Head: Head (Buddah Records) (1970)

Buddah Records might be more notable for bubblegum acts like The Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, but to be fair, Captain Beefheart was also on that label for his debut album, Safe as Milk (by far the most credible artist to end up on the label). One of the more unusual albums you’ll ever come across this long-defunct label is Head, which shows some pretty bizarre sci-fi artwork (looks like its on some cold, desolate planet) on the cover. Plus the album came with a coloring book, but in this day and age, the coloring book is a little hard to come by, and it’s easy to figure out why: some owner probably had a kid who used it as an actual coloring book. Unfortunately my copy didn’t come with the coloring book. Though you have to look hard to find out who actually did the music, it was actually Nik Raicevic, a Los Angeles-based electronic music, who happened to go by a bunch of other names, like Nik Pascal, Nik Pascal Raicevic, and Pascal. In 1973, he even made an appearance (on percussion) on the Rolling Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup! But of course, nothing he recorded himself is anywhere as mainstream as the Stones. This is pretty trippy, spacy experimental electronic music played on modular Moog synth. There are three extended cuts, all bearing the titles of drugs. The first, at over 17 minutes, is “Cannabis Sativa”, you hear plenty of strange spacy sound effects and droning, in a rather minimalist context. “Methedrine” consists of strange rushing sounds, while “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide” is more or less in the vein of “Cannabis Sativa”. Listening to this, you know right away you’re not listening to Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene, that’s for sure. And I really can’t say if this music is the sound of being under the influence of one of those drugs or not, but you can imagine it was. This is one of those albums that never saw the light of day on CD, and probably never will. So that means you need to hold on your turntables and look hard.

Thanks to the content of the album, Buddah Records kicked Raicevic off the label. He started his own label called Narco Records and released several more off-the-wall electronic albums, Beyond the End… Eternity (1971), Sixth Ear (1972), Magnetic Web (1973), and Zero Gravity (1975), before retiring from music. It’s my understanding in 1976 Nik sold his equipment to a certain San Diego race car driver named Steve Roach, who in the 1980s and ’90s, made a name for himself in electronic/New Age music (including collaborations with Australian didgeridoo player David Hudson). I can understand why Nik Raicevic threw in the towel in the mid 1970s: electronic music was going to get a lot more normal, and unfortunately in the 1980s, devolve into New Age (look what happened to Tangerine Dream!).

Truly a nice historical curiosity of electronic music, and well worth it if you like off-the-wall stuff!