HHV Records Vinyl 382 Items

In 1968, Janis Joplin decided to go solo while her album 'Cheap Thrills' with Big Brother & the Holding Company was still on top of the charts. 'I Got Them Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!' was her first effort. She leans more towards Soul/Rock than on her previous work, with heavy horn arrangements from her accompanying band. The album contains the lead hit single 'Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)'. The audio is sourced from the original masters and features the original artwork.

Cavity-causing Cordovox-driven 1969 girl-group garage! A delightful romp through 'Oye Como Va,' 'Proud Mary,' 'Walkin' The Dog,' 'Son Of A Preacher Man,' their chicle sticky original title track, and so much more! Cordovox organ, trumpet, bass, drums, congas, and tambourine! Not a guitar in sight! Out of sight! Pressed on cloud white vinyl!

The Ethiopians were one of Jamaica’s most popular bands during the late ska, rocksteady and early reggae periods. The much loved harmony group began working with the legendary producer Carl ‘Sir J.J.’ Johnson after a series of successful ska and rocksteady hits. This collaboration resulted in some of the biggest reggae hits of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Most notable hits were “Everything Crash”, “What A Fire”, “Feel The Spirit”, “Hong Kong Flu” and “Woman Capture Man”, which are all included on their 1969 debut album Reggae Power. The album cover features a photo of future Carry On Girls-actress Pauline Peart. Reggae Power is available on black vinyl.

Crazed time signatures abound as musicians from the West look East for inspiration, infusing their rock and jazz sounds with vibes looted from India and the Far East. A true marriage of Western and (Middle) Eastern music with a fuzzed-out psychedelic edge. Released originally in 1969, Middle Eastern Rock is a unique, compelling fusion record from Armenian-American oud player John Berberian. The Rock East Ensemble, Beberian's backing band, consists of the artist's standard group, which specializes in traditional Armenian music with a jazz edge, and American session musicians who bring more of a rock sound. The results, which blend elements of psychedelia, free jazz, surf music, and various klezmer, African, and Middle Eastern textures, are dazzling, and are sure to thrill anyone with a taste for rare "outside" albums. ' AllMusic Review by Anthony Tognazzini

At the end of the '60s in Italy - but also abroad, especially in France and
England - a very particular trend began to spread, that one known as 'Library
music' or 'sonorization': as suggested by its name, those were real music
libraries intended for the accompaniment of audiovisual productions such as
television programs, advertisements, documentaries and films. Since they
were created in total artistic freedom condition, they are often difficult if not
impossible to catalog, as they're not anchored to a specific musical genre;
this freedom also allowed the authors to compose, sometimes in the most
complete anonymity, experimental and avant-garde music, capable of
anticipating the sounds that only many years later would have been
widespread on a larger scale.
Oronzo De Filippi is known not only for his library music works, but also for
having been part of the project The Braen's Machine, together with
Alessandro Alessandroni, another very important name in this context.
"Meccanizzazione" is a completely instrumental record - like practically all
LP's in this genre - literally dominated by the sound of the harpsichord, and it
substantially features two main kinds of compositions: the most 'friendly' and
easy-listening ones with a jazz-lounge and bossanova flavor, and the darker
and hypnotic ones, decidedly more fitting the repetitiveness of the industrial
world and its machines at work.
"Ritmo dell'industria N. 2" is part of a reissues series, made in collaboration
with Edizioni Leonardi (Milan, Italy), of extremely rare library music LP's
published between late '60s and early '70s, most of which have never been
released again until today, and that are finally made available again for
collectors and sonorization music lovers.

A deep dive into the one of most collectable jazz catalogues in the world, a selection of some of the rarest and most sought-after recordings from the 60s and 70s, a time when British jazz began to find its own identity. Drawn from the iconic labels of Decca, Deram, Argo, EMI Columbia/Lansdowne Series, Fontana, Mercury, & Philips. Kenny Wheeler was born Canada in 1930 and, with encouragement from his father - himself a trombone player - began playing trumpet at age 12. After studying at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory, he arrived in London in 1952, his playing enveloped in the sounds of Miles Davis, Booker Little, and Fats Navarro. In 1959, Wheeler joined the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra and stayed there until 1963, although he returned frequently for shows and other projects in the years that followed. He quickly become a distinguished soloist in the Orchestra and appeared on Dankworth’s key sixties albums. Wheeler met and played with the rising artists of London’s free jazz scene. Players such as Trevor Watts, Derek Bailey, and Evan Parker, musicians who would challenge the conventions of the day, eschewing formal composition and structure to embark on group improvisation. For a musician thoroughly schooled in all the conventions of charts and dance bands as Wheeler was, this was a radical departure. Wheeler’s contributions proved his ample flexibility and showed he was capable of inhabiting both the free environment and the more formal and controlled settings of a big band and orchestra. This was shown most clearly on his debut album, Windmill Tilter, recorded for Fontana with the John Dankworth Orchestra. The album features a young John McLaughlin on guitar along with bassist Dave Holland and a roster of talented and well respected musicians playing on one of the greatest modern jazz big band and orchestral albums.

Nina Simone ably picked a variety of compositional classics from the new Rock era for her 1969 LP To Love Somebody. Opening with a beautiful, introspective version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," Simone shows an obvious affinity for social statements with the Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)" and a trio of Dylan standards: "I Shall Be Released," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," plus a dramatic, meditative "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

180g vinyl.

Four Sail is the fourth album by the American Rock band Love, released in 1969. By mid-1968, Arthur Lee was the only remaining member of the Forever Changes line-up of Love. Three LPs worth of material were recorded in a makeshift studio in a Los Angeles warehouse, released as Four Sail and the Blue Thumb LP Out Here. This expanded edition of Four Sail includes three bonus tracks.

180g vinyl.

“Metti, una sera a cena” is a 1969 movie directed by Joseph Patrons Griffi, made up from an eponymous theater script and especially transposed to the film medium. It immediately obtained consents and success, and paved the road to success for actors Florinda Bolkan and Tony Musante in particular. So did the music written by Ennio Morricone, who in 1970 won the Nastro D’Argento Award for Best Score. Lounge sounds, bossa nova, jazz (especially the drums touch) and beat (usually still in vogue in the Italy of the late ’60s), seasoned with orchestral arrangements conducted by Bruno Nicolai, merge here to one of the most famous soundtracks of the Italian Maestro. A perfect mix of eroticism and melancholy, for a real classic! This edition offers the original soundtrack released in 1969 on Cinevox Record in a new artwork, a gatefold cover and colored vinyl. A bonus track is also included, the song “Hurry to me” sung by The Sandpipers, a folk/pop trio who became famous at the time for their version of the popular “Guantanamera”.

180 gram audiophile vinyl
Includes 4-page booklet
Features "Mr. Bojangles" and "About Her Eyes"
Limited edition of 750 individually copies on gold coloured vinyl

Jerry Jeff Walker was an American country music and folk singer-songwriter. He was a leading figure in the progressive country and outlaw country music movement, best known for having written the 1968 song "Mr. Bojangles". The late '60s and early '70s were an interesting time during which a number of enduring singer-songwriter albums were released, and this album is a prime example.

Originally released in 1969, Five Years Gone is a forward-looking album rooted in late-'60s folk and folk-rock rather than popular country. The poetic, yet sometimes inscrutable, lyrics owe more to Bob Dylan than any Nashville tradition. For this album, Jerry Jeff Walker was joined by some Nashville heavyweights, including Weldon Myrick, Hargus "Pig" Robbins, and Charlie McCoy.

Five Years Gone is available as a limited edition of 750 individually numbered copies on gold coloured vinyl, including a 4-page booklet.

Touted as the “new Doors,” Ars Nova’s second release shows the band genre-bending jazz and heavy psychedelia in a style that’s their own. Shifting from a largely classical centric sound, this was the group’s last album before going their separate ways. Pressed on pink vinyl!

Sunshine & Shadows takes the baroque-meets-psych sound of the debut and turns a bit more to the psych side. The stately brass interludes are gone, but horns still figure prominently in the mix. There’s some jazzy New Orleans flavor to a couple of the tunes, albeit twisted into a 7/4 vamp on “You Had Better Listen.”

The instrumentalists in the band, featuring trumpet and trombone, really give the music a unique flavor, setting them apart from the multitudes of other American psych bands. Ars Nova might be likened to Ultimate Spinach (but without the overly serious, pretentious lyrics) or later Zombies (though with less emphasis on the keyboards).

It’s all very well written and nicely played, and when they do a tender ballad like “Temporary Serenade,” the acoustic guitar is very lute-like, much more along the lines of classical than folk (like the later work of Jan Akkerman with Focus), and the trumpet descant adds a lovely spice.

“Well, Well, Well” is the heaviest rock tune in their repertoire, with a great electric guitar riff and hot organ playing, again set apart by trombone and trumpet. This one is definitely worth seeking out for baroque pop fans.

One of the rarest psychedelic garage albums ever, the Kaleidoscope album was recorded in the Dominican Republic by this Boricuan/Dominican band but released only in Mexico in 1969 as a tiny pressing, housed in a fantastic psychedelic sleeve designed by Bodo Molitor.

Although Veloso had already been thrown in jail once for his criticism of Brazil’s military regime, he continued to speak out against it on his second album (1969), with tracks like “Irene”, (about a machine gun-toting outlaw celebrated by the left). No wonder he would soon find himself in political exile in the UK. The general tone of the album is in keeping with its dire message and actually, Veloso felt it was important for his voice of protest to be heard around the world. If he was a high profile public figure, he felt that he would be safer. All this (or perhaps because of all this) and the man still managed to make excellent records! Color vinyl version.

Due to high demand, Svart Records will release represses of Wigwam's early works on vinyl once again. The Finnish legends in Wigwam are no strangers to fans of Progressive Rock around the world. Their debut album Hard N’ Horny from 1969 and the following Tombstone Valentine from 1970 are a couple of cornerstones among many in their impeccable discography. The previous Svart editions of these absolute classics by the pioneers of early progressive rock date back to 2019, so it was about time to bring back these must-haves to the market.

Hard N’ Horny started the legacy of Wigwam. Album’s A-side is jazzy, early prog-rock by the keyboardist Jukka Gustavson, with an exception on the first track written by the original bass player Mats Huldén. Lots of heavy organ, jazzy piano, and some vocal parts by Gustavson. The B-side is ‘60s psychedelia written by the British-born vocalist Jim Pembroke. It consists of songs about a man called Henry, together forming a mini Rock opera.

Self-released in 1969 ‘Our Thing’ is the debut album of the performing Houston unit known as Kashmere Stage Band. The Texas student band came together at the Kashmere High School and under the direction of musical director Conrad O. Johnson, released a series of cult album on Kram Records, before disbanding in 1978. Raw funk, that’s basically what they’ve been playing and clearly there was a blacksploitation feel all over the place, but their drive was quite unique. Rediscover the myth.

'Miles in Tokyo' is a live album recorded on July 14, 1964, by the Miles Davis Quintet (featuring Sam Rivers, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams) at the Tokyo Kosei Nenkin Kaikan, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. It is the first recording of Davis in Japan and the only album to showcase an early incarnation of his Second Great Quintet featuring Sam Rivers on tenor saxophone, following George Coleman's departure. After this, Wayne Shorter's appointment completed the classic line-up which recorded such albums as 'ESP' and 'Miles Smiles', through to 'Miles in the Sky'. The legendary 'Miles in Tokyo' album is now available on vinyl in Europe for the first time. The heavyweight gatefold contains a 4 page-booklet glued inside, like the original 1969 Japanese LP version.

The 1969 follow up to Silver Apple’s debut found the duo digging into the far reaches of their songwriting psyches for a darker and more emotionally charged set of songs. While the debut set the stage for a sound the world had never heard before, Contact is where the Silver Apples began inhabiting that sound with more urgency and experimentation.

Sourced from the original master tapes plus inner sleeve with unseen master tape box photos. Featuring the original controversial artwork with the Silver Apples in the cockpit of a Pan Am jet on the front, and a plane crash with the duo superimposed over it, on the back. The airline sued both Kapp Records & the band, forcing the band to breakup. Their highly influential sound has influenced countless bands from Stereolab, Beastie Boys, Blur and more.

As the Soft Machine's first bassist and original principal songwriter, Kevin Ayers was an overlooked force behind the group's groundbreaking recordings in 1967 and 1968. Joy Of A Toy is his debut solo album, its whimsical and unique vision is a clear indication of how Soft Machine might have progressed under Ayers' tenure. On the LP he is accompanied by his Soft Machine colleagues Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge and Hugh Hopper.

180g vinyl.

'Miles in Tokyo' is a live album recorded on July 14, 1964, by the Miles Davis Quintet (featuring Sam Rivers, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams) at the Tokyo Kosei Nenkin Kaikan, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. It is the first recording of Davis in Japan and the only album to showcase an early incarnation of his Second Great Quintet featuring Sam Rivers on tenor saxophone, following George Coleman's departure. After this, Wayne Shorter's appointment completed the classic line-up which recorded such albums as 'ESP' and 'Miles Smiles', through to 'Miles in the Sky'. The legendary 'Miles in Tokyo' album is now available on vinyl in Europe for the first time. The heavyweight gatefold contains a 4 page-booklet glued inside, like the original 1969 Japanese LP version.

The 1967 Impulse Records legendary Funk/Soul Instrumental masterpiece album Chicken Fat. If you haven’t heard Chicken Fat yet, get ready because the LP won’t leave your turntable until your jaw stops hitting the floor. Sourced from the original analog master tapes by Kevin Grey. All Analog Process (aaa) Initially working as a guitar player for such greats as Sonny Boy Williamson & Etta James, Impulse Records eventually offered Mel Brown the chance to record his own material. Recorded in 1967 in Hollywood, CA, for the Impulse record label, Brown amassed a group of session musicians who had played with Charles Mingus, Marvin Gaye, and Dizzy Gillespie. Much of the album was arranged by Oliver Nelson, who worked with Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Smith and more. His touch is felt all over the record and helps solidify the journey. These recording sessions also reflected the Sunset Strip and the energy of late ‘60s Los Angeles so incredibly, you can almost hear the go-go boots hit the floor to dance til they drop.

LP issued to celebrate more European artists than ever before winning the annual “Downbeat” polls in 1969. On this release they all perform as a unit.

My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton. She had a voice like Billie Holiday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed"- Bob Dylan This essential folk/blues classic, originally released in 1969, was the debut album by Karen Dalton. Dalton was discovered by singer/songwriter Fred Neil, who introduced her to producer Nick Venet (the man who signed The Beach Boys and took The Beatles to America). She cut most of the tracks with one take, and all in one night. A perfectionist, Dalton was hard to convince to record, and producers Venet and Neil were only successful by tricking her into thinking the tape wasn't rolling. "Some find Karen Dalton's voice difficult to listen to", wrote Al/Music critic Richie Unterberger. "But Dalton's vocals aren't that hard to take, and they are expressive; like Buffy Sainte-Marie, it just does take some getting used to because of their unconventional timbre." On this album, Dalton covers a wide range of styles, from lim Hardin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Leadbelly to the traditional folk song "Ribbon Bow" and the Eddie Floyd/Booker T. Jones penned soul tune "I Love You More Than Words Can Say." She also sings a couple of Neil tunes. After years of drug abuse, Dalton died in 1993, aged 55. Although she didn't enjoy commercial success during her lifetime, her work has gained significant recognition since her death, and artists like Nick Cave, Devendra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom have noted her as an influence.

The 1967 Impulse Records legendary Funk/Soul Instrumental masterpiece album Chicken Fat. If you haven’t heard Chicken Fat yet, get ready because the LP won’t leave your turntable until your jaw stops hitting the floor. Sourced from the original analog master tapes by Kevin Grey. All Analog Process (aaa) Initially working as a guitar player for such greats as Sonny Boy Williamson & Etta James, Impulse Records eventually offered Mel Brown the chance to record his own material. Recorded in 1967 in Hollywood, CA, for the Impulse record label, Brown amassed a group of session musicians who had played with Charles Mingus, Marvin Gaye, and Dizzy Gillespie. Much of the album was arranged by Oliver Nelson, who worked with Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Smith and more. His touch is felt all over the record and helps solidify the journey. These recording sessions also reflected the Sunset Strip and the energy of late ‘60s Los Angeles so incredibly, you can almost hear the go-go boots hit the floor to dance til they drop.

Jeff Beck's second album, originally released in 1969 and featuring Rod Stewart on vocals and Ronnie Wood on guitar.

Track Listing:

Side A: 1. All Shook Up 2. Spanish Boots 3. Girl From Mill Valley 4. Jailhouse Rock Side B: 5. Plynth (Water Down The Drain) 6. The Hangman's Knee 7. Rice Pudding

Here’s the official reissue of the album originally released on Dallas Pompeii label in April 1969. When he was out on tour with his regular gig, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Ike found the time to cut this unbelievable instrumental album. Whenever he had some spare time he would drag the band into a local studio and lay down tracks, resulting in these 12 funky soul jams that sound like they were lifted from a blaxploitation movie. The band is tight and laid-back at once, with horns at the forefront most of the time. Los Angeles hip-hop group Jurassic 5 later sampled "Getting Nasty" on their self-titled EP.

Vinyl reissue of the live album by American jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Featuring tracks recorded in Italy in 1961, during an extensive European tour that also resulted in recordings from Paris. The album was originally released on the Riverside label in 1963 and would be Monk's final recording for the label before signing with Columbia. Includes the tracks 'Straight No Chaser', 'Bemsha Swing' and 'Rhythm-A-Ning.

Jewels of Thought is an album by the American jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. It was recorded at Plaza Sound Studios in New York City on October 20, 1969, and was released on Impulse! Records in the same year.

Touted as the “new Doors,” Ars Nova’s second release shows the band genre-bending jazz and heavy psychedelia in a style that’s their own. Shifting from a largely classical centric sound, this was the group’s last album before going their separate ways. Pressed on pink vinyl!

Sunshine & Shadows takes the baroque-meets-psych sound of the debut and turns a bit more to the psych side. The stately brass interludes are gone, but horns still figure prominently in the mix. There’s some jazzy New Orleans flavor to a couple of the tunes, albeit twisted into a 7/4 vamp on “You Had Better Listen.”

The instrumentalists in the band, featuring trumpet and trombone, really give the music a unique flavor, setting them apart from the multitudes of other American psych bands. Ars Nova might be likened to Ultimate Spinach (but without the overly serious, pretentious lyrics) or later Zombies (though with less emphasis on the keyboards).

It’s all very well written and nicely played, and when they do a tender ballad like “Temporary Serenade,” the acoustic guitar is very lute-like, much more along the lines of classical than folk (like the later work of Jan Akkerman with Focus), and the trumpet descant adds a lovely spice.

“Well, Well, Well” is the heaviest rock tune in their repertoire, with a great electric guitar riff and hot organ playing, again set apart by trombone and trumpet. This one is definitely worth seeking out for baroque pop fans.

* Newly Remastered!* Ultra rare 1969 private press psych-folk-rock masterpiece – featuring the legendary Wrecking Crew (Beach Boys, Phil Spector) * Lacquers cut by John Golden Mastering * Plated at Record Technology Inc. (rti) * Includes deep booklet with liner notes by Andria Lisle, rare photos, archival materials and full lyrics (LP: 16-pgs, CD: 48-pgs) In March 1975, Jim Sullivan mysteriously disappeared outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His VW bug was found abandoned, his motel room untouched. Some think he got lost in the desert. Some think he fell foul of a local family with alleged mafia ties. Some think he was abducted by aliens.

By coincidence – or perhaps not – Jim’s 1969 debut album was titled U.F.O. Released in tiny numbers on a private label, it too was truly lost, until Seattle’s Light In The Attic Records begun a years-long quest to give it the full release it deserves – and to solve the mystery of Sullivan’s disappearance. Only one of those things happened.

For record collectors, some albums are considered impossible to get hold of, records so rare you could sit on eBay for years and not get a sniff of a copy. U.F.O. is one of those albums. A seventh son, Jim Sullivan was a West Coast should-have-been, an Irish-American former high school quarterback whose gift for storytelling earned him cult status in the Malibu bar where he performed nightly. Sullivan was always on the edge of fame; hanging out with movie stars like Harry Dean Stanton, performing on the Jose Feliciano show, even stealing a cameo in the ultimate hippie movie, Easy Rider.

Friend and actor Al Dobbs thought he could change all that, and founded a label – Monnie Records – to release Jim’s album, enlisting the assistance of Phil Spector’s legendary sessioneers The Wrecking Crew to do so. That’s Don Randi, Earl Palmer and Jimmy Bond you can hear, the latter also acting as producer and arranger.

U.F.O. was a different beast to the one-man-and-his-guitar stuff Jim had been doing on stage; instead, it was a fully realised album of scope and imagination, a folk-rock record with its head in the stratosphere. Sullivan’s voice is deep and expressive like Fred Neil with a weathered and worldly Americana sound like Joe South, pop songs that aren’t happy – but filled with despair. The album is punctuated with a string section (that recalls David Axelrod), other times a Wurlitzer piano provides the driving groove (as if Memphis great Jim Dickinson was running the show). U.F.O. is a slice of American pop music filtered from the murky depths of Los Angeles, by way of the deep south.

With no music industry contacts, the record went largely unnoticed, and Jim simply moved on, releasing a further album on the Playboy label in 1972. But by 1975, his marriage breaking up, Jim left, for Nashville and the promise of a new life as a sessioneer in the home of C&W. That’s where it gets hazy.

We know he was stopped by cops for swerving on the highway in Santa Rosa, some 15 hours after setting off. We know he was taken to a local police station, found to be sober, and told to go to the local La Mesa Motel to get some rest, which he did. Some time later, his car was spotted on a ranch belonging to the local Genetti family, who confronted him about his business there. The next day his car was found 26 miles down the road, abandoned. His car and his hotel room contained, among other things, his twelve-string guitar, his wallet, his clothes and several copies of his second album, but no note, and no Jim. It was as if he had simply vanished into thin air.

Jim’s family travelled out to join search parties looking for him, the local papers printed missing person stories, but the search proved fruitless. Around the same time, the local sheriff retired and the Genettis moved to Hawaii. Jim’s manager Robert “Buster” Ginter later stated that during the early morning hours of a long evening Jim and Buster were talking about what would you do if they had to disappear. Jim said he’d walk into the desert and never come back.

Tracking down the truth behind Jim’s mystery became an obsession of Light In The Attic’s Matt Sullivan (no relation) when he happened upon a copy of the album and fell in love. He took on a cross country pilgrimage in search of master tapes and truth, and came back with neither, despite hundreds of phone calls, e-mails, letters, faxes, private detectives, telepathy, palm readings and meetings with Jim’s wife, son and producer. Thanks to superb digital mastering techniques, Light In The Attic is still able to present a clean, near perfect copy of Jim’s masterpiece for general consumption for the first time. Enjoy. And remember, beyond the mystery, there’s the music.

“Gabor Szabo exploded onto the American jazz scene in the early sixties. His unusual approach and unique sound brought something startling and new to jazz. With Chico Hamilton, Charles Lloyd and Gary McFarland, Szabo offered something few in jazz had ever heard before: guitarist as enchanter and conjurer and musician as storyteller and mesmerist. Once Szabo declared his independence in 1966, he also proved how seamlessly jazz can blend the Beatles and Bacharach with Latin and Indian styles. The guitarist released a string of albums on Impulse that challenged many assumptions about jazz and stand out today as some of the most radical, yet appealing music of the period. But the times were woefully a-changing. Szabo biographer Károly Libisch considers the year 1969 a “turning point” for the guitarist. The spell Szabo weaved in the press was beginning to wane. The blizzard of coverage he generated in the previous few years began to trickle off. Perhaps the rise of rock – and rock-guitar heroes – tamped down the guitarist’s exotic allure and faddish charm. Then, too, Szabo’s erratic behavior started attracting poor notices and hastened the demise of his storied quintet, featuring guitarist Jimmy Stewart and percussionist Hal Gordon, in late 1968. Now, both Gabor Szabo, the artist and businessman, needed a hit. 1969 was his response to the call of 1969.

The album was released in August 1969, initial reviews were positive. Cash Box raved that Gabor Szabo 1969 “is magnificent music, and an album that deserves great success” while Record World called it “luscious guitaring” that features “lots of contemporary material, which he makes completely his own.” Gabor Szabo 1969 never did find the success it was seeking. But it remains a lovely listening experience that finds the guitarist at his melodic best at an important crossroads in his recording career. “

An Electric Storm is justly renowned among techno boffins as one of the first albums to fuse pop and electronic music before the advent of the Moog synthesizer. But you don't have to be versed in the language of sine waves and oscillators to enjoy this mostly delightful and hugely inventive album. For although the White Noise were almost exclusively composed of virtuoso knob twiddlers and tape splicers moonlighting from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, luckily they were no slouches when it came to penning a decent tune. There's also anarchic humor at play on the manic "Here Come the Fleas," which contains more edits in its two minutes than the whole of Sgt. Pepper's.Yet it's the retro-futurist textures that still grab the ear most. These are sounds that will be familiar to anyone who knows the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet or the early series of Doctor Who, but they had never before been deployed in the service of pop music, nor have they since. And whereas the Moog would supplant all of these primitive, time-consuming techniques of sound generation and manipulation within the year, it also destroyed much of electronic music's spirit of adventure in the process. How could you boldly go where no man had gone before when your sound universe was suddenly overlaid by tram lines and route maps? So although most of the songs that make up the first half of An Electric Storm are pretty much your standard-issue polite British psychedelia (the somewhat embarrassing United States of America-style orgy of "My Game of Loving" aside), the way they're dressed up still sounds innovative decades later. Sometimes songs dissolve into bleeps, whooshes, and gurgles that hurtle between your speakers, but compared to the extended guitar and organ solos that were common currency at the time, they are the very essence of restraint. That said, restraint was put to the sword on the final two tracks, the 12-minute "The Visitations" and the seven-minute "The Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell." The former is a decidedly spooky "Leader of the Pack"-style drama with a supernatural twist. The biker, having departed this life, attempts to make one last attempt to cross over and console his grieving beloved, only to fall agonizingly short. If you can suspend your disbelief -- and persuade yourself that the biker's departing spirit doesn't sound like a cappuccino machine -- it's spine-tingling stuff that you won't dare listen to with the lights off. Which is more than can be said for the concluding track, a would-be satanic jam session botched together in a hurry to meet Island's suddenly imposed deadline.