Down Came The Blackbird

Whenever I come across something like this, that seems so unusual, so intriguing -- some new rare "found" music with no explanation or background or forthcoming information -- I get so excited. Until further research reveals that it was all a hoax, an attempt to gain notoriety for their band or their work that they feel would never get recognized on its own, and I feel oddly let down. Oddly because I'm also no stranger to pranks or using similar tactics as a means to advertise.

Twenty years ago when my friends and I were in the underground nightclub business, we would paper the city with strange, cryptic flyers of girls peeing random numbers on street corners, with little more than an address and date to guide by. I remember one man, not knowing that I was involved in the project, frantically ran up to me at random when I worked at the Music Man and ask me if I knew anything about that mysterious flyer in his hands, and how it had been eating him alive for weeks trying to figure it out. Looking back at it now, I can imagine the guy being sorely disappointed when the date of the event arrived and discovered it was nothing more than a bunch of pretentious art-school dropouts trying to get people to come out and dance to Meat Beat Manifesto.

But I will admit to missing the days when music was more of a mystery to me than it is these days. I have listened to everything from the likes of The Residents, Fushitsusha, Les Rallizes Denudes, and something that Bleecker Bob's called "The sound of a baby being thrown into a wood chipper", and honestly, nothing really surprises me anymore. I kind of dislike that jaded feeling, and miss the innocence I once approached music when I hadn't seen it all and heard it all before. Music fans: When was the last time you picked something up and was really, genuinely curious about it? When what you heard was incongruous with everything you had ever heard before it, that took you out into space and had nothing to ground you to earth because of a lack of information about the artist themselves?

Sometime in the mid 1980's, maybe a few years before I met Joe in college, he and his friend Leeann were digging through cheap vinyl in a local record store and came across the album pictured above. And what you see is pretty much all the information available, inside and out. No track listing, either on the back or on the record itself, and no liner notes or names of band members. Just the letters SPK and the words Auto-Da-Fé, which of course means the process of burning heretics during the Spanish Inquisition. And the music was, well.... interesting. Or at least it was at the time, several years before Joe and I would meet and later explore the world of industrial music in depth during the early 90's. But the record was only 25 cents, and he bought it, recording the songs that intrigued him onto a blank cassette (giving them their own names since none were provided), gave the record to Leeann, and kept the interesting cover for himself.

When he showed me the cover a few years later, I was just as fascinated as he must have been that first day pulling it from the bins. At a quarter, Joe jokes "They must have really wanted that out of there!" In 1987, having never heard anything much weirder than Bad Brains or the occasional reggae dub, I played those few tunes recorded off the vinyl over and over as if trying to decipher some arcane message that only those in the know would, well, know. One that I always remembered for being disturbing as well as darkly funny was a track that Joe named "Ménage à trois", though we discovered years later was originally named "A Heart That Breaks (In No Time For Place)", a song keeping in the theme of torture and despair. A common trend in industrial music, we'd come to find.



Of course over time and the general process of educating myself, reading about SPK in the famed RE/Search Publications Industrial Culture Handbook that features an interview with the band, I've uncovered so much about the mysterious band and their style of music. SPK (or Sozialistisches PatientenKollektiv, Surgical Penis Klinik, System Planning Korporation, SePuKku, Selective Pornography Kontrol, Special Programming Korps or SoliPsiK, depending on what you read) is a group from Sydney, Australia that formed in 1978, and that their founding member, Graeme Revell, is currently a very successful Hollywood film composer. They even put this album out on CD, pictured below, though with more information and less cryptic artwork.

Over the years we explored the heights and depths of industrial music with a small group of equally interested friends, and we often hosted "industrial music nights" at various bars and clubs along Hampton Boulevard in Norfolk from 1990 to about 1994 or so. But sadly, once you know everything there is to know about that subject, it fails to shock or surprise you anymore. I still love industrial music. But few records of the likes of SPK in the 80's, as naive as I was, spark that kind of breathless intrigue that used to seize me when presented with such a mystery. And true mystery seems so hard to come by in this day and age. Everything is so contrived. So thought out, so post-modern, so saturated in irony. People are hip to everything these days. Or maybe it's just me that's too hip. And I don't think I like that about myself.

If anyone has a story similar, about something found, something mysterious, that sent you on the Search Of A Lifetime, I would love to heard it.