I just found this record and wanted to point it out to anyone and everyone who hasn’t heard of it (read: most of you). I haven’t been able to really find out that much about this strange trip of a record/coloring book (PDF). I can truthfully say that it is one of the more bizarre yet remarkably interesting things I’ve heard in a while. Lucia Pamela’s Into Outer Space appears to be her only recording, and from my internet travels I’ve learned next to nothing about her –except that apparently she actually did travel to the moon and around the universe to record this record. Which is a remarkable feat to say the least.
I’m still sitting in awe here though… I can’t explain most of what is happening on this record. The track, “Indian Alphabet Chant” which starts with the lines, “Here we are still on the moon, oh there’s an Indian village, I see Indian’s dancing and singing, it’s a wedding ceremony! There’s the bride and there’s the groom!” Is one of the weirdest beginnings ever. But the point here isn’t the fact that this record is strange. The point is that records like this USED TO EXIST. This vibrant and weird experimentalism used to be okay, it used to happen all the time, and it was accepted as being new and unusual. Into Outer Space existed in the same world as Bruce Haack’s Electric Lucifer, Silver Apples‘ Contact, Aphrodite’s Child’s 666, it sat side by side in record shops with The Temple City Kazoostra, The Unites States of America, Pierre Henry & Michel Columbier. It was a world where fun was fun and music was a show (and hell, was featured on a number of shows, remember Bruce Haack on Mr. Rogers?). Music wasn’t made for money, it wasn’t made to impress friends, hell, this music wasn’t even made to express feeling. It was made so everyone involved could have some fun, it was recorded not for money but to share that fun with everyone. Cheers to Lucia Pamela.