Music primarily created as a soundtrack always risks being in the shadow of its visual counterpart. Certainly, when sitting through an initial stunned screening of Suzan Pitt’s remarkable 1979 animation, Asparagus online, our minds were far more challenged by trying to fathom the richly psychedelic visuals and perplexing oddness. Set in a dreamlike world, accessed via a bathroom mirror, the 18-minute animation, that took 4 years to make, – loops, ripples and mutates. Drawn in a style that sits somewhere between Giorgio de Chirico and Henri Rosseau paintings, and Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet film. A Venn diagram between surrealism and hallucinogens.
Asparagus, as a film, is filled with sexuality, sensuality, and transformations. All underpinned with a sense that what’s happening on screen, at any given moment, could well be a hallucination, as much as a carefully drawn cellulose frame. The effect, as it washes over you, is an eery and unsettling magnetism, that takes us back to watching Yellow Submarine as a child.
Despite the vibrance, the story happens in a silent space. The music function seems to initially give a sense of little more than generic slabs of human activity and presence. Normality filtered and layered like some sort of shorthand sonic version of everyday. The sound feels the most normal part of what’s experienced, but when regarded in isolation, it’s quickly apparent, they are every bit as skewed and head bending as the visuals…
This new album released by the ever-stunning label, Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle, focusses on the sound alone, and is an absolute stunner. Featuring music composed and performed by Richard Teitelbaum, along with contributions (for the soundtrack) from Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacy, George Lewis and Steve Potts, is gathered into 70 minutes of trippy bliss.
The first half of the double album is dedicated to the 33 minutes of Asparagus (European Version) in which Teitelbaum plays a Moog and Polymoog. The whole piece slowly drifts between heady clouds of energy, like a waking dream. Slowly the piece pulls itself apart in ever expanding waves that never seem to stray far from your attention, despite almost nothing ever being in focus.
Side 3 is filled with Asparagus (Original Soundtrack), in which Teitelbaum presumably reworks the tape from the European Version and adds elements from his group of contributors. It’s not quite clear who does what other than the woozy cloud of jazz textures, that drift in and out of focus. The middle section gathers into a lopsided barn dance before finally locking into a pulsating twinkly stew of weird delights.
After this stupendous lysergia, the final piece Threshold Music stretches across almost 22 minutes and feels like an even vaguer almost ungraspable drift. The granular surface of tape, blending with field recordings, scraping drones and shadows, somehow referencing, and reconfiguring the previous pieces into a mist.
Teitlbaum, who sadly passed away in 2020 had a long and hugely interesting career. Perhaps most famous for his part in the earliest iteration of the absolutely wild Musica Elettronica Viva, and several collaborations with Anthony Braxton, and many others. The constant seemed to be seeking new settings for his keyboard and synth-based improvisations. Whilst his discography is vast and varied, Aspargus feels like a particularly remarkable latter day point of entry into his fascinating sonic world.
Whilst the film originally enjoyed an extended midnight cinema run with the far more celebrated industrial gloom of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. That film, with also features Peter Ivers In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song) both seem to have enjoyed decades of out there adulation since. Several articles that do zone in on Pitt’s film barely even mention the soundtrack. But for us, a near half century later, the true weird gem that was obscured by various more seemingly apparent layers has finally found its own hugely deserving spotlight.
Asparagus by Richard Teitelbaum is undoubtably one on the oddest and most powerfully captivating albums to come our way in a long time. It’s somehow the type of deeply psychedelic music we hoped was hiding out there, and now finally it’s here.
Allow yourself to become completely absorbed by this music, and allow it to put a zap in your day. You’ll never look at asparagus the same way again…
Asparagus is out March 29 on 2x vinyl and digital on Black Truffle.
Pre-order here and here
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