[CP 269 CD] Skilly, Bone; Comet Omelette

September 2022; always love a completely inscrutable, head-scratcher of a record. Nothing but conjecture out there surrounding the provenance of this presumably early-70s "Private Press" monsterpiece, replete with hand-painted covers & a pair of mismatching-ink signatures reading "Skilly" & "Love Bone" amidst a lone credit-stamp on the rear:

Taking this at its word, we can at least presume the involvement of Andrew Rudin, whose 1968 Nonesuch anti-classic "Tragoedia: a composition in four movements for electronic synthesizer" has baffled many a record-bin scourer actually in search of labelmate Morton Subotnick's more easily-introductable work (in all honestly, this is a majorly slept-on record that we'd all be freaking out over if it were issued in a similar fashion).

Rudin was the head of the "Philadelphia Musical Academy Electronic Music Center" & its Moog apparatus, at/on which both "Tragoedia" and "Comet Omlette (sic)" were created, and this itself opens up a wormhole: for years I had this whole setup conflated with the whole Vibronic Music Services crew in Ardmore, PA (responsible for that "The Philadelphia Moog Ensemble" private-press LP of, largely, Moogsploitative works by Purcell, Bach, Langlais, and the like) although reading up on it all now, I see that the latter wasn't incorporated until 1974, whereas Rudin's earliest pieces are the result of an extremely early, direct transaction w/ the Trumansburg -era Moog plant.

What I do know is that there is absolutely no trace of either "Skilly" nor "Bone" out there in the annals of the heavily-documented early Moog scene, or anywhere for that matter, and this lends to a series of mind-races around whether or not this music is the result of two "Turnt" Philly-area kids simply granted access to Rudin's setup for a night. Their music, largely concerned with crude, brutal tape-manipulation of scrap-metal clangor leading into the sorts of Psychedlic potentiometer-chicanery most commonly associated with Nicolas "Pascal" Raicevic (see [CP 079.5-080-081 CD]) is truly in another league, calling into mind that early LAFMS scene's access to CalArts' Serge prototypes.

I honestly can't think of a more C.P.-aligned record in existence, and it's, frankly, incredible that this hadn't crossed any of our RADAR-screens until now. Behold the mystery of Skilly & Bone, perfectly rendered in classic C.P. fashion across a six-panel booklet, meticulously restored & revived from a pristine, SIS example.