From the mid 60’s through to the early 80’s, one of the most prolific and successful of Japanese film genres was a local style of pornography known as pink films. By the late 70’s, they accounted for more than 70% of domestic film production and encompassed material aimed at a wide array of “tastes”.
Among the tastes catered for was S&M, which started finding its way onto Japanese screens in the mid 1970's and attracted enough of a following to turn its female principals into stars who could use their fame to branch out into other areas... like music.
For the past couple years, the boutique label Tiliqua Records has been diligently seeking out the recordings made by these "bondage queens" and re-releasing them in strictly limited editions. Surprisingly enough, what they've found is both slick and musically solid and, in some cases, quite arresting. Take Naomi Tani, for instance.
For much of the 1970's, she was the reigning queen of S&M pink films. When she decided to leave the industry at the end of the decade, she released a musical swansong, Modae no Heya, which combines traditional instrumentation and lush orchestration with "provocative" but tastefully restrained spoken vocals.
Naomi Tani - Showa Kare Susuki
Sadly, the CD that this comes from is pretty much sold out, but a little bit of hunting may unearth others from this series. Even if it doesn't, make sure you bookmark the Tiliqua site so you can be ready when their next installment hits the Web.
For the benefit of Friday Brekkie listeners, here’s the link to the mp3s of Erotic Aerobics which were posted on the WFMU blog by Station Manager Ken a couple of weeks ago. Despite track titles like The Lover’s Lunge and The Shameless Shake, this 1982 album of suggestive workouts is a lot less sordid than you might expect. The faux-French instructor Pierre Raymonde is obviously a devout disciple of the old seductive threesome of soft lights, champagne and Bolero, and tries to inject this sort of “mood” into his routines. As you might expect, though, the results are more inadvertently comical than arousing… But what else would you expect from 1982? Download and enjoy.
Sometime in the 70’s, Craig Huxley – a former child TV star who appeared briefly on the original Star Trek – created a truly remarkable musical instrument called the Blaster Beam. Basically, it was an 18 foot long piece of aluminum fitted with movable pickups and numerous strings which, when plucked, produced some seriously visceral bass tones. The Beam’s first 15 minutes of fame came when it was used to produce the signature theme for the sentient space probe in 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”.
And that might have been the last of it, were it not for a 1990 concert in New York’s Central Park where "over a dozen women reported having intensely sexual feelings from the Beam sound, up to and including orgasm". And this experience wasn’t confined to live performances... Here's the testimonial of the owner of a synth with Beam settings who recently subjected a lady-friend to the resulting sounds:
“The expression on her face abruptly changed. When I asked her what was wrong, she blinked for a moment and said, "Please play that again. Louder." I did so, and had the odd experience of watching her eyes glaze over as she half fell into a chair breathing hard. "I...*like* that sound," she managed to get out in a whisper."
Obviously, when I heard such claims I was somewhat sceptical, so I got Daz to put them to the test by playing a looped remix of this sample of the Blaster Beam sound from the Star Trek soundtrack on the show last Friday. The verdict?... Well, it had no impact on Daz herself and if it did lead to any early morning arousal of 2SER's female listeners, then they're keeping tight-lipped about it. (Of course, the failure of our little "test" might just be a result of the subsonic genito-resonant frequencies not being present in our audio sample, or not being successfully relayed over the airwaves and the in-studio monitors. We will endeavour to track down a "better" sample in the near future, and repeat the test on higher fidelity equipment.) (via music thing)
A couple of months back, Otis Fodder over at free-mp3 net label Comfort Stand offered a mouthwatering proposition to all and sundry – compose some original porn soundtrack music for inclusion on a forthcoming release. Now, the responses to this challenge have been compiled and posted on the Comfort Stand site for download. The results aren’t quite as seedy as I might like; tending towards tastefully funky exotica and electronic tracks with faux-O samples… But there’s still some fun stuff to be downloaded – and its all fully legal.
Dirty Fan Male is a CD of recordings of fan letters sent to porn stars and Page 3 girls. The letters are from the private collection of Johnny Trunk, the eponymous head of Trunk Records, a British label that specializes in cheesy vintage erotica and zombie biker film soundtracks; and the recordings themselves were done in single takes by a man named Wisbey, who seems to be blessed with a collection of accents that would rival even the late Peter Sellers.
The results of all this prurient documentation are frequently bizarre, LOL hilarious and downright disturbing, but occasionally, they are also rather poignant… Revealing desperately lonely men who imagine that they can forge some deeper emotional connections with images of women served up to them as wank fodder. (For the most part though, these guys are just unashamed perverts!)
The album can be purchased from the Trunk Records site, which also has a selection of amusing audio samples.
Two of the more enduring themes of Daz and Anthony's brekkie show are sex and Serge Gainsbourg, so its only natural that this compilation would be featured on the segment...
When Gainsbourg's orgasmic anthem "Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus" moaned its way into the charts in 1968, it inspired a multitude of lesser artists, working in a variety of styles, to record their own "three-minute-climax" tracks. For the first time, the results of these musical exertions have been gathered together on a single CD, Ooh Ooh Ahh: Moments of Musical Ecstasy. Real Audio samples of the sleaze it contains can be heard here, and the CD itself can be purchased through Surefire Distribution.