Bruce Haack - 1970 - The Electric Lucifer

Quality: 5 out of 5
Trip-O-Meter: 5 out of 5

Bruce Haack expended a lot of his efforts on children's and novelty music. Here, he tries to make a more 'adult' album, although the insane concept and sounds keeps it charmingly goofy. I guess you could say that this album sits at a crossroads among the Jefferson Airplane, the easy listening Moog stylings of Perry and Kingsley, and wacked out mysticism. No, that combination doesn't really make sense, but that's probably a good thing for this album. The album's concept has to do with 'Powerlove,' a force that is supposed to bring humanity together and reunite it with the forgiven Lucifer. Word up!

Despite the concept, this album comes across best as a series of great, and very out there, tunes. My favorite here is "Program Me," which really does come across like alien doppelgangers of the Jefferson Airplane playing rubber instruments in a glass moon dome. "National Anthem to the Moon," meanwhile, has a great minor-key melody and "Electric To Me Turn" features some awesome homemade vocoder. "Word Game" is sort of an even more deranged version of what Haack was doing with Miss Nelson. For a dose of pure psychedelic madness, I direct you to "Super Nova." You get your 'powerlove' anthem with "Requiem," although it entertainingly loses focus after each verse, and then ends with a bit of "The First Noel."

This is a pretty phenomenal album. It's certainly unlike anything else that you'll come across. Bruce Haack really was a mad genius. Although his approach and music was extremely different, I feel that Haack must have shared the same astral plane as Sun Ra (I like to think they still do). When I bought this one on vinyl, the fellow at the record store gave me a discount for the simple fact that I was buying The Electric Lucifer.

Bruce Haack - 1968 - Way Out Record For Children

Quality: 3.5 out of 5
Trip-O-Meter: 4.5 out of 5

Bruce Haack was an early electronic music pioneer who went to the trouble of creating his own electric noise makers and synthesizers. He also had a serious whimsical streak, which must have brought in contact with Miss Nelson, his collaborator for this and a few other albums from the period. I believe Miss Nelson was a bona fide kindergarten teacher, and this is a bona fide children's album. Granted, I get an image of the kids in Huxley's Brave New World dancing to this just after their first hit of soma, but that's still children's music, yeah?

For the most part, these are more chants and stories than proper songs, but Haack's musical insanity often comes springing out of nowhere for a passage or three. 'Motorcycle Ride' doesn't have much more than a (sampled?) drum loop going for it musically, but the strange affectations of the vocals make me think of tots rolling down the street in a bike gang. 'Mudra' is probably the most mind bending of the tracks here, with the structure of a basic kindergarten activity, but the synthesized faux-Eastern sounds making the whole thing far stranger. "Accents" will just hurt your brain, but I suppose that it is somewhat educational. "Nothing to Do" is just waiting for a Yo La Tengo cover - maybe they've already gotten to it.

There aren't many psychedelic children's albums out there, and it's perfectly possible that all of them were made by Bruce Haack and Miss Nelson. Should you actually play it for your kid? Probably not - but I did. She seems to like J-pop better, though.