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Way-Out Record for Children
$15.99 LP
Electronic Record for Children
$15.99 LP
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BRUCE HAACK
The Way-Out Record for Children
(Mississippi)
 "Accents"
"Nothing to Do"
BRUCE HAACK
The Electronic Record for Children
(Mississippi)
"Listen"
"Saint Basil"
The Mississippi label has always maintained an eclectic and original catalogue of fascinating and esoteric releases, but their base has been historic blues collections and reissues. Here, however, they've taken a step to the left and perhaps a quick flight into outer space with their welcome reissue of a pair of fairly insane late-'60s children's records from the well-known synthesizer-freak, Bruce Haack. Haack grew up in Canada but moved to New York in the mid-'50s to study at Julliard, where his freethinking, restless pop-influenced style was at odds with the establishment. Haack was undeterred and for the next several decades he wrote and recorded an incredibly diverse range of compositions, often in various combinations with Ted "Praxiteles" Pandel, and a children's dance teacher named Esther Nelson. He was on the vanguard of electronic composition and created many of his own synthesizers and effects, and he wrote many "serious" avant-classical pieces and dance and performance scores. Throughout the '60s he also frequently appeared on television shows like Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, showing off his inventions and performing his more eccentric pop-culture pieces. He also released a well-known psych-influenced rock LP in 1970 called The Electric Lucifer, but Haack's defining passion was children's music, and he released a series of great, wild kids records on his own Dimension 5 label throughout the years, impassioned and intriguing odes to the power of imagination, music and weirdness in the lives of young ones.
Mississippi has released two of the very best from Haack's large catalogue, 1968's The Way-Out Record for Children, and from '69, the incomparable Electronic Record for Children. Both somewhat follow the standard kid's-music plan of directly engaging the listener with stories, dance-along sections, straight-up party tunes as well as morals and meanings, but all skewed through Haack's incredibly fertile mind. "Listen to the world all around you, listen carefully, listen well," sings Haack's collaborator Chris Kachulis on "Listen" from the Electronic Record, and that may be Haack's defining sentiment. He dreams of trips to space, he engages robots, bugs and animals alike, he travels the globe and the universe and explores the tool box back at home, literally and figuratively. These are heavily electronic albums but they incorporate diverse acoustic instrumentation as well, and he and his odd coterie seem to have a blast -- it's hard not to join in the fun. They are off the wall but still deeply musical, and once you get into Haack's head, they start to make perfect sense. You can say you are buying them for your kids but you will listen to these late at night when they are deep in dreamland. And if you see me in the shop some time, ask me about the day, years back, when the Japanese pop star Cornelius came into Other Music looking for original vinyl copies of these (very rare, very pricey) records. It's a good story! [JM]
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Black Tambourine 
Bridget St. John 
