vampyros lesbos - sexadelic dance party

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Hipness has come full circle with the rise in popularity of vintage Sixties and Seventies exotica film soundracks. Some of the veteran studio musicians play on these sountracks and do so with abandon and laser-like percision. It's a rare opprotunity to hear usually staid studio hands playing with an over-the-top enthusiasm they seldom have a chance to display. Hired studio guns have a thankless task when they back well known singers. The producer usually orders them to stay in the background and cheeky solos are regarded as taboo, for fear of upstaging the "artiste" who is paying them handsomely for their time.

"The Vampyros Lesbos Sexadelic Dance Party" is an example just how good it can get when these expert musicians are allowed to rip. Beatnick hipster arrangements with plenty of tempo shifts and thematic improvisation. Blaring Stax horn sections, wild psychedelic fuzz box guitar, jazzy organ runs, strutting funkadelic drum and bass, and an occasional glockenspiel or sitar for freakout effect. Composers Manfred Hubler and Siegfred Schwab toss this melange of styles into a Cusinart blender and hit the "puree" botton. The musicans of Vampyros Lesbos play lounge jazz, funk, psychedelica, mambo, samba, europop, ethnic music, rock and roll and just plain old kitsch with equal facility. This isn't schlock however... the music here is straight from cool cat school of pop fusion as practiced by Serge Gainsboro, Lee Hazelwood, Jimmy Webb,Ennio Morricone and the great Fellini sountrack composer, Nino Rota. Granted, Hubler and Schwab's soundtracks freely borrowed from other sources, but the final product was a fascinating pastiche of the great popular music of their era.

Detractors of exotica soundtracks often berate them as background music written for go-go dance parties or sordid sex scenes. Man!...those cats just can't dig it. They should buy a one-way ticket back to Squaresville and do the funky chicken til the cows come home.

thanks for tuning in, turning up, and zoning out!