Zaista ludo. Muzika za shizofrene pirane u androidnim kostimima na međugalaktičkom karnevalu.
The Residents i Renaldo & The Loaf nakon višegodišnjeg druženja s Higgsovom česticom.
streaming
petunia-lieblingmacpumpkin.com/
soundcloud
The music I wrote from 1991-1995 and recorded, but did not have the equipment to clean up and add the vocals to.
Influenced heavily by the Residents and Renaldo & The Loaf... A project that started in the early 1990s and came to fruition in 2012. - Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin
RADIO
Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin Green Glow featured on
Nardwuar, The Human Serviette Show, UBC CiTR 101.9 FM
Fish Drive Edsels featured on BEPI CRESPAN PRESSENTS..., UBC CiTR 101.9 FM
"PETUNIA-LIEBLING MACPUMPKIN embodies the goal and vision I have for BEPI CRESPAN PRESENTS... and community radio in general: to be a resource for independent, creative, humorous, fiercely non-commercial / non-mainstream, challenging and at times DIFFICULT music. AND THAT'S A GOOD THING!!" -Bepi Crespan, Host (http://bepicrespan.blogspot.ca
-CITR Vancouver, BC (www.citr.ca)
They say there is no such thing as second acts in
American lives, but American lives haven't fully contended with outsider
music, the crushing boredom of suburban Florida, and the permeable
temporal membrane of album reissues. God, no.
With that firmly in mind, let me tell you a story.
Many years ago, a young girl in Florida became corrupted by a band. It
infected her thoughts, her words, her actions, her appearance,
everything. Big deal right? You can throw a rock and hit a teenager
who's just gotten done loitering in Hot Topic or is one Slayer album
away from going on a cat massacre. But it wasn't any of that nonsense.
This girl was corrupted by something far darker and more mysterious: The
Residents. She bought everything she could. She started wearing a top
hat around. As a mere teenager, she got closer than anyone ever has to
figuring out the Residents' identity, interrogating a hapless Penn
Jillette, sending dead fish through the mail, and even palling around
with Renaldo and the Loaf.
Mere fandom didn't suffice. Iit wasn't enough to be
close to her idols, she had to BECOME them. Hell, surpass them. Besides
the Residents, her life was an ultraviolet collage of pop culture
weirdness: Jem & The Holograms, David Bowie in Labyrinth,
Gary Numan... and her writings and drawings from the time became
hopelessly infected by those reference points. And so was born
Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin. Using only the primitive musical tools
available to her at that point -- Casio keyboard, toy drum machine, tape
recorder -- and a truly unhinged sense of ambition, a strange set of
songs were crafted, some attempts at recording began, and then...
Nothing.
Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin disappeared.
The songs, the ideas, the weirdness lay dormant for
many, many years. Until the tapes were unearthed, and in what was
clearly a cult ritual, the ghost of Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin was
channeled, was summoned. And all she wanted to do was finish her record.
Fish Drive Edsels does, in many ways sound
like transmissions from an outer realm. Vocals are stretched and
distorted into otherworldly shapes, the keyboard lines drift along in a
dreamy, hallucinogenic ether, the song structures are strangely
timeless, flirting with baroque signifiers before swooping into mutant
new (or no-) wave shapes, Morse code/ fingers-on-a-window percussion.
There are moments of just sublime strangeness, like "Frozen Fish," a
hallucinogenic paean to, well, a frozen fish, with harpsichord, a creepy
vocal, and laser-bright synth lines attempting to restore order. I'm
also partial to "Vegetable Medley," a heady mix of horror movie
keyboards, chopped'n'screwed vocals approximating a litany of different
characters, and a sense of creeping dread. And people think that Paul
McCartney chomping celery on a Beach Boys outtake is the height of "out
there"!
Maybe you can file it next to Residents, Renaldo and
the Loaf, and Barnes and Barnes, and I'm hearing similarities to the
likes of Irene Moon and Russian Tsarlag, but other than that, this music
is all alone. - Matthew Moyer So the winner of our latest Weird Band Facebook Poll™ seems to be a big fan of our site (she’s been sharing links on our Facebook page like crazy), but we still know almost nothing about her. Then again, maybe that’s OK. Certain acts work better if there’s an air of mystery. We probably don’t really need to know the full story behind Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin. Or maybe she’ll decide to share it with us someday and it’ll be just as weird as her music. Although that’s asking a lot, because her music is some of the trippiest shit we’ve heard in a long time.
MacPumpkin is (we think) the creation/alter-ego/bizarro version of a lady from Florida named Melody Felicia-Baril McGinn. We first heard about her from a new reader named TommyTopHat. Sup, Tommy? Thanks for the tip.
Melody apparently grew up a huge fan of The Residents (hence her fondness for top hats) and Renaldo & The Loaf (another band we really should add to The Weird List one of these days). She says she started making her heavily Residents/Renaldo-inspired MacPumpkin music back in the early ’90s and is only just now getting around to releasing it via Bandcamp.
Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin’s one and only album is called Fish Drive Edsels and it’s completely insane. Vocals and rhythms speed up and slow down like some kind of cracked funhouse carnival music. The lyrics, when you can make them out, are about cowboys bagging groceries, conversations with frozen fish, and something called the Bedazzler, which we thought was just some tool chicks use for putting sequins on shit but is apparently also, in Petunia’s world, a shapeshifting monster who “usually comes at night when there’s a storm.” When I was a little kid, I was afraid of a similar monster called the Beshatter who would come at night and take a dump on your head. But I digress.
Besides Fish Drive Edsels, MacPumpkin has also released a few new tunes on Soundcloud, including one that sets Edward Lear’s poem “The Jumblies” to music that sounds like acid rock for Oompa-Loompas, and another inspired by electro-soul weirdo Gary Wilson. Apparently she and Wilson have some kind of mutual admiration society going, because on her website, MacPumpkin has this quote from Wilson: “After a pleasant listening, Petunia inspired us to go out and have some fish and chips.” High praise indeed. Here’s the Wilson-inspired track, “He Cried.” (Note: If you see a blank space below instead of a Soundcloud player, click here and that should fix the problem.)
Melody Felicia-Baril McGinn may or may not also be the lunatic behind another musical persona called Rosewater Treacle Tart. Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin hasn’t made any YouTube videos…or actually, it looks like she once had YouTube videos and for some reason she’s taken them all down. But this Rosewater Treacle Tart video is amazing, so we’re including it here,
MANBEHINDTHECURTAIN Strange Girls: Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin
"Linda and I were listening to Fish Drive Edsels by Petunia
Liebling Macpumpkin the other night. While listening, Linda motioned to
me that she enjoyed the album and wanted me to dance with her to the
music. I quickly realized what was going on and jumped to the floor and
did the latest dance (The Twist). Soon Petunia's music and vocals had
both of us deep in meditation and dance. Petunia's voice spoke to us.
We wanted to hear more. The musical play between her vocals and
instrumentation brought us back to a happier time. After a pleasant
listening, Petunia inspired us to go out and have some fish and chips."
—Gary Wilson (musician) "In terms of out-thereness, Petunia is beyond Pluto! You don't need to invent a hyper-drive to catch up with her, just listen to her CD." —Brian Poole/Renaldo Malpractice (musician, Renaldo & the Loaf)
"Damn girl! I thought my music was weird!" –Blowfly (musician)
"YOU ARE THE CRAP! AKA THE SHIT AKA YOU GOT THAT DOO-DOO!" —Tra'zae Lewis-Clinton (music producer)
"House of Mystery's leading fan historian has just sent me this amazing album. It is very much in the tradition of House of Mystery's pre-code roots!" —T Casey Brennan (comic book writer)
"Fish Drive Edsels sounds like old, foreign folk music. There's a personal iconography at work, recurring themes and private jokes and sorrows. There aren't many musical reference points for me; it just seems to have sprouted from the ground fully formed. But it's that organic quality, the strength of the veins and threads that you do catch hold of, that keeps luring you back to the album. And every time you go back, you're rewarded with a few more pieces of the puzzle."
—Mark Lerner (musician, Life in a Blender, Flat Old World)
"Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin, the lady who makes songs your pets love, your neighbors hate, and fashion mannequins never forget. WARNING: this music may change your molecular structure!!!!"
—Neo Zeiss (electronic musician)
"Just finished a marvelous trip upon Ms. MacPumpkin's art-songs. Picasso couldn’t have made it better! Very complex, grand opening of a new era in songwriting—a trip into the inconscient side of the brain! Joni Mitchel created songs as a painting, she paints the songs! Truly original, she is creating new standards!" —Cassiano Pereira Viana (lawyer/writer/songwriter)
"Ms. MacPumpkin's work is outstanding and inovative. She has taken her influences from the Residents and Renaldo and the Loaf to new heights." —GL Sullivan (educator/artist)
"The music contained here will force you down the rabbit hole, you will travel an ethereal journey of many colors, tones, and textures." —Scotty Kniving (musician, The Kniving Complex)
"David Lynch meets Tom Waits. Green Glow reminds me of the girl in the radiator. I like the Bagboy Cowboy too (great title). It sets a nice tone for doing some painting at 3 in the morning!" —Dave Farrelly (painter/illustraitor)
Interview with Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin
February 7, 2013 by TommyTopHat
Now, without further adon’t, let us commence!- Who would be your biggest influences? The Residents and Renaldo & the Loaf seem to have inspired you a great deal, but are there any others?
- Are you a friend of the Hitcher from The Mighty Boosh? Or just an admirer? (You’d make a good couple.)
- Do you ever see yourself becoming a cult icon like Klaus Nomi, Captain Beefheart, etc? Because I definitely think you have the potential to be one.
- Do you ever plan to branch out into other forms of art? Painting? Writing? Theatre?
- Excitement! How would you describe Fish Drive Edsels?
- You seem to have a fondness for fish by the way. Is it true that you sent a dead frozen fish to the Residents?
- Right.
Anyhaps, you claim to be “a ghost and a concept from the past”. So are
you otherworldly in nature then? Do you wish to reveal more about your
true self, or do you prefer to keep it a secret?
- You’ve just recently finished working on the music video for Carnival (Introduction’s Aside), and I must say it’s quite impressive. The whole thing is like some insane cross between Years Ago by Alice Cooper and The Residents’ Freakshow album. Was it fun to make? Did it take long? Where did the ideas for it come from?
- Childhood seems to be a sort of theme on Fish Drive Edsels…like all those hazy, blurred, sometimes disturbing memories you get of when you were younger. Was that intentional?
- Gary Wilson is a fan of yours now, I believe. That’s pretty groovy.
- If there was any artist, living, dead or undead, that you could collaborate with, who would it be?
- Are you going to be collaborating with any other musicians in the near future?
- I love your hat, by the way.
- Will there be more music videos coming out soon?
- Who are your style icons?
- Have you ever spotted Elvis Presley? Do you think that he’s still alive?
- Who, in your opinion, are the best new musical artists of today?
- Who do you prefer: Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck?
- Who is Rosewater Treacle Tart?
- If you could do the soundtrack to any film, which would it be?
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar