Remix alert: Captain Beefheart’s ‘Safe as Milk’ album reworked by Al Lover
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The tributes and hat-tips continue to pour forth for Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, who died on Dec. 17. The singer and composer, who spent his formative years in Los Angeles, concocted strange rhythms and sounds and combined them in curious structures to create something resembling free jazz and rock. (‘Free rock’?)
In the spirit of Beefheart’s innovative work, producer/remixer Al Lover has created a thrilling, weird remix of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s first album, ‘Safe as Milk.’ On it, the San Francisco-based sample maven takes beats, guitar sounds, rhythms and random chaotic sounds and compiles them into instrumental excursions.
Writes Lover of the process: ‘Created in one week of all-nighters, heavy alcohol consumption, and paranoid reclusiveness the results are both gruesome and beautiful -- drowned with delay, beat to death by distortion, and hung out to dry on a tambourine. A heavy cloud cover of sonic bombardment cut by thunderous crushing drums, the album is a hologram of the original seen through a shattered mirror reflecting into eternity.’ (via The Daily Swarm)
The reworked full length is called ‘Safe As Milk Replica,’ and you can download it in its entirety here. Or if you want to sample it first, here’s a taste.
-- Randall Roberts
