I'm not sure if it was this album's fault (Bruce Haack's Haackula) that I had a strange experience on the way to work yesterday, but I'm pretty sure it helped me on my way to somehow getting lost and going the total wrong direction on my way to a place where of course I've driven plenty of times. The lady with tight Maroon trackpants and white headband who I see jogging every single time I drive somewhere was there and so was a guy who must've been pretty mad because he ran up to a bus timetable on the bus stop pole and did a flying karate kick on it and then pointed at it and yelled something as he kept on walking, yeah he was there but seemed pretty normal considering this ridiculous album that I was hearing for the first time, being guided off my automatic route to work and not realising until I finally noticed that this was quite far from the correct way to drive to work. It's hard to describe and I'm not sure if stuff like this happens to other people but anyway, it was weird, but I was glad having got lost in this way out world of sounds even if it did make me late for work.
At first it sounds essentially like a weird guy who has got hold of a few keyboards and learnt how to use the preprogrammed chords . But on a record that in 1978 was deemed too dark and too offensive for release, Haack has crafted something that today comes off like the soundtrack to an unfortunate and sinister NES game, a hamfisted space odyssey with ghouls and goblins, like waking up early to watch cartoons but realising yr still dreaming. There's a perverse sort of childlike glee on this record , it's a mysterious flight of a definitely unique imagination. A pioneer of electronic music, Haack mostly worked on children's music, which is a worrying idea in itself, but further concern (or fodder for a sweet bio on the back of a reissue) comes in reading that he took Mescaline with Native Americans when he was eight years old. I'm not sure if that's all Wikipedia means by a 'notoriously dysfunctional childhood'. He sounds like the Henry Darger of electronic music but without knowing all that background this record (reissued by Mistletone/The Omni Recording Corporation) is warped enough on it's own.
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