55
Page 2:
- Pachuco Cadaver - 4:37
- Bills Corpse - 1:47
- Sweet Sweet Bulbs - 1:47
- Neon Meate Dreams of a Octafish - 2:25
- China Pig - 3:56
- My Human Gets Me Blues - 2:42
- Dali's Car - 1:25
Page 3:
- Hair Pie: Bake 2 - 2:23
- Pena - 2:31
- Well - 2:05
- When Big Joan Sets Up - 5:19
- Fallin 'Ditch - 2:03
- Sugar ´N Spikes - 2:29
- Ant Man Bee - 3:55
Page 4:
- Orange Claw Hammer - 3:35
- Wild Life - 3:07
- She's Too Much for My Mirror - 1:42
- Hobo Chang Ba - 2:01
- The Blimp (Mousetrapreplica) - 2:04
- Steal Softly Thru Snow - 2:13
- Old Fart at Play - 1:54
- Veteran's Day Poppy - 4:30
reception
| source | rating |
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| Allmusic |
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| Laut.de |
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| Pitchfork Media |
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The cartoonist and writer Matt Groening gets to the point when he said that he thought at the age of 15 years, "... that's the worst thing I ever heard. I said to myself they don't even try! One sloppy cacophony. Then I listened in a few more times because I couldn't believe that Frank Zappa could do that to me - and because a double album costs a lot of money. From the third listen, I realized that they were doing it on purpose; they wanted to make it sound like that. The sixth or seventh time it clicked and I thought it was the greatest album I've ever heard ”.
The influential BBC Radio 1 - DJ John Peel said: "If there has been any something in the history of pop music, which can be called a work of art, making it possible for people from other fields of art understand, then is likely Trout Mask Replica 'this work. ” He described his first listening experience of the album as follows: “ I staggered into the night of Hollywood and knew that nothing would be the same as before. ” Goedzak wrote on Captain Beefheart's death on the Friday that the album “ is the most beautiful and the worst album of contemporary music that I know. " The musician, radio presenter and writer Carl-Ludwig Reichert said: " Only those who listen to all four pages of 'Trout Mask Replica' can be my friend. "
The groundbreaking album Trout Mask Replica inspired numerous subsequent bands and musicians such as the Talking Heads , The White Stripes , Tom Waits , Public Image Ltd. or Franz Ferdinand .
literature
- Bill Harkleroad, Billy James: Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Firefly Pub, 1998, ISBN 0-946719-21-7 . (engl.)
- John "Drumbo" French: Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic. Prober Music Publishing, 2010, ISBN 978-0-9561212-1-9 . (engl.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b 500 Greatest Albums of all Time (accessed February 4, 2015)
- ↑ The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s on pitchfork.com, accessed October 28, 2017
- ↑ www.scaruffi.com ( accessed November 28, 2011)
- ↑ John French on www.beefheart.com ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed November 26, 2011)
- ↑ Mike Barnes: Captain Beefheart. Quartet Books, 2000, ISBN 0-7043-8073-0 .
- ↑ a b Daniel Gottschalk and Udo Pasterny in Rock Session 3. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1979, ISBN 3-499-17270-4 .
- ↑ www.allmusic.com (accessed November 26, 2011)
- ↑ Matthias Leitner: An inaudible album on on3.de ( memento of the original from January 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed November 2, 2011)
- ↑ Matthias Weiß on www.fairaudio.de ( Memento of the original from October 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed November 27, 2011)
- ↑ wnew.radio.com ( Memento of the original from February 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed November 27, 2011)
- ↑ Review by Steve Huey on allmusic.com (accessed October 28, 2017)
- ↑ Review by Yannik Gölz on laut.de (accessed October 28, 2017)
- ↑ Review by Marc Masters on pitchfork.com (accessed April 28, 2018)
- ↑ "The first time I heard Trout Mask, when I was 15 years old, I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me - and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realized they were doing it on purpose: they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard. " Www.beefheart.com ( Memento from July 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed February 4, 2015)
- ↑ "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then 'Trout Mask Replica' is propably that work." Mike Barnes on WWW.furious.com ( Memento of the original from November 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed November 28, 2011)
- ^ Philipp Krohn / Ole Löding: Sound of the Cities. A journey of discovery through pop music. Rogner & Bernhard, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-95403-091-0 , p. 295.
- ↑ www.freitag.de (accessed on November 28, 2011)
- ^ Karl Bruckmaier : Soundcheck. The 101 most important records in pop history. CH Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-42093-1 .
- ↑ Mission: unlistenable on theguardian.com, accessed October 28, 2017
- ↑ Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica (1969) on elsewhere.co.nz, accessed October 28, 2017
Web links
- www.beefheart.com
- Trout Mask Replica at Allmusic (English)
- The lyrics on www.lyricsmania.com