To call the British-born, Swiss-based musician Michal Turtle “obscure” is an understatement. Active since 1983, Turtle’s been in bands like wearedust, It’s 5 to 12, Monika Miller and Wicked Kitchen Staff, which is to say, music entities that are barely blips on anyone’s radar. If known for anything, it’s a collection of six strange electronic songs Turtle pressed up in 1983 entitled Music from the Living Room and if you weren’t residing near said room, chances were you never heard it.
But time has a funny property in the digital age, where even the most reclusive and obscure sounds can find a strand on the web and ride it back to the surface, which is what Turtle did, thanks to the Music from Memory label. Despite its name, the label specializes in music nearly lost from memory, reviving the fringe folks like Gigi Masin, Leon Lowman, Vito Ricci, and now Turtle. The songs that comprise Music from the Living Room scan as both primitive and deeply forward-thinking, sounding loop and sample-based though all instruments were played live and layered on tape. Truth in advertising, that album was recorded in the living room of Turtle’s parents.
And while Phantoms of Dreamland comes from an eight-minute spoken word track that grows fangs as it proceeds, the title scans as truthful in its own way. Twelve of the fifteen tracks are unreleased, phantasmal things tucked away on tape and left unheard for three decades, things once conjured by Turtle’s musical imagination. No doubt it’s Turtle’s sensibilities as a drummer that help give these tracks their ability to be revived in a DJ-centered era, in that all the squiggles, bell dings, synth dollops and guitar string scrapes are rhythmically organized into—if not grooves per se—than at least into peculiar rhythmic patterns. “Village Voice” might originate from Mr. And Mrs. Turtle’s kitchen, all gong-like lids and glugging water sounds with two voices droning at play, but its underlying pulse gives it coherence.
Glittering flits of electronics and layers of hand drums make “El Teb” sound astral and tribal at once, its hazy fidelity making it fit into a constellation between Sun Ra and outsider house producers. But almost all of the tracks follow their own insular logic, as on the nine-minute “Zoote Pointe.” It begins in a Jon Hassell-like world of woozy ritualistic percussion, rattled chimes, fluttering electronics and a cycling bassline. It nearly flickers out before Turtle suddenly changes gears at seven minutes, adding a clang of go-go bells, guitar pings and what sounds like a squeeze bottle of mustard.
Maybe having a track climax with a wet fart made sense to the man himself back then, before he went on to a career writing jingles for radio and TV. It’s a nearly lost history, but each number here presents a strange yet charming self-contained little sound world. As most musicians forgo live interaction to instead get lost in loops and insular music-making (often in their own bedrooms), Turtle’s squelchy proto-techno composition “Are You Psychic?” seems to become more prescient with each passing year.
