Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Diatric Puds & The Blobbettes


Haunted house swamp doo-wop extraordinaires Diatric Puds & The Blobbettes create lurching dance music...a perfect soundtrack for scratching your scabies. You can currently catch these cretins hobbling around Oakland, California.

This track came from a very limited edition split CD-R with Hans Grusel's Krankenkabinet. I have #4 of 24.

Diatric Puds & The Blobbettes - Mutant Dinner Music: Party Of Two (mp3)

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Little Girl Sings The Hits

From a found thrift store cassette, this recording features a little girl singing her ABCs, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Old Macdonald's Farm...with a little help from her mother.

Unknown Girl Found Cassette - ABC/Twinkle Twinkle/Old Macdonald (mp3)

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Jimmy The Boy Wonder

From the Cake & Polka archives, I present a repost of Hershell Gordon Lewis' demented and totally incompetent children's classic "Jimmy the Boy Wonder". I have included a couple extra MP3s.
Hershel Gordon Lewis, creator of Blood Feast, made a kiddie movie?

The premise of this turd is that Jimmy, a doltish little boy, wishes time to stop....and, well, it does. Father Time sends his homely daughter Aurora to lead Jimmy to The Great Clock (cheap cardboard) which only Jimmy can start again. Immediately they are accosted by Mr. Fig, a gangly weirdo in a plaid suit and thick greasepaint eyebrows. Mr. Fig kills time and intends on wasting Jimmy's time in order to prevent him from restarting TIME. If time has stopped, why does Jimmy have limited time?

Jimmy & Aurora get in many idiotic adventures, accompanied by severely retarded song and dance numbers. They soon get tired (as did the script writers) and Aurora tells Jimmy a story...a perfect excuse to jam in some old cartoon in order to kill some time. Jimmy eventually starts time again, but not without a run-in with Mr. Fig's tempting Hot Dog Tree. WOW.

I KILL TIME! (Mr. Fig Theme Song) (mp3)
Wonderful Beans (mp3)
One Step At A Time (mp3)
Think Big! (mp3)
Hot Dog Tree (mp3)
One thing that bores the hell out of me is writing plot synopsis...go here if you want it.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Cake & Polka Parade Pee Pee Party!


Today Cake and Polka Parade is one year old. I started this blog after a few months of perusing the big MP3 blog blow-up that was happening at the time. I was a bit underwhelmed by the glut of shit that was out there, the bland self-indulgent writing and the unimaginative derivative artists that were being pushed forth as something ‘interesting’. But I was equally inspired by such sites and blogs as Rummage Through The Crevices, Basic Hip, The 365 Days Project, Pastor McPurvis' Vinyl Orphanage and EC Brown's massive collection of MP3 links among many others.

I took my cue from these obscure music blogs as well as from a longtime obsession with WFMU. I wanted to showcase some forgotten treasures and interesting bits of found sound that I have accumulated over the years as well as highlighting some brilliant work that is being made today.

Thanks for everyone’s support over the last year, especially Scott Soriano from Crud Crud, Oddio Katya from Oddio Overplay, Warren from Rummage Through the Crevices and Ken Freedman.

I’m going on a little vacation…I haven’t been out of the city in four fucking years. Don’t worry though- over the next month I will resurrect some earlier posts that suffered the fate of deletion from a server crash.

Here is a birthday party song from Robert Downey's film Chafed Elbows.

Robert Downey's Chafed Elbows - Intro Credit Sequence (mp3)

And be sure to check out my posts from WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog. And…uh….my ART.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Bulgarian Diva At Betty's Resale Shop


I picked up this record because the woman on the cover looks exactly like Rita Tushingham, who I had a crush on after watching The Knack And How To Get It.

Don't ask me...I know nothing about this record. Everything is in Cyrillic except for "Made In Bulgaria" on the record label. Click on the image above if you can read it. (it's Lili Ivanova...thanks everybody)

The record is a sad and melancholy mix of traditional melodies blended with 70's arena rock ballads. I find this song quite haunting.

Unknown Bulgarian Diva - ??? (mp3)

I found this record at Betty's Resale Shop on Lincoln Avenue on Chicago's north side. Betty's was a strange junk shop operated by the feeble 75 year-old Betty and her white trash daughter. The whole place was a mound of garbage spanning two storefronts, a maze of water-damaged crap and piss-soaked furniture.

There were layers and layers of stuff piled- years and years worth, I'd imagine. I once dug through a pile for an hour, trying to excavate an old pump organ I saw way in the back. But honestly, most of Betty's wares were junk, absolute worthless crap. The big pile of moldy and filth encrusted records yielded only a handful of finds over the years I went there. If you looked hard enough through the mounds of crap, you could see various secret rooms such as a filthy kitchen and a little hovel for the dog to hang out. They had a few birds in cages ensconced in all that garbage as well.

Betty was always stationed at the front of the heap and her daughter would be wildly zinging around the store, a real nervous type, fiddling with this and that, flirting with the guys they hired for furniture moves. I still kick myself for never bringing in a recorder to Betty's, because every visit was priceless as Betty and her daughter would constantly fight. It wasn't petty squabling, they really went at it at top volume. If it was quiet in there, I would linger around just to hear one of their ridiculous arguments.

Gentrification eventually came to the neighborhood and Betty's was bulldozed down. (pictured above) R.I.P. Betty's

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Petaluma Chicken Farm


From archive.org comes an inexplicable promotional film for Sonoma County poultry industry featuring young women making an extremely large omelet. One of the most bizarre films I have ever seen. The dance sequence is a must-see.

Petuluma Chicken Farm @ archive.org