billy green: stone (fkr 10th anniversary edition)

To mark its 2015 ten-year anniversary, the Finders Keepers label presents a remastered, repackaged repress of its 2010 reissue of Billy Green's soundtrack to the 1974 Australian biker film Stone. Features updated liner notes and an alternative sleeve design based on the original Japanese theatrical poster. Stone's trailer says it all. A deep Australian drawl narrates the scene over a psychedelic swamp-funk rhythm section doused in electronic percussion and treated keyboards. The screen fills with images of slo-mo bike accidents, hallucinatory trips, and a death-defying cliff stunt that could easily be mistaken for a doppelgänger scene in Psychomania (1971). Cut to a satanic ritual burial at the hands of a denim-clad crew of outlaw bikers with strangely familiar faces. To many global record collectors, DJs, music producers, and general retrophiles living outside of Australia, Stone was primarily known for its electronic sound effects, psychedelic guitars, cosmic soundscapes, and funky basslines. In the '80s and '90s, before the global DVD boom, Stone was primarily a soundtrack for most people -- the kind of soundtrack that makes the listener wish the film were available. The original LP artwork alone is beyond enigmatic, with its embroidered logo (designed by writer, director, producer, and star Sandy Harbutt) alongside its strikingly futuristic airbrushed chrome insignia (designed by comic artist Peter Ledger and realized by airbrush whiz Errol Black). The huge parade of Kawasaki bikes inside the gatefold sleeve looks like something from the future compared to the classic full-dresser Harleys from American biker movies. And when the needle drops into the groove and the freakish blend of didgeridoo and Moog (played by Johnny "Didge" Matthews and synth expert Andy Cohan respectively) -- mixed with unidentified clicks, belches, and pops -- flies out the speakers, it is impossible to put a date, let alone a storyline, to this acid-fueled soundscape. The use of confusing and contradictory musical influences alongside bizarre noises is actually the secret sauce in this concoction and when the swampy psychedelic funk-rock rhythm section kicks in the listener is left with a 45-minute program of skewed, forward-thinking avant-pop that would stylistically fill a very lonely section in the record shop racks. There are not many records quite like Stone.