Unlikely vinyl reissue of this 1968 concrete/tape/electronic/free music masterpiece with appearances from Alan Silva, Andrew Cyrille, Burton Greene and more: Shipen Lebzelter is perhaps best known in underground circles as the founder of The Trees Community, whose 1975 LP The Christ Tree is revered as one of the greatest Christian psych albums of the period. But this is even stranger, an album originally released on Columbia Masterworks only a few months after Frank Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy and simultaneously with Terry Riley’s In C and Wendy Carlos’ Switched On Bach with Lebzelter and Marks culling original tapes of interviews with counter-cultural rock stars of the era that were made during the production of Marks’ book, Rock And Other Four Letter Words, a book that was largely a collection of photos by Linda Eastman (McCartney)accompanied by pithy quotes. Tapes of people like Moby Grape, Grace Slick, Pete Townshend, Tim Buckley, Brian Wilson, Jimmy Page, Pigpen and Big Brother and the Holding Company are combined with wild, slashing electro edits, dubbed over choirs, flashing west coast psych rock, weird ethno-drones and extended passages of purely out free improvisation to realise a stunning concrete soundworld that is somewhere between the electronic experiments of the first United States Of America LP, The Electric Prunes’ Mass In F Minor, Basil Kirchin’s Worlds Within Worlds and the wildest Zappa experiments. The list of guest musicians is mind-boggling, with free jazz bassist/cellist Alan Silva, drummers Andrew Cyrille, Laurence Cook and Warren Smith, trombonist Roswell Rudd, the Greater Abyssynian Baptist Choir and more. The album functions as a teleport to a period of dazzlingly accelerated creativity, exploding a bunch of parallel free music and avant garde currents while documenting the excess, beauty and stupidity of the era like little else. Massive kudos to Paradigm for rescuing this one from the void, beautifully packaged with repro sleeve, heavy vinyl and a 12” four page booklet. Highly recommended, you’ve never heard anything quite like it!