ALLMUSIC

This CD is a re-issue off an incredibly obscure LP from 1976 and documents a bizarre musical mix of Jazz improvisation, electronics and noise that makes the album a pre-cursor to the mayhem of the Sun City Girls and Nurse With Wound. Mastering a unique method of tape collage this group of misfits lead by weirdo artisan Rev. Dwight Frizzell at the helm of the editing table, some similar recordings that spring to mind are Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table by Nurse With Wound and the enigmatic Faust Tapes, although neither avant-Europeans reach the surrealist peaks that this 1976 recording from Middle America. (Skip Jansen)

AVANT (Spring 1989)

Beyond The Black Crack, a concept realised by Reverend Dwight Frizzell, is both joyfully ridiculous and challenging at the same time. The CD cover confronts the viewer with a huge mooning arse and an implausibly dark crevis from which three cut-out figures fall as excrement; the binary bum cheeks unable to contain the multivalence of the centre parting poop. The use of free jazz textures, humour, disruptive editing and electronics mirrors much of the music to emerge from the avant-garde scene of 1967 where experimentation was Happening. Frizzell, a musician, film maker, Doctor of Metaphysics and minister in the Universal Church of Life revels in creating an intelligent transient collage of diverging textures. Similar to techniques used today by the likes of Simon Fell, Dogbiz and Evil Dick, the course of the music is unpredictable to the last honk. Recorded between 1974-1976 this music radiates Radical. Almost aimless improvisation somehow makes sense when slotted between bizzare location recordings - the pyramid opposite Harry Truman's grave site to name but one, paper compositions, vocal interruptions and overdubbed clacking percussion.The chaos that ensues has a pattern as intricate and as ugly as an assemblage by Kurt Schwitters. Unlike the claustrophobic indulgence of The Velvet Underground, Anal Magic and Rev. Frizzell create something more subtle and ventilated; the solo textures, usually aided by echo/reverb, are beautifully abstract utilising Varese's principle of density to achieve their full effect. The net result is a work that brings increasing delight on repeated listening. The high point of the suite occurs during a piece of environmental recording where an interrupting child innocently enquires 'What are you doing this for?' Such a question destroys the barrier between art and real life, provoking the listener with a residual question. 'Why am I listening to this?' Scorchio. (Richard Hemmings)

BANANAFISH 13

God bless the braintrust at Paradigm for re-releasing what has to be one of the weirdest records ever to come out of Kansas City: Anal Magic and The Reverend Dwight Frizzell's 'Beyond The Black Crack'. Originally released in 1976 in an edition of 200, this possesses all the beauty and human outsider charm as other lost albums of that time, most notably 'Static Disposal' by Debris and Vertical Slit's 'Slit and Pre-Slit'. Or if you're a fan of the LAMFS, this would definately be the thing you'd wanna hear as you buckle your belt and prepare to start another day of superior flim-flamming (Roland Woodbe)

ND 21

Reissue of the obscure LP, with previously unreleased bonus tracks of equal merit. One of the more endearing vices of my now deceased friend Scott was his tendency to include whole album sides of 'mystery material' when taping some other record for me that I had requested. For years I had searched in vain for the identity of one such album that Scott had taped for me but 'forgot' to write about on the tape label. This one, a record containing some of the most original, spooky, and deeply affecting experimental music I had ever heard. Well, you guessed it! Upon hearing this CD the first time, my mind was doing victorious summersaults. While side A of the album contains (intensionally bad?) material which sounds like a collaboration between Intersystems and a Jr. High marching band, the CD is otherwise packed with luscious, shadowy head music which I'm convinced makes this release one of the most indispensible for ND readers. Carefree genius from backwater hippies who lived outside the current of history (Jeff Filla)

RECORD COLLECTOR (April 99)

The Rev. Dwight's ministry in the Universal Church of Life takes a back seat to his true calling as a demi god of experimental music on this 1976 offering. He and his followers recorded this 200-copy limited edition with such unorthodox instruments as a streetlamp pole, a water ventilation unit, and dogs, as well as Rush Rankin's 'imagistic inspiration'! This is interwoven with tape splicing, relatively conventional electronics and sax-driven free jazz. When 'real' music rears its head, such as Get It Out Your System, what starts out like a shambolic Tom Waits' backing track develops into a battle between the Mothers Of Invention and Gong! Elsewhere, maniacal tapping comes to the fore, and it may come as no surprise that the whole influenced Nurse With Wound. Bonus material from '77 follows a similar path, but with darker overtones. Harry Truman's Hiroshima speech is used along with Geiger clicks, and Copulation Of Basilea And Hyperion is a sonic assault. Not for the Faint-hearted, but a unique archival treasure. (Trevor King)

RESONANCE (Vol.2 No. 7)

Issued in an edition of 200 copies in 1976, this music for an annual Celebration of the End of the World is an obscure relic rescued from the black hole of history which is still as odd as when it first disappeared. Made in Kansas, it careers from Baum to bomb, heralding Hiroshima as the New Wave and presenting the apocalypse as a ramshackle, vaguely danceable din punctuated by studied, meditative interludes of humming electronics and distroted saxophone wailing. Oscillators buzz, metronomes tick, someone whistles tunelessly, recording glitches pop - the odd music emerges organically in the fullest sense of the word, growing, decaying and rotting away before your ears. The first half of this reissue features solipsistic, sometimes childish freak-outs with live audience and tape surface noise, a juvenile marching band playing lively and lopsided instrumentals; the other half (Turtle Music, which consists of field recordings made on a miniature pyramid in Missouri) is fragmentary and more introspective - articulating not the public interaction of the audibly alienated, but a private realm, one that in this context seems infinite rather than circumscribed. Inside the booklet there are plenty of cast lists and some philosophical musings that flesh out the aural sketches; on the front cover is a photo of someone's arse from which three tiny figures fall. Intimations of potential transformation and parallel states of being sit cheek by jowl, or buttock by buttock, with flatulent outpourings - the Turtle Music sequence is both a meditation on the nature of identity, myth and music, and a couple of dreamy guys larking about one distant summer with a tape recorder. Salvador Dali's thought that farting is the soul's way of sighing comes to mind, but the music aspires to higher things and it's the more spikily disturbing and cooly sinister Max Ernst who gets thanked in the credits (Ed Baxter)

REVUE ET CORRIGEE (March 99)

Groupe obsur pour les uns, réédition très attendue pour les autres, ce disque fait ré appara”tre au grand jour un vinyl à l'origine paru en 1976 et édité à 200 exemplaires, avec quelques bonus bienvenus. Enregistré à l'origine pour la PREMIER CELEBRATION ANNUELLE DE LA FIN DU MONDE, le 18 novembre de cette année là. Et ces joyeux-fouteurs-den'importe-quoi-pourvu-qu'ça-tripe vous offrent à peu-près tout ce dont vous pourriez rêver venant d'un groupe avec un nom pareil!! Faisant très bonne figure entre le 'Cave Rock' de Cromagnon sur ESP et le premier 'Catalogue' de Berrocal, bien que nettement plus calme, les remerciements contenus dans la pochette vous permettront de vous faire une idée de la famille dans laquelle s'inscrit ANAL MAGIC & Rev. Dwight FRIZZELL :Sun Ra, Max Ernst, Robert Desnos, Gaston Bachelard, Walt Disney, Priscella, Independence Police Department et toutes les tortues, entre autres... Et si ça ne vous dit rien mais que vous dit rien mais que vous êtes en possession d'un coeur de tortue, sachez que ce disque vous est dédié. C'est bon d'être cinglé! (Manu Holterbach)

RUBBERNECK 30

Difficult to get beyond the title and cover art of the re-release of Anal Magic and Rev. Dwight Frizzell's mid-70s LP Beyond The Black Crack (plus the inevitable unreleased material). Once inside (as it were), the listener is presented with a variety of largely lo-fi, bizarrely-edited sequences, largely based on improvisatory percussion rhythms and a halting jazz band. Shades of Ayler and Art Ensemble of Chicago (what am I saying?), much obscure thumping and muttering. Ron Pate's Debonairs spring to mind, though this lacks their lunatic and slanted virtuosic spark. Much of it sounds awfully dated, especially the in-recording tape speed manipulation during the live performances. Side 2 of Neu! 2 it ain't. I find it remarkable that anyone feels this important enough to re-release - postmodernism, what hast thou wrought? After Paradigm's excellent Pauline Oliveros release (PD 04), I'm disappointed.

The SOUND PROJECTOR 6

Genuinely odd and genuinely obscure, at first this strikes you as an astounding blend of free jazz, acid-addled psychedelia, industrial tape constructions, political protest poetry readings, found recordings and field recordings, scatological humour, electronic music, Mothers of Invention styled absurdity... which fairly well sums it up. A bit like the promises of the ESP label, the early Residents and Mothers of Invention records all come true at once. The common thread is the performer Revd. Dwight Frizzell, aka Fredrik Tibbits Air, appearing throughout these astonishing recordings on wind instruments, percussion, and other non-instruments such as 'chair, trashcan, pins, soybeans, and audio oscillator.' A curious tale of this records history lurks within the booklet, revealing almost a parallel universe of freak madman poised to assume a position of power. A tale that unsettles your perception of what had passed for reality in your wretched existance up to this point! It emerged from a conglomerate of eccentric bands, taped at tiny little events: Black Crack and The Sole Survivors were recorded live at the Kansas City Art Institute Foundation in 1975; Fredrik's Cosmic Spaced Out Blues Band and Orchestra played at the Second RLDS Church chili supper in 1974 (hence all the farting and shitting jokes); the Turtle Music tracks were recorded atop the midget pyramid in McCoy Park Missouri in 1976. These disperate items were compiled and released to commemorate the First Annual End of the World Celebration on 18 November 1976, and originally issued as a mono recording in an edition of 200 copies by Cavern Custom. The bonus tracks filling out this CD come from an equally insane enterprise, a work for electronic tape, performers and narrator called The Wandering Madness of Basilea, The Great Mother. This is something to get excited about. Let's face it, you and I would never find a vinyl copy of anything like this nor would we care to devote years of fruitless searching to finding it; if we ever knew it existed in the first place. Let's hear it for CD reissues! And hats off to the Paradigm label, in whose catalogue this does seem somewhat untypical - we look forward to further weirdies in a similar jugular vein... (Ed Pinsent)

TOP

Blowing outsider is REV DWIGHT FRIZZELL who - with his band ANAL MAGIC - recorded one of the '70s forgotten (until now) underground masterworks. 'Beyond The Black Crack' (Paradigm Discs)***** was originally released in '76 in an edition of 200 mono copies, the bulk of which scarcely saw the light of day before they were either junked or hoovered up into the cavernous collections of various weird record connoisseurs. Miraculously, Frizzell's strange mix of electronics, free jazz and turtle worship has (thanks to Paradigm) now been sucked into the butt end of the '90s for a whole new audience to discover for the first time ever. If the idea of Sun Ra's Arkestra jamming with electric-era Miles Davies and Frank Zappa on some distant burnt-out asteroid appeals, then this could be for you. That said, however, Frizzell's mysterious and alluring tenor sax drone on Oh What It Is To Know You Have A Turtle Heart shows that he wasn't playing it all for laughs. More than just an oddity, 'Beyond The Black Crack' burns with a genuine passion to create something special. (Edwin Pouncey)

The WIRE

To call 'Beyond The Black Crack' 'legendary' would be an outright lie, as you would have to have been a member of Nurse With Wound to have even heard of it. Where Paradigm are pulling these re-releases from I've no idea, but the story goes like this: originally issued in 1976, Reverend Dwight Frizzell was a classically American oddball in the style of Jack, or even Harry, Smith. A film maker and apparent Doctor of Metaphysics, he recorded 'Beyond The Black Crack' in two years, on stage and out in the fields. It's a patchwork of badly-spliced industrial ritual (à la Hermann Nitsch!), classic private-press psychedelia and atonal jazz occasionally punctured by the damaged rantings of a stoned Beck-soundalike. Also included are some outtakes and unreleased experiments. Just what you most surely need. (David Keenan)