clone: son of octabred

We've seen a lot of oddities reissued over the last few years, but few come close to capturing the bewildering brilliance of this bizarre instructional Birthing album recorded somewhere in Alaska in 1982 and resurfacing now on a first-ever vinyl pressing, thanks to the supreme Ethno-musicological skills of Andy Votel and his Dead-Cert imprint. Utilizing the ARP 2600, ARP Odyssey, Polymoog, harmonica/synthesizer interface, Eventide Omnipressor, Roland vocoder and genuinely bizarre narration imploring the listener to "push..." over a background of retro-futuristic space-age progressions, these recordings edge the concept of extreme American outsider music to its furthest reaches. Originally broadcast as a one-off transmission for electronic harmonicist Gary Sloan's Import Hour show on Anchorage radio station KGOT FM, it's one of the rarest recordings in the very limited line of Clone breadcrumbs released to date -- the audio discovered by Sloan in his own time capsule of C60 compact cassettes used to document the unlikely synthesized wing of an untraveled North American micro industry. Son of Octabred is unlike any other Kosmische or early synth record you're likely to have heard, arcing from the surreal instructional opening segment to pop-wise synth hooks before eventually building into a monumental layer of synthesized drone you'll have trouble comprehending after the umpteenth listen. As a label set up to give life to recordings that were never really intended for wider public consumption, Dead-Cert has done a commendable job shining a light on lost DIY aesthetics -- this album perhaps making for its most compulsive, odd outing yet.