Damian's Top 100

Kalvos's Top 100

All right all right, I, too, have washed onto a desert island with no immediate means of rescue. Utterly by happenstance, I find that my prized case of 100 favorite musical recordings is by my side, a bit damp but otherwise in good condition. Using Stone Age tools, bark from a papaya tree on the island -- whose only other inhabitants, luckily for me, are slow-witted and tasty ancestors of the common weasel -- and memory of a 1959 Popular Mechanics article on how to build electronic stuff from vegetable matter, I am able to fashion a rudimentary cassette player. By another sheer coincidence, I was, before I mysteriously landed here, en route from Washington DC, where the US BuRec had named me beta-tester for their new Dam-in-a-box, and I conveniently still have one unit in my pocket.

By the end of the day, I have managed to channel the island's fastest-moving stream through a sluice gate and tap into enough hydroelectricity to power the cassette player. Music is not of primary interest when one is leery of frostbite, however, and I feel no remorse from making a small shelter out of the dismantled case and burning forty recordings in order to keep warm the first night. Had I only explored a cave on the ridge across from me earlier, I would have found the hot springs, short wave radio, and hundred fifty pounds of Acme brand pemmican.

After a hearty breakfast, an APB to ships in the surrounding sea as to my desire for rescue and orange juice, and a nice hot bath, I decide to relax with some tunes. I am able to choose from among the following, all of which have, serendipitously enough, appeared on The Bazaar:

1. Terry Riley's In C
2. Dagmar Krause's Supply and Demand
3. Ollie Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony
4. The Klezmer Conservatory Band's A Touch of Klez!
5. Morton Subotnick's The Wild Bull
6. Mort Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon
7. Dan Lentz's On the Leopard Altar
8. Nic Collins' It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
9. Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano (all on 1 cassette!)
10. Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung
11. Henry Cow's Western Culture
12. Ann Southam's Re-tuning
13. Paul Ruder's Gong
14. Kay Saariaho's Du cristal
15. Kay Saariaho's Verblendungen
16. Kamikaze Ground Crew's Kamikaze Ground Crew
17. George Todd's Green Ideas Furiously Asleep
18. Some Philharmonic's Some Philharmonic
19. Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians
20. Steve Reich's Drumming
21. Steve Reich's Tehillim
22. Frank Zappa's Little House I Used to Live In
23. Frank Zappa's Hot Rats
24. Frank Zappa's Jazz From Hell
25. Brian Reinbolt's Bathtub Curve
26. Ilhan Mimaroglu's Agony
27. Lucius Berio's Visage (but not at bedtime)
28. D.S. Crafts' Soap Opera Symphony
29. Scott Johnson's John Somebody
30. Harold Partch's The Bewitched
31. Harold Partch's Delusion of the Fury
32. Harold Partch's Eight Hitchhikers' Inscriptions
33. John Zorn's Spillane
34. DBK's Specimen
35. DG's The Missing Inn MIDI March
36. Univers Zéro's Ceux du dehors
37. Marc Battier's transparence
38. Carl Stone's Shing Kee
39. H.P. Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls
40. Fred Rzewski's Lip Service
41. Erik Lyon's THUMPmusic
42. John Adams' Harmonielehre (could be wrong about this one)
43. Jim Tenney's For (Ann) Rising
44. Todd Levin's Deluxe
45. Calvin Hampton's Catch Up
46. Laurie Anderson's O Superman (just an excerpt)
47. Eldon Rathburn's Mostly RR Music
48. Furious Pig's Furious Pig
49. Raymond Scott's The Music of Raymond Scott
50. Tom Johnson's Failing
51. Laurie Spiegel's Unseen Worlds
52. N.B. Rollnick's ElectriCity
53. Ken Gaburo's Music for Voices, Instruments & Electronic Sounds
54. Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story
55. Moondog's Madrigals
56. The Bobs' David Byrne's Psycho Killer
57. The Gordon Highlanders' The Bagpipes & Drums of Scotland
58. Robert Ashley's She Was a Visitor
59. Eric Salzman's The Nude Paper Sermon
60. Forty Fingers Sax Quartet's Blue Quilt

Oh dear, the pemmican's burning, and I think I hear shrieks of gaity from a passing ocean liner. Must run.