Parson Sound

Eons before being a Swedish muso meant that one endlessly turned-out plasticine variations on dance cheese or lil’ diva pop, Parson Sound was reconceptualizing music. In existence from 1966 to 1969, the ten-member outfit — psychic kin to like-minded acts in Germany’s fledgling krautrock scene — seamlessly ground rock, classical, and jazz instrumentation into a repetitious, heady psych-prog pâté that they then spread out for acres at a time. Comprising two discs featuring eleven live and studio tracks, Parson Sound is a lot to absorb in one sitting, but it’s undeniably worth your while to hear tectonic genre plates scraped, shifted, and tape-manipulated simultaneously, as though the rhythm section, string section, horns, guitarist, and vocalists were all playing completely different songs at once — a jammy parade of gloriously muddy cacophonies both senseless and divine.