1893. Chicago. The World's Fair to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America opens. In the entourage of one Nikola Tesla, the renegade pioneer of modern electricity, travels Alfred Darlington, a young inventor from Los Angeles.

On the second day of the fair, Darlington is electrocuted in a terrible accident, pronounced dead, and taken to the morgue. Two days later, an attendant there hears knocking from one of the corpse drawers. Armed with a shotgun and whiskey, he finds the young Darlington not only alive and well but babbling about future worlds he has visited and asking that everyone now calls him "Daedelus."

Tesla, both relieved that the boy has survived and embarrassed by the accident, allows him the run of his workshops. Over the next six months of the Fair, he devotes his time to building strange electronic instruments, and on the very last night of the Fair presents the Love To Make Music To Symphony, which, he claims, is the sound he heard in the future.

The events of the performance are shrouded in secrecy--widely believed to be a result of a cover-up by government and the vested commercial interests who had most to gain from the Fair's success. The few reports which have filtered out say that people go mad as they listen to the strange, alien sounds the young composer describes as "music," that they scream, laugh, pull off their clothes, have sex with each other and themselves, fall into reveries, and shout of "the hills, the beautiful hills." Daedelus himself is dragged from the stage and detained indefinitely in a mental hospital in Chicago, staying there until his mysterious disappearance on May 29, 1913, incidentally the night of the riots in Paris at the first performance of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring.

But for another twist, the story would have ended there. Dr. John Thompsock of the Chicago Ultra-Arts & Science-Head Institute and one of the greatest living Tesla-ologists, was lucky enough to obtain a cache of Tesla's papers from a shadowy Eastern European in 1999. In among them he finds a cylinder disk. On playing it, he discovers that it contains the only recording made of Daedelus' first and last performance.

Digitized, cleaned of crackles and pops, and shorn of 45 minutes of detuned primitive oscillator noise, it as strange as the day it was first performed and as liable to bring on what one can only describe as "sexual fever." To ease the listener through--and hopefully hold the fever at bay--this version features commentary from a number of leading scientists including Om'mas Keith and Taz of the Sa-Ra Foundation, plus Dr. Michael Johnson, Prof. N'fa, Paperboy (Mphil), Dr. Erika Rose, and Prof. Laura Darling (of The Long Lost Institute). Of more than academic interest, this will appeal to all aficionados of Very Very Late Victorian Music.

 

Track Listing:

 

1. Fair Weather Friends 
2. Touchtone feat. Paperboy, Taz Arnold 
3. Twist The Kids feat. Nfa 
4. Get Off Your HiHats 
5. My Beau feat. Paperboy, Erika Rose 
6. Make It So feat. Michael Johnson 
7. Only For The Heartstrings 
8. I Car(ry) Us 
9. I Took Two 
10. Assembly Lines 
11. Bass In It feat. Taz Arnold 
12. Hrs:Mins:Secs 
13. If We Should feat. Laura Darling 
14. Drummery Jam 
15. You're The One feat. Om'mas Keith