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FKR 101LP
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After years of mythology, misinterpretation, and procrastination Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton finally chooses Finders Keepers as the ideal collaborators to release "the right tracks" from his über-legendary psych/prog/punk peculiarity shopping list known as The Nurse With Wound List, commencing with a French specific Volume One of this authentically titled Strain Crack Break series. Featuring some Finders Keepers' regulars amongst galactic Gallic rarities, this double-vinyl dossier demystifies some of the essential French free jazz and Parisian prog inclusions from the alphabetical "dedication" inventory as printed the anti-bands 1979 industrial milestone debut. When Steven Stapleton, Heman Pathak, and John Fothergill's anti-band Nurse With Wound decided to include an alphabetical dedication to all their favorite bands on the back of their inaugural LP the notion of creating a future record dealers' trophy list couldn't have been further from their minds. By adding a list of untraveled European mythical musicians and noise makers to their own debut release of unchartered industrial art rock they were merely providing a suggestive support system of existing potential like-minded bands. Many of the rare, obscure and unpronounceable genre-free records on The Nurse With Wound List have slowly found their own feet and stumbled in to the homes of open-minded outer-national vinyl junkies, mostly without consultation of the enigmatic NWW map. Via vinyl vacations, on cheap flights and interrail tickets, buying bargain bin LPs on a shoestring while oblivious to the pending pension worthy price tags after their 40-year vintage, Stapleton and Fothergill, even if you've never heard of them, were at the bottom of the pit before "digging" became pay dirt. The List has been mythologized, misunderstood, and misconstrued. It's also been overlooked, overestimated, and under-appreciated in equal measures. Bolstered by the sub-title "Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden," all bands on the inventory (many chosen on the strength of just one track alone) were chosen for their genre-defying qualities. Forty years after Nurse With Wound's first record, Finders Keepers, in close collaboration with Steve Stapleton remind fans of this kind of "lost" music, that there once existed a feint path which was worn away decades before major label pop property developers built over this psychedelic underground. A collaborative attempt to officially, authentically, and legally compile the best tracks from the list, succeeding where many overzealous nerds have deferred. The first volume of the series focuses exclusively on individual tracks of French origin, the country that unsurprisingly hosted the highest content of bands on the list. Comprising of musique concrète, free jazz, Rock In Opposition, Zeuhl School space rock, macabre ballet music, lo-fi sci-fi, and classic horror literature inspired prog.
Features Jacques Thollot, Philippe Besombes, Igor Wakhévitch, Mahjun, Lard Free, Etron Fou Leloublan, Jean Cohen-Solal, Z. N. R., Red Noise, Pierre Henry, Horrific Child, Dashiell Hedayat, and Jean Guérin.
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FKSP 015EP
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A spontaneous Turkish-Norwegian-Dutch expedition makes the story of Durul Gence's Asia Minor Mission group the stuff of lost-rock legend and remains one of Turkish music's great "what ifs?". Durul Gence assembled the underground fusion group known as Asia Minor Mission (AMM) in early 1972 (with Irfan Sumer, Oguz Durukan, and Ugur Dikmen). Unintended for commercial release, Finders Keepers present these previously unheard tracks sourced directly from original tapes. A testament to the inimitable talent of Gence and the only studio document of the mythical AMM Turk jazz funk troubadours -- a pop-psych Hollandaise holiday postcard which has taken five decades to be delivered.
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FKR 099LP
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As a genuine vanguard of electronic music composition at the forefront of the modular synthesizer revolution in the late 1960s, Suzanne Ciani's forward-thinking approach to new music would rarely look to the past for inspiration, which makes this unheard composition from 1969 a rare exception to the collective futurist vision of Ciani and synthesizer designer Don Buchla. In choosing to adapt the controversial prose of French poet Charles Baudelaire, Suzanne would join the ranks of ongoing generations of pioneering musicians like Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Serge Gainsbourg, Etron Fou Leloublan, Celtic Frost, and Marc Almond (not forgetting Star Trek's William Shatner!), all equally inspired by the 19th century writer's works of "modernité" (modernity), a self-coined term dedicated to capturing the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, best exemplified in Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers Of Evil). In her varied career that would combine art gallery installations, major film soundtrackings, and commissions for Atari, Suzanne Ciani's earliest experiments remain some of her most challenging, beguiling, and timeless. Flowers Of Evil ticks all the above boxes and flicks switches that would power-up a new uncharted universe of her own musical modernité. For the many enthusiasts that have already drawn the parallels between Baudelaire's writings and experimental/electronic music (a relationship rivalled only by the likes of J. G. Ballard and Aldous Huxley) some might instantly recognize an unconscious sistership between this recording and another 1969 electronic adaptation of Flowers Of Evil by celebrated female electronic composer Ruth White. An interesting distinction of White's excellent version of Flowers Of Evil (released via Limelight records) is that its dark tone generation and vocal manipulation was created with a Moog synthesizer, the commercially triumphant rival to Suzanne and Don's Buchla Systems. The fact that Ciani's version was never intended for commercial release is also poetically reflective of the nature of Ciani and Buchla's alternative perspective. The choice to present this extract from Flowers Of Evil in its intended French language further distances Ciani's faithful reaction from some of its better-known variations. Having attempted to voice the poem herself, the multilingual Italian-American composer's French accent did not meet her own standards, resulting in the request for a fellow unnamed French student who lived on campus at Mills College in Oakland to accurately verbalize the section of Baudelaire's collection entitled Élévation.
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FKSP 016EP
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RSD 2019 release. When braving the oblique corners of Jean-Claude Vannier's vault, few lost souls cast a darker silhouette than the cinematic obscurity known only as La Bête Noire ("The Black Beast"). Lost and presumed missing for decades the soundtrack tapes to this lesser-known 1983 French thriller, captures the revered composer and arranger of Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire De Melody Nelson embarking on a darker exploration of free jazz, frenzied batucadas, and cyclic carousel psychedelia. Counting key players of the French jazz scene within its ranks, The Insolitudes group comprises a crack team of Palm/Futura/Actuel/Saravah regulars such as saxophonist Philippe Maté alongside drummer Bernard Labat (Mad Ducks), and legendary Arpadys/Voyage rhythm masters Marc Chantereau and Pierre-Alain Dahan (Brutus Drums) all of whom alongside Michel Zanlonghi (Ensemble De Percussion De Paris) make up this thunderous, tumultuous, four-headed rhythm machine bridging an authentic gap between the Jef Gilson groups and France's signature "cosmic" revolution.
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FKR 048LP
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B-movie junkies, gather round and prepare yourselves for what could only be described as a cinematic speedball. Take a combined hit of two of the most potent strains of toxic cinema, dress it up in ritualistic robes, and make it dance to the beat of a stoned, motoric, country commune soundtrack. Like an exploit-o double-bill where both films merge into a single feature, this directorial debut by an ex-Roger Corman protégé and future Russ Meyer art director (another heady cocktail) is the product of one writing duo's fleeting time in the driving seat as the moviedrome marathon approached its dwindling finish line. Werewolves On Wheels emerged in 1971 in a climate where the B-movie genre of the previous two decades began to make way for the early glimpses of imported slasher films and video nasties. Entirely out of popular context in 1971, the soundtrack music of Don Gere (Curt Boettcher, Kid Dynamite, Don & Stevie) would perhaps reveal him as the most versatile actor involved in the whole production. Until this point, Don Gere had been a pop folk songwriter and a country music devotee, but while riding with the werewolves, Don Gere became a disjointed psych rock stoner making ritualistic commune country with more coincidentally in common with Germany's emerging krautrock scene or the more localized stoner psych of Skip Spence (whose radically ahead of its time LP OAR (1969) was recognized by Columbia Records as their lowest selling record in the company's history). Imagine guitarist Sandy Bull jamming with Munich's Amon Düül or some Swedish prog outfits like Träd, Gräs Och Stenar or a sedated Kebnekaise. In comparison to the Curb Records/Davie Allan scores, for films like Wild Angels (1966), Devil's Angels (1967), Thunder Alley (1967), and Born Losers (1967) (often released on Curb's own Sidewalk or Tower Records), the new music made by Don Gere, only three years down the line, sounds like it's from an entirely different generation... "Pre-certified biker psych from the hillbilly Haxan. Amazing!" --Sean Canty (Demdike Stare)
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FKR 092LP
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With this previously unreleased 1963 score for Jindlich Polák's Ikarie XB-1, Finders Keepers present an "elusive" musical artifact by Zdeněk Liska, the label's third soundtrack by the composer. Fettered by the hampers of communism, this lifelong resident of Czechoslovakia would never quite find his seat at the same table as the likes of John Barry, Ennio Morricone, Michael Nyman, and Stanley Myers. But having waited patiently behind the borders of the wider landscapes of international cinema, Liska's musical brood, spanning multiple stylistic decades and generations, has now started to walk proudly amongst his would-be, latter-day compeers. In an era where music lovers have almost become immune to adjectives like "lost", "rare", and "unreleased" in a climate where previously lesser-known off-kilter master composers such as Vannier, Kirchin, and Axelrod have become widely revered, it is perhaps the perfect time for discerning listeners to advance above the feeding trough and seek out this truly pioneering and revolutionary Eastern European composer. Rivaled only by the likes of Krzysztof Komeda and Andrzej Korzynski in Poland, alongside Alexandr Gradsky in Russia, and often splitting workloads with fellow Czech composers like Lubos Fiser, Zdeněk Liska's filmography of over almost 300 fully formed movie scores virtually eclipses the achievements of these socialist era luminaries. Respected unanimously in both Czech and Slovakian by studio bosses, producers, directors and actors alike Liska is widely known for his ability to take the existing energy in a reel of film and literally change the polarity to suit his own interpretation while maintaining the full support from his "client" who would in-turn end up working under this composer's creative direction. Not only was Liska a genius of emotive orchestral and coral composition, his grasp on small group arrangements and intimate, minimal scores set him above the competition. By utilizing primitive sample techniques by "looping" a film's existing ambient noise, or rearranging found sounds and dialog into subtle melodic arrangements, Liska would independently develop his own techniques which had simultaneously become known in Paris as musique concrète. It is a direct extension of these experiments that saw Liska also draw parallels with Walter Branchi (Ennio Morricone's main electronic sidekick) in Italy as well as Daphne Oram in the UK, making Liska a relatively untraveled pioneer of early electronic composition and sound design due to his unlikely global environment. Remastered from the original tapes with the full cooperation of the National Film Archive in the Czech Republic.
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FKR 007X-LP
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2019 edition. A mythical and misplaced masterpiece of lost soft rock and acidic folk funk by a one-hit wonderer lost in the wilderness for four decades. From the producer of Margo Guryan, writer behind Wool, Gerry Mulligan collaborator, Tarantino sound tracker, and Wendy & Bonnie confidant, Paint A Lady now emerges from folkloric obscurity. Within certain record collecting circles, especially those who gather under the umbrella that covers fragile niches like "acid folk" and "soft rock", it's difficult to imagine a time when the legendary Susan Christie album didn't exist. As Finders Keepers' lucky seventh release, Paint A Lady has slowly become one of the label's most requested re-releases, and with this 2019 edition, it is technically accurate to say that this pressing is the first-ever reissue of this elusive and essential LP. The oft overused term "mythical" applies to this album on many levels. Perhaps it's the woozy nostalgia found within the pop craft of Paint A Lady that has led to false rumors that original 1960s copies used to exist on the collectors market, or the bizarre claim that songs like the head-nodding title track, and the acid-drenched sound effects on "Yesterday, Where's My Mind" were just a product of a contemporary studio band trying to create a fake folk funk red herring. As a result, Christie and her producer and husband of 40 years, John Hill have happily taken the repeat phrase "unbelievable" as a compliment to their songwriting skills and foresight. The original 1969 song titles alone do seem custom-built for the nostalgia market: "No One Can Hear You Cry" might lament the unrequited yearning for a record deal which never quite followed Susan's won one-hit wonder novelty hit "I Love Onions"; similarly, "When Love Comes" might allude to the subsequent 35-year wait for the right label to eventually come along. "Echoes In Your Mind" and the aforementioned "Yesterday" could easily allude to the haunting melodies that sat in the can on John Hill's studio shelf while his projects for Margo Guryan, Wool, and Pacific Gas & Electric sat proudly in record racks before benefitting successful French cover versions or making their way on to Quentin Tarantino soundtracks. The track "Paint A Lady" itself, complete with its future-proofed sample-worthy rhythm section, seems like the perfect title for a mock rock pseudo psych contender. Remastered from the original source material; Features both updated and original liner notes.
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FKR 098LP
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From Guy Skornik, the composer and arranger behind Popera Cosmic and Pour Pauwels (1971), comes the enigmatic instrumental cues that provided fellow existentialist and notorious auteur director Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain, 1973) with the soundtrack music to what is now considered his rarest and most overlooked feature film, Tusk (1980). As part as Finders Keepers' ongoing dedicated Jodorowsky soundtrack series, the label present the original film edits from the 1979 studio sessions featuring Steve Hillage (Gong) and members of Cossi Anatz. Following his mind-melting masterpieces Fando & Lis (1968), El Topo (1970), and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky's "disowned" attempt at a family film retains the director's ongoing demand for intense, experimental film music resulting in what is undeniably one the best kept sonic secrets from the darker corners of this coveted filmography. Cherry-picked from pre-recorded synthesizer-fueled, cosmic pop sessions by Skornik, these compositions provided Tusk with arabesque new age synthesis alongside full-blown ambitious electro rock, as well as classic French Fender Rhodes-driven romanticism during some of this lesser-spotted movie's most memorable moments. Presented here in isolation, Guy Skornik's multifarious futurist-pop evokes worthy comparisons to Ash Ra Tempel, Eno's Bowie and Suzanne Ciani, mapping an unlikely journey between Magma and 10cc in the process. Don't ignore Jodorowsky's "elephant in the room" -- you never know what is hidden in the trunk. Tusk not only unearths a lesser-known Jodorowsky gem, but forms another spiritual circle in the label's alternative pop universe, forming new twines in the Finders Keepers family tree.
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FKR 097LP
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Finders Keepers presents Denis Wise's Wize Music, one of the most unique and unlikely exponents of the highly collectible genres of ambient electronics, experimental tape-music and PINA (Private Issue New Age). This English-born Jamaican-raised sound designer, artist and existentialist furrowed his own unblinkered path through lesser-charted electronic fields for many moons before eventually teaming up with Bill Laswell (with Material) and Daevid Allen in New York to bring self-taught synthesis to Gong during their most oblique periods. Creating two impossibly rare self-pressed vinyl LPs of conceptual inner-visionary outer-galactic angular tonal-dronal alien-art soundscapes in the process, the man known under figure shifting guises such as Dennis Wise/Denis Weise/Dr. Wise combined a culture of sound system circuitry and radiophonic trickery adding teapot poetry and sci-fidelity future-folk to his magnetic mesh. Presented here as the first ever dedicated Wize Music collection, this record combines compositions spanning 1979-1984 in both a solo capacity as well as small-group projects featuring members of the Emerald Web band. Imagine a comic book where a Funkenstein monster called "Laraaji-Scratch Perry" invaded your record shelf while Komendarek and Holger Czukay kept lookout. Dr. Dennis might be the only one Wise enough to outsmart all of them with his powerful amorphous anesthetic.
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FKR 096LP
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Finders Keepers present a reissue of Popera Cosmic's Les Esclaves, originally released in 1969. For the few people lucky enough to have heard the entire album in the five decades since its release, the mythical Popera Cosmic album is now considered to be France's first dedicated psychedelic album and the shrouded blueprint for the hugely influential Gallic concept album phenomenon that followed -- including Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire De Melody Nelson (1971) and Gérard Manset's La Mort D'Orion (1970). Spearheaded by François Wertheimer (songwriter for Vangelis, Barbara, and BYG Records), composed with future Jodorowsky soundtracker and genius all-rounder, Guy Skornik, and based on an embryonic concept co-conspired by a teenage Jean-Michel Jarre, this instantly deleted 1969 recording is a true essential for any outer-national-radicalized record collection. With credentials that mark the birth of the cosmic funk (later disco) that helped shape the influential sound of France today, this LP also includes the first pressed instrumentals by members of Space Art, some of the best orchestra rock arrangements by William Sheller -- Lux Aeterna (1972), Erotissimo (1969) -- and orchestrator Paul Piot (Jean Rollin), as well as sitar psych benchmarks courtesy of uber legend Serge Franklin -- all pinned down by the rhythm section that would later be known to prog aficionados as Alice. Subtitled Les Esclaves ("The Slaves"), this street theater/rock opera (influenced by the work of Julien Beck's Living Theatre) now celebrates its 50th birthday standing firmly as a sonic tome to the birth of the no-no era (that rebuked France's yé-yé hamster wheel) leading directly to the thematic progressive network of Wakhévitch, Manset, and Magma while comprising an inter-Gallic intergalactic super group from the early annals of France's pop psych revolution. Imagine a rock opera where the cast of Mister Freedom perform Clash Of The Titans at the foot of The Holy Mountain -- then pinch yourself...
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2LP
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FKR 068LP
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2018 repress. Sharing social circles and spiritual ideologies with artists such as Iasos, Connie Demby and Deuter, whilst splitting label release schedules with Laraaji, Laurie Spiegel and Wendy Carlos, the unique Florida-raised soul mate duo known as Emerald Web released their privately pressed debut LP at an axis where post-prog rock met proto-new age and ambient electronic music. At the turn of the 1980s, Bob Stohl and Kat Epple embarked on a ten-year spiritual journey playing at planetariums and laser shows above the same Californian silicon city that devised the early computer music software, unifying their state-of-the-art modular synth soundscapes and organic compositions of flutes, bells and field recordings and furnishing a self-pressed cassette tapeography of inimitable Emerald Web music for their self-funded Stargate label. Having first communicated via the medium of music as flute players at a South Florida jam session, the future space music luminaries would be instrumental in assisting synthesizer companies via feedback and consultancy in developing instruments such as the Lyricon wind synth (favored by Suzanne Ciani and Bruno Spoerri) and various sponsored machines for Arp, Buchla, EML, Computone and Orchestron. Named after a laser show formation and combining influences from science fiction films, fantasy novels and a broad musical spectrum including Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, It's A Beautiful Day and Goro Yamaguchi, Bob and Kat would balance day jobs as synth programmers as well as TV and film soundtrackers under the moniker BobKat Productions (counting microscope nature documentarian Carl Sagan amongst their clients) with evening synthesizer shows at galleries, spiritual centers and even punk clubs. This compilation album comprises early tracks from Emerald Web's debut vinyl release and the four rare cassette-only albums on Stargate Records from 1979-1982. Taken from original master tapes and recorded using revolutionary and prototypal music technology.
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FKR 009XA-LP
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New 2018 edition. 2018 marks ten years since Finders Keepers Records first liberated Lubos Fiser's immaculate soundtrack music for Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders ("Valerie A Týden Divu") from the vaults of the Barrandov Studio in Prague. As the inaugural release of an ongoing discography of previously unreleased scores from the hugely creative "Film Miracle" that occurred during and after the Czech New Wave (CNW), this score will always retain a special place in the heart of the label. Having grown in status from an obscure and misunderstood socialist-era art house oddity, via the hands of risqué foreign fluff merchants, to finally find its rightful audience as a bona fide surrealist cinematic masterpiece of world class standards, this 1970 film adaptation of Vítezslav Nezval's 1935 avant-garde novella -- a film that literally cross-pollinated Max Ernst's A Week Of Kindness (1934) and Lewis Carol's Alice In Wonderland (1865) -- has garnered widespread critical acclaim. Inspiring ongoing generations of visual artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers, Valerie continues to impregnate their daily artistic referential fabric. Commonly considered to be the swansong of the CNW, following a huge paranoia-fueled government film cull in 1969, owing to the fact it is last government approved feature film of the post-Prague Spring era to combine the efforts of controversial filmmakers from the FAMU (Filmová A Televizní Fakulta Akademie Múzických Umení) film school, Valerie would also be the first of an exciting and essential new fertile strain of Czech made cinema fantastic. Successfully condensing the final drops of CNW lifeblood through a series of presumed apolitical scary/fairy tales, directors like Jaromil Jires and Juraj Herz used surrealism, traditionalism, and fantasy to rejuvenate the creative energy of apathetic filmmakers evading government scrutiny via creatively coded artistic allegories. By strategically choosing to adapt a pre-war surrealist melodrama written by a communist convert author called Vítezslav Nezval and based in a non-specific traditional era, the previously censored filmmaker Jaromil Jires was able to craft what many consider his finest filmic hour and what would later become his most universally received achievement. Jires managed to unintentionally establish a new genre format that was both stylistically and sonically tuned to the trends of the impending decade. Remastered from the original studio tapes with updated liner notes. This new edition is available in two sleeve designs, both based on the original theatrical posters.
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FKR 009XB-LP
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New 2018 edition. Second of two sleeve designs based on the original theatrical posters. 2018 marks ten years since Finders Keepers Records first liberated Lubos Fiser's immaculate soundtrack music for Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders ("Valerie A Týden Divu") from the vaults of the Barrandov Studio in Prague. As the inaugural release of an ongoing discography of previously unreleased scores from the hugely creative "Film Miracle" that occurred during and after the Czech New Wave (CNW), this score will always retain a special place in the heart of the label. Having grown in status from an obscure and misunderstood socialist-era art house oddity, via the hands of risqué foreign fluff merchants, to finally find its rightful audience as a bona fide surrealist cinematic masterpiece of world class standards, this 1970 film adaptation of Vítezslav Nezval's 1935 avant-garde novella -- a film that literally cross-pollinated Max Ernst's A Week Of Kindness (1934) and Lewis Carol's Alice In Wonderland (1865) -- has garnered widespread critical acclaim. Inspiring ongoing generations of visual artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers, Valerie continues to impregnate their daily artistic referential fabric. Commonly considered to be the swansong of the CNW, following a huge paranoia-fueled government film cull in 1969, owing to the fact it is last government approved feature film of the post-Prague Spring era to combine the efforts of controversial filmmakers from the FAMU (Filmová A Televizní Fakulta Akademie Múzických Umení) film school, Valerie would also be the first of an exciting and essential new fertile strain of Czech made cinema fantastic. Successfully condensing the final drops of CNW lifeblood through a series of presumed apolitical scary/fairy tales, directors like Jaromil Jires and Juraj Herz used surrealism, traditionalism, and fantasy to rejuvenate the creative energy of apathetic filmmakers evading government scrutiny via creatively coded artistic allegories. By strategically choosing to adapt a pre-war surrealist melodrama written by a communist convert author called Vítezslav Nezval and based in a non-specific traditional era, the previously censored filmmaker Jaromil Jires was able to craft what many consider his finest filmic hour and what would later become his most universally received achievement. Jires managed to unintentionally establish a new genre format that was both stylistically and sonically tuned to the trends of the impending decade. Remastered from the original studio tapes with updated liner notes. This new edition is available in two sleeve designs, both based on the original theatrical posters.
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FKSP 014EP
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From the shrapnel of the unlikely collision point where Mancunian post-punk royalty collides with sci-fi cinema and art house animation, this obscurity shines a new light on the Northern DIY era providing disc detectives with a whole new punk funk perspective. Recorded in 1976 by Invisible Girls' Steve Hopkins and Martin Hannett for a stop-motion animation called All Sorts Of Heroes, this hard-edged funk instrumental theme reveals another side to this versatile production team joining the hidden dots between Hannett's own discoid experiments with ESG, Gyro, A Certain Ratio, and the mythical Afro Express recordings from the same year.
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FKR 095LP
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Rising out of the smoky Parisian Mai 68 shrapnel and claiming his stake as the first French vampire movie director, the inimitable father of European horrortica, Jean Rollin (1938-2010) has smudged the painted face of surrealist cinema for over five decades. Dragging his roots from beneath the Letterist/Situationist movements, avant-garde theater, and Belgian fine art groups and entwining them around the minds of sexual revolutionaries, the European comic book cognoscenti and the Parisian free jazz and rock scenes, Rollin stopped at nothing to bring his macabre fantasies of zygotic vampyrism and backwoods blood cults to Gallic cinémathèques and beyond. Celebrating the immortal legacy of the late director, Finders Keepers compile a detailed and comprehensive music cabinet of some of the finest musical moments from his initial directorial decade between 1968-1979, which provided a much needed platform for the freak rock and free jazz that mirrored the distorted erotic visions in his own mind's eye. Imagine Gong-gone-wrong meeting the art ensembles of Châteauroux... Fantasy pop groups mutate and thrive within... Features tracks from Yvon Gerault, Acanthus, Pierre Raph, and François Tusques.
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FKR 091LP
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The missing component in the history of Turkish pop and one of the earliest exponents of Turkish electronic music alongside Ilhan Mimaroglu and Bülent Arel, Gökçen Kaynatan electrified the rock and roll scene of the late '50s/early '60s -- sending teenagers wild with his custom-built guitars and back lines -- helping charge the climate for the birth of Anatolian rock. Then, from the sanctuary of his private studio, he revolutionized the industry with his pioneering use of electronics whilst hanging the sonic wallpaper in the living rooms of an entire generation of tele-addicts as the in-house composer of choice for Turkey's first national television channel TRT 1. Despite having a modest discography of only four 7" singles to his name, his influence is a major current that flows through over 50 years of Turkish pop culture. Compiled with unparalleled access to his private studio vault, Finders Keepers present the first-ever collection of Gökçen Kaynatan's pioneering early electronic works. Featuring a selection of his experimental pop and rock recordings dating from as early as the 1968, Gökçen Kaynatan features both of the highly sought after 1 Numara singles -- including a never before heard extended version of "Evren" -- as well as previously unheard archive material and songs recorded for and broadcast exclusively on TRT 1 -- most of them never to be repeated. In helping Gökçen end his self-imposed 44-year exile from the record industry, Finders Keepers can now share the first of these important recordings from a genuine maverick who helped shape the face of modern Turkish music, as well as shed some light on the rise of one of Anatolian rock and pops must fruitful and experimental periods that began with the arrival (and subsequent explosion) of domestic synthesizers on the Turkish scene. Mastered from the original quarter inch studio tapes with full cooperation from the man himself, this important compilation also includes extensive liner notes written by Doug Shipton, as well as a host of rare personal photographs and memorabilia.
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FKR 100LP
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2018 repress. After decades in the making, Finders Keepers present the first-ever pressing of Serge Gainsbourg's most elusive and coveted soundtrack studio recordings, co-written, arranged, and orchestrated by the genius Jean-Claude Vannier (the arranger behind 1971's Histoire De Melody Nelson) during what many consider to be the dynamic duo's most definitive creative period. Believed to have been lost in a studio fire by Gainsbourg enthusiasts for over forty years (a myth that also shrouds Morricone's lost Danger Diabolik soundtrack), the misplaced master-tapes for the drug-fueled/Mai 68 cash-in/road-movie Les Chemins De Katmandou (1969) have been widely considered the final audio jigsaw piece in an immaculate discography/filmography, thus earning this soundtrack bona fide holy grail status amongst the most avid disc detectives. Featuring the original crack team of Paris based players now recognized as French library music royalty, this album epitomizes the inimitable musical direction and expert psychedelic pop musicianship that graced classic Gainsbourg/Vannier soundtracks like La Horse (1970), Cannabis (1970), and Sex Shop (1972), the sound that laid the stylistic, future-proof foundations for subsequent decades of forward-thinking Gallic funk mastery. Comprising Vannier's signature recipe of thick plucked bass lines, close-mic'd drums, biting clavinet, and Eastern influenced strings and percussion (and a sprinkling of subtle traditional French instrumentation) the soundtrack to Les Chemins De Katmandou ("The Road To Katmandu", or "The Pleasure Pit") captures Vannier and Gainsbourg in the first year of their creative partnership capturing their unique embryonic energy. The music on this record contains the full extent of the music found on the newly discovered studio tapes. It has since been preserved through the "baking" process, re-emulsified, transferred, remastered, and recompiled and sequenced in accordance with the original screenplay in close collaboration with Finders Keepers and inaugural artist, Jean-Claude Vannier.
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LP
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FKR 094LP
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As faithful guardians of the Ciani Musica Inc. studio vault, Finders Keepers twist the key and return to their collaborative series of previously unreleased music from one of the most important and influential composers in multi-disciplinary electronic music, Suzanne Ciani. This electronic soundtrack for an operatic, ecological, scholastic, science fiction theater production for children of all ages not only further reveals Suzanne's vibrant and versatile skills as an experimental musician and narrative sound designer, but also highlights her European heritage -- working to the script of Milanese librettist Gian Carlo Menotti and a cast of forward-thinking fellow Italian-American creatives (including Giorgio Armani and Fiorucci in the wardrobe department). Originally written and performed in 1968, and gaining worldwide acclaim throughout the 1970s, Gian Carlo Menotti would update and revise his play for the turn of the '80s which called for a new approach to the music and sound effects -- all of which would make their world premiere in New York high school theaters in April of 1980. Suzanne on the original: "The original production had been in 1968 and I felt that the electronic music component could be more playful and less abrasive than the original production." For Help, Help The Globolinks!, Ciani would give Menotti's well-traveled aliens a brand new voice and with reinvention she communicated with a young audience keen to hear the genuine sounds of the future while retaining melodicism and personality. Unlike many successful electronic composers, Suzanne managed to evade the obvious typecasting of her music through the medium of shlock sci-fi cinema; within the realms of opera and education Suzanne found her perfect channel -- scratching her other cosmic cinematic itches with android music in The Stepford Wives and as "the first female composer to score a major Hollywood movie" with The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981). Furnishing a plot of an ecological alien intervention worthy of a Magma youth starter pack and realigning early pioneering electronic operas such as Karl-Birger Blomdahl's Aniara or Remi Gassman's Electronics (CACK 004B-LP), this virtually undocumented work by the hardest working woman in VCO business is finally preserved after just a handful of exclusive theatrical airings over 35 years ago. Ciani's combined roles as an abstract artist and an astute technician are in equal measures here, a rare duplicity which is essential to The Globolinks!.
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7"
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FKSP 013EP
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As one of the most enigmatic figures of the 1970s Italian soundtrack and library music network, Emma De Angelis and her short recording career provides thirsty fans of speedball psychedelic rock and drum heavy instrumental funk with a tight discography. Emma was the younger sister of award-winning composers Guido And Maurizio De Angelis. While simultaneously pursuing a career as an illustrator and set designer the De Angelis family contacts would lead Emma to the offices of Romano Di Bari, whose Flirt label released a compilation called Underground Mood (1972). It is from this rare LP that this record is compiled.
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CD
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FKR 026CD
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2009 release. For the second installment in Finders Keepers' Sounds Of Wonder! series, exclusively licensed from EMI Pakistan, the label present two previously unreleased soundtracks, Dekha Jaye Ga (1960) and Uf Yeh Beevian (1976). The two soundtracks feature the talents of M. Ashraf, Nahid Akhter, Mehdi Hassan, Tafo Brothers, and Ahmed Rushdi, all of whom were featured on the first The Sound Of Wonder! compilation (BMS 012CD, 2009). Commonly, ignorantly but understandably lumped in with its wealthy not-too-distant cousin, Bollywood, Lollywood was inspired by, but often overshadowed by, its posh and well-traveled relative. Following the simplistic "Bombay + Hollywood = Bollywood" name game (that would in later years spawn Nollywood in Nigeria), Lollywood's Lahore based film industry was a profitable and vibrant one that found great success in the modest boundaries of its own country but was seldom savored outside Pakistan. However, the hugely important musical business spawned a by-product that was viewed as a potential earner for international entertainment industry, EMI, which allowed talented musicians to create ambitious music with world class mediums at their disposal, which throughout the '60s and '70s ranged from fuzz-guitars, space-echo machines, and American and European synthesizers, but, due to the composers indigenous roots, rarely a drum-kit. Here, you'll find fuzzy, scuzzy, twang-happy, spaced-out, and funked-up Urdu-grooves, complete with harmonium melodies and driven by some of the most random factor, freakish, finger-numbing, percussion that the South East Asian mainstream has ever had to offer. Above all, Lollywood soundtracks sound raw. Re-imagine some of the most action-packed Bollywood productions (which Lollywooders actively did) then fire the make-up department, take away the special effects budget, and then improvise. The lack of gloss on a dusty Pakistani mini-LP makes for truly experimental Eastern pop music. Beautifully remastered and presented here in a split digipak.
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FKR 083LP
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"I am black beauty... love me!" A forthright enough request, one would think, from an artist whose music was indeed loved, revered and which played a hugely influential and omnipresent role in Lahore's vibrant cinematic patchwork that covered the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, until now, it seems that this lost love letter to a potential global audience of millions of sonic suitors has been caught up in the pesky Pakistani postal system. Nahid Akhtar needs a connection. Don't blame the Khyber Mail. In a neat and tidy career that spanned exactly ten years, Nahid Akhtar came, saw, and conquered, then relatively disappeared without even thinking about buying the t-shirt. Disrobing the vibrant finery that interweaved textures of Ghazals, classical music, Punjabi folk songs, and Qawwalis (not forgetting a wide range of progressive pop music penned for the Pakistani picture house) from which this record's track list is lovingly gathered. It is virtually unfathomable that the multifarious music of Nahid Akhtar -- combining textures, tempos, technologies, global in fences, and multicultural languages (and all this within the opening seconds of a song!) -- didn't open the door to international stardom to match that of Asha Bhosle or Lata Mangeshkar from India. In the last few years, the music of Lollywood's golden era has enjoyed a marked resurgence amongst outer-national music fans, with labels like Finders Keepers remastering and compiling the work of the Tafo Brothers and M. Ashraf for a global market with wide critical acclaim. Hopefully, with this collection as a sturdy stepping stone to a widely rewarding expanse of further listening, the music of Nahid Akhtar can find a place alongside your favorite international songbirds and her original love letters to the world of music will command a much justified RSVP. Compiled from some of the rarest and most desirable Nahid Akhtar 7" appearances, some released for the first time since their original release.
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LP
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FKR 093LP
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Finders Keepers present a reissue of Maria Teresa Luciani's Sounds Of The City, originally released under the Italian name Suoni Di Una Città in 1972. Welcome to the parallel musical universe of Miss Maria Teresa Luciani, a landscape of sonic architecture and theoretical composition constructed by a family of engineers that reinvented the wheel before the vehicle even began the journey. Imagine, if you will, the musical equivalent of Peter Cook's Archigram group or the soundtrack to Charles and Ray Eames's private sketchbooks, hinting at a new municipal, utopian metropolis, just hours before the blueprints are suspiciously misplaced by the courier and mainstream pop building regulations piss on our asbestos bonfire. These 1972 constructions of progressive, cyclic, proto-industrial color music were never intended for public habitation. These are the Sounds Of The City in a galaxy far, far beneath our radar and above your expectations that was never built. Pseudo-futurist pop music, cubic folk, tape-op-art. Before the needle hits the first groove, the story of Maria Teresa Luciani reads like an Alphaville caper full of foreign intrigue, low intensity identification fraud, secret codes, family bonds, mistrust and wanderlust... Naturally, you are holding a genuine Finders Keepers article. To say this rare Italian concept album is "unbelievable" is justified on multiple levels. This multi-story storage facility of found sounds, radiophonic samples, tape loops, early electronic music experiments, mechanical folk, cinematic vision, sound design, educated music theory, political pop, and high concept art-as-noise successfully layers more musical ideas within its unique structure than one would think possible for a solo artist within any musical genre. This is why Sounds Of The City presents a brand new genre defying compositional framework, pre-dating sampling culture, cut-and-paste plunderism, and industrial music in the process. Pre-digital, indefinable and genuinely unbelievable. But who is Maria Teresa Luciani? On hearing this record, respected collectors and enthusiasts have suggested "the female answer to Basil Kirchin", or "the Italian Daphne Oram", both with justified cause. Mystery, myth, legend, teacher, artist, inventor, author, musician, psychologist, daughter, and (possibly most importantly) sister.
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LP
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FKR 053LP
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LP version. 2017 repress. The American Delia Derbyshire of the Atari generation. With a sonic portfolio that boasts commissions for the Xenon classic pinball machine, the sounds for the Meco Star Wars theme, the Atari TV commercials, and the electronic sound effects in the original Stepford Wives film (1975), amongst many others, the mutant electronic music CV of Suzanne Ciani is proof that in a 1970s commercial world of boys toys, monopolized by a male dominated media industry, a woman's touch was the essential secret ingredient to successful sonic seduction. A classically trained musician, with an MA in music composition, this American-Italian pianist was first introduced to the synthesizer via her connections in the art world when abstract sculptor and collaborator Harold Paris introduced Suzanne to synthesizer designer Don Buchla who created the Buchla Synthesizer, the instrument that would come to define Ciani's synthetic sound. Cutting her teeth providing self-initiated electronic music projects for art galleries, experimental film directors, pop record producers, and proto-video nasties, Suzanne soon located to New York where she quickly became the first point of call for electronic music services in both the underground experimental fields and the commercial advertising worlds alike. Counting names like Vangelis and Harald Bode amongst her close friends, Suzanne and her Ciani Musica company became the testing ground for virtually any type of new developments in electronic and computerized music amassing an expansive vault of commercially unexposed electronic experiments which have remained untouched for over 30 years... until now. Finders Keepers Records present a new creative archive based relationship with Suzanne Ciani, who, as one of the very few female composers in the field (save Chicago's Laurie Spiegel, Italy's Doris Norton, and a post-op Walter Wendy Carlos) turned a hugely significant wheel behind-the-screens of many early computerized music modules throughout the 1980s, dating back to her formative years studying at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Labs in the early '70s. Suzanne Ciani's detailed and academic approach to music and electronics coupled with an impeccable sense of timing and melody (and a good sense of humor) shines throughout this new collection of previously unreleased recordings. Lixiviation complies and re-contextualizes both secret music and commercial experiments of Suzanne Ciani made for microcosmic time slots and never previously documented on vinyl or CD.
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FKR 090LP
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LP version. Gatefold sleeve. Imagine, if you will, a foreboding homemade electro-acoustic, new age, synth-driven, proto-techno, imaginary world music created on a Portastudio soundtrack for a Polish-made animated fantasy based on a Finnish modern folk tale and created for German and Austrian TV, composed in 1982 by two politically-driven post-punk theater performers from a shared house in Leeds. To even the most perspicacious and adventurous of alternative music fans, the genuine bloodline of this previously unreleased record already begins to sound like an entire record collection in one sitting. It would be surprising if this project's ambitious and exotic credentials didn't tick at least one box on your musical matrix and without one drop of unnecessary nostalgic hyperbole this project already sounds like the perfect fantasy record that you've never heard. From the same social landscape as Gang Of Four, The Mekons, and Impact Theatre Co-operative - armed with a Wasp synthesizer, an ocarina, and a cassette of the Robinson Crusoe music taped off the TV, Graeme Miller and Steve Shill used minimum means for maximum mayhem, instilling over 35 years of dream-like illusory fuzziness and freakiness into the memories of a generation of school age TV addicts waiting for the next five minute fix of outer national fuzzy felt folklore. Collected here, all in one place for the first time, Finders Keepers, in close collaboration with the original composers, present the first-ever full soundtrack release for the UK-specific cult animated series. Finders Keepers take the original homemade micro-melodies and reintroduce them to a musical landscape where fans of vintage electronics, concrète tape effects, pocket percussion, and domestic synths are finally ready to be reunited with the magnetic music of Moominvalley.
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7"
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FKSP 011EP
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RSD 2017 release. Single-sided "aquatic clear" 7". Includes a copy of the original press release as well as a press cutting from the time. Limited edition of 1000. As the first and only label dedicated to liberating the private, non-commercial artifacts from Suzanne Ciani's groundbreaking Ciani Musica studio vault, Finders Keepers Records presents the first release of an incredible cryogenically suspended slice of precious, precocious, immersive fledgling synthesis. Ironically well removed from the intention of phonographic application in its original inception, this anti-pop wash of marine biology modular synth sound-design was originally proposed by a very young Ciani for exclusive infinite-loop airings in a giant mid-American shopping mall aquarium in 1977. Potentially conjuring ambient scenes from the consumerist satire Dawn of the Dead while sonically ushering in a genuine desire for total musical science reevaluation and revolution via a decidedly mainstream portal, the Fish Music project is a striking, eerie example of how Ciani's "Subversion With A Smile" approach led to a long career of breaking boundaries in formal music technology, film scoring, the advertising industry, and gender equality -- all of which has continued to fuel her passion and channel her life-lust and artistic appetite, much to the benefit of future ambitious trajectories of music. Owing much to the memory of genuine synthesizer maverick Don Buchla, this conceptual release is very much the product of artistic America at its progressive halcyon, but with its illustrious and idiosyncratic composition also communicates subtle undertones of Ciani's feminine Italian origins, which seldom reside outside of the efforts of Roman library composers like Casa, Tomassi, Raskovich, and siblings Antonio and Maria Teresa Luciani. File under... water.
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