Fly PR sent me this years ago a couple years ago with a bunch of other newly released Ohio weirdness from daze gone by and somehow I don’t believe I ever listened to it (sorry, Ilka…) but it’s an incredibly avant-garde band or project or collective from Cleveland in the early 70’s that called itself Hy Maya. I don’t think a single note of their’s had been released by anybody before ever. Most of the stuff on this nicely packaged two disc set is from 1972. Scott Krauss later of Pere Ubu is a name and instantly identifiable drumming you Ubuphiles will recognize. Allen Ravenstine is the other name and instantly identifiable Pere Ubu electro static sound you’ll recognize. The sound is out there, like some of the fringier Krautrock things, some of it pretty even, and some anything but, a lot of it way weird, and there’s one driving Velvet Underground worthy rave up, and no doubt a bunch of us would have been at whatever gallery or other this was recorded at, in embarrassing seventies clothes and buzzed on rag weed and feeling very much at the center of something far from the center of everything else.

Anyway, you know from reading this if this artifact is your kinda thing, and if it is, you just gotta have it. I liked it, and liked it even more the second time through. Amazing liner notes, too, just chock full of incredibly obscure Ohio avant-garde rock history. It’s on Smog Veil, and quite up to their usual high standards.

Here’s a sample pulled at random from YouTube: