the devil and the deep electric blue sea

Album of the day is the Sea Donkeys' Volume 1 (Abduction), an LP that appears to be limited to 300 copies. I applaud the existence in limited form of albums that will make 300 people happy, and I am one of those 300 people in this case. It's sort of nautically themed, from the packaging: song titles include "Sailors," "Castaway," "Crossing the Equator," etc. (The song identified on the track listing as "Jenny" is in fact a verse of Brecht/Weill's "Pirate Jenny," which in my weirder moods lately I've started to think of as the theme song of modernity. And I think "The Anchor Song" may be a devolved version of the Björk song. "Lydia," though, is the nautical-only-by-rhythm-and-cultural-association "Lydia the Tattooed Lady"; the packaging also includes a distorted-by-reproduction photograph of a tattooed lady.)

What the album is, really, seems to be at least one of the Sun City Girls (Charlie Gocher, definitely, given one singer's particular mock-drunken growl) and at least a couple of other people (unless one of the SCGs has turned into an actual girl, or started playing woodwinds), messing around in a room with some kind of cassette recorder with a very cheap condenser mic, collaged into an album ex post facto. The surface vibe--sonically cruddy, OCD-repetitive, acoustic strum-based in a non-rehearsed way, with open-improv passages--brings to mind the first couple of Amon Düül records; the editing and sequencing, though, is more a Faust Tapes kind of experience. I will listen to pretty much any album that's been this enthusiastically edited, and a couple of times I've tried myself to trim a bunch of promising but overlong jams and curlicues into something that doesn't actually get dull. It's surprisingly tough, and I'm always impressed when people can do it.

I've been semi-obsessively listening to David Bowie's Low this week (and reading Hugo Wilcken's 33 1/3 book about it), and admiring the Bowie/Eno ability to get into and out of songs, and to leave space in them where space is warranted--even when they don't start out with space there, as with the absent first verse of "Sound and Vision." (Elvis Costello, on working with Eno on "My Dark Life": "I very much admired his creative use of the 'erase' button.") Tonight I started wondering: the Sea Donkeys made their record under impossibly casual conditions (partly on a boat, if we believe the press release, which I don't think I do), and I love them for it. But what if they'd done it in a catered château and a well-equipped Berlin studio? How would Volume 1 be different--would it be an album you could sink into the way you can sink into Low? Does anyone with access to châteaux and well-equipped studios now make records like this, all textures and crosscuts and half-feigned craziness, with the self-control to hit "erase" when they need to? Do they make them in editions of 300 copies and only give them to their friends?