Caledonia - Cromagnon

To break up all the good-time novelty records we've had recently, how about some avant-garde, throat tearing, industrial folk music? Just so you don't start feeling too happy.

Cromagnon were a collective band from New York lead by multi-instrumentalists Brian Elliot and Austin Grasmere. The band put out a single album titled Orgasm (later re-released as Cave Rock in 1993), recorded in just three days. Orgasm is a less a set of songs and more a piece of sound-art. Tracks include ones comprised entirely of screams and rocks being beaten together (Ritual Feast of the Libido), unsettling sound collages of modern technology (Fantasy) and over ten minutes solid of static driven white noise (Toth, Scribe I).

Today's Best Song Ever is opener Caledonia. Somewhere between a Scottish war march and Marylin Manson, the song tears at your eardrums with the whispered screams of madmen and the dead. Warped bagpipes squark and wheeze and drums echo and thunder like boulders tumbling down a mountain.

What's truly incredible about the song is how there were no musical reference points like this sound at the time. No one else was making music like this in 1969, and really no one would again until the late seventies/early eighties blossoming of industrial and black metal.

This creation of an entirely new sound was the foundation of the Cromagnon ethos and the concept behind the album. In a rare interview given in 2009 drummer Sal Sagado described their mission as being one of musical evolution. As he put it, ''The original concept of the album was to progress from different decades of music. Like, in ‘59 Elvis was shaking his pelvis and driving people — well, women — crazy. And adults as well, making them very upset. And then ten years later Hendrix was pouring lighter fluid on his guitar and getting a lot of great distortion out of his Marshall amps. And the Who was breaking up equipment. And then we were trying to carry it on to the next decade. We were going to say, maybe in 1979 there’ll be a group of people on stage that’ll be blowing through reeds of grass while someone is reciting some poetry, and another person is squirting water at a microphone on stage with a hose…'

The members of Cromagnon have since dispersed into solo groups, non-music related work or simply vanished into the ether. Their one album remains a unique and timeless experiment in sound, as fresh and terrifying today as it was when first quietly handed to an unsuspecting public.