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Dusted Reviews
Artist: Georges Montalba Album: Pipe Organ Favorites & Fantasy in Pipe Organ and Percussion Label: Hit Thing Review date: Jun. 26, 2003 |
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Music for One-Shot Sex Or Extreme Torture – Recommended by Inmates of Guantánamo Bay
High Fidelity Pipe Organ Favourites (& Fantasy Pipe Organ and Percussion) is the type of madness that should only be listened to under circumstances of extreme duress – say, one has reasoned the several millionth digit of Pi, and needs to let loose some musical violence that cannot even be expressed by Wendy Carlos' electronic Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange; or one wakes up and suddenly finds oneself right there, back in fucking 1957, full of itchy shirts and poodle girls itching to get out of their skirts, listening to Rock N' Roll while meanwhile the parents, three quarters of them in shellshock and post-traumatic stress disorder from World War II, Believe All The Hype and Get Off Their Rocks to some light organ music. Music so light that German pound cake will feel like Angel Food – light as in Dark Matter, light as in so airy-fairy-light that the sound is in fact ominously heavy, and if anyone in 1957 had their head screwed on properly (probably Aldous Huxley and a few, limited others) they would have realised that this shit was the devil's music... not Rock N' Roll.
How else can one listen to these ogre-like pounding organs? At times I feel like I am in one of those bad circus moments in a Fellini film – lost in a maze of aristocrats in La Dolce Vita, trying to hang on while Mastroianni takes off with my girlfriend into a dark tomb to fuck her brains out. Yes kids, this was the '50s – the counterculture was brewing, and the Good Ol' Boys & Folks were listening to the likes of Georges Montalba, whose 1958 USA spring tour has all but been forgotten except by those who were irrevocably changed & mutated by these renditions of the Volk, the bells of St. Peters run through a chopping block, the Russians invading on all sides & no one saw fit to think what the fuck are we doing listening to organ music?
Indeed. But as the then-young (but still fucked) HST would have said (and still does say): Why Not? "It's one HELL of a trip" – so intones the Professor of Narcotics and his wisdom at the DEA Conference in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. This is the music of the American Dream, the Circus Circus, the perfect erotic atmosphere for Terry Gilliam to fall in love all over again with ticker-tape machines and obscure, small typewriters... A word of warning to the average listener, however – forget Cage, forget Merzbow, forget Stockhausen, hell Cascone, Ikeda, 0* or Chartier or Plastikman's Concept, forget Floyd's Ummagumma – for this shit will fuck you up forever and ever and ever. After awhile you just start humming along to these massive organ polkas, designed to do the opposite of an early '90s rave – keep everyone in their seats, stone them beyond belief through the sheer heaviness alone, the unbearable massiveness of being... Like a chill room on PCP; like a chillroom immersed in carbon monoxide, gasoline fumes & laughing gas, with the doors taped shut and a 55-year-old fat woman doing a slow, sloppy belly dance on your lap – and you can't move because your ankles are tied behind your back, and your genitalia taped into Tighty Whities; meanwhile the females have been pinned-up into Victorian dresses of decorum, to ensure no meeting is ever possible between the sexes; thus every poor sod in this hell is a bloodthirsty beast waiting to get their hands on anyone or anything, be it male or female – which is a fairly accurate summation of the '50s generation that has fucked us royally right up to the present, launching us full on into Hot and Cold wars and a culture of fear & paranoia, marched us into Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, offering us such shining luminaries as Nixon and Reagan/Thatcher/Mulrooney, leaving us smack dab today with King George II & another Capitalist War of World Domination – meaning that this album should be required listening to understand the psyche of these people, the disgusting inner minds of those in power. No doubt this is a perennial White House office favourite, keeping the Lords dancing into the wee hours – Condoleezza grew up to it on the home stereo, and even Powell keeps a copy on his MP3 player-slash-tactical-nuke-tank-walkman...
But perhaps this is going too far. Georges Montalba surely< i>never meant this hell, unless he actually was the Anti-Christ. Why not? These heavy organs make a solid soundtrack to S&M and a surefire way to drive the neighbours into fits of uncontrollable, nail-biting, wall-smashing, rage. Thank God it's been remastered. Somebody must care.
[& in fact, it seems the occult hordes have been attributing this album for years to wicked Church of Satan Founder Anton LeVay... but the truth be told this was in fact the work of Bob Hunter, deeply religious Christian from California who created the fictitious Frenchman "Georges Montalba" to release and play to packed houses this organ chaosophy... All recently discovered by the weird Toby Dammit, aka Larry Mullins, who has worked with Iggy Pop & Swans]
By tobias c. van Veen
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View all articles by tobias c. van Veen