NINE DAYS' WONDER

This album must have one of the weirdest ever cover-texture (in its original German pressing) as it was a rubbery foam (not having aged well for the most part), but the music inside it was equally disturbed being a strange mix of what was the craziest music around. This very international group (saxman-flauter Earle is Irish, drummer Roscoe British, and the bassist is Austrian), NDW is one of those UFOs in terms of influences, and this album in its original version is worth a small fortune, and has been re-released with a different artwork too.

As much as I have been listening to this album, I always felt that it was rather impossible to describe the music succinctly without omitting a facet (or two, even three) of it, so would resume it as a bizarre cross of Beefheart's Zappa and a Crimson Machine with Purple Traffic. Only four tracks two of them multi-movement "suites", this is head-twisting dizzyingly-wild music, constantly changing with a few characters intervening here and there. All tracks and subsections are attributed to all the members and it hardly surprises once you heard it a few times.

As the group will fold soon after, John Earle left for England and eventually ended up in Gnidrolog, playing second sax on their classic Lady Lake.