Two oddities from the pacific North-West USA’s favourite oddball ethnodelic forgers of all things conjured up from an alternate world music scene. Side one’s “Themes From The Motion Picture Man With The Green Gloves On” is a slice of solemn gamelan’n’drone in their usual temple of the weird mode, all chimes and rumbling percussion interspersed with feedback and other signs of electronic life. As the drift becomes choral and the motion fritters into stoned wafts of sound, it’s almost possibly to smell the incense, inhale the smoke machine tendrils and feel the confusion which greets the many-robed ensemble as they continue their vocation to befuddle and bemuse.
But flipping to the other side of the 7” finds that “Theme From The Science Fiction Television Show Ban Bè Cua Anh” is far, far weirder than anything they have played hitherto. Splurging out in vibrant Technicolor widescreen to a martial samba snare drum rolls marches a cod-Vietnamese rocking good-time, swinging tune. It’s possible to imagine the kids from Saigon boogieing to this before picking up their ChiCom AKs and heading out for a warm evening’s insurrection in the dance bars South Viet Nam back in the imaginary day – not that the Viet Cong would have approved – but this is a historical forgery, right? So as the brass section wanders off into an echoing void, and the drummers spasm fitfully until the groove kicks back in, it only remains to speculate that this was probably playing during one of the impromptu dance parties on the US Navy patrol boat which took Captain Willard upriver for his fateful meeting with Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now; but when the cameras were off, or in an out-take or something, possibly just before sighting a UFO beyond the burning bombers on the riverbanks…
-Linus Tossio-
