Before I start, can I just say that this piece was inspired by Stephan Kunze’s post 3 Of The Strangest Albums Ever Recorded, which he published in 2024. Go and read that now. And then come back.

Wesley Willis - Greatest Hits (1995)

That a record is “strange” can mean 1,001 different things: that it is unconventional, pioneering, obscure, abrasive or, frankly, just a bit different. In researching this article I read a few lists of the strangest records ever recorded and, without being rude, if Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is one of the weirdest records in your collection, then you need to get out more.

In putting together my own brief list I’ve tried to avoid the obvious candidates - so no Trout Mask Replica, however damn strange it is - in favour of records from my own collection that have blown my mind and, crucially, that I enjoy. There’s no tapping at the zoo glass of novelty here.

And this is especially important with Wesley Willis’ Greatest Hits, released in 1995 by Alternative Tentacle (and, coincidentally, one of the first records I ever reviewed.) 

Willis, who died in 2003, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1989 and made a vast number of albums over his career, even signing for American Recordings in the mid 90s. As the record’s sleeve notes, he once recorded four albums in 36 days and each one of his records is completely finished in five hours or less.

What emerged from this is a vision of music that was totally unique, joining an ultra-conventional, hyper-repetitive musical sound with Willis’ nasal, sort-of spoken word deliver and idiosyncratic lyrics - think Dry Cleaning brought up on the tough streets of Chicago. 

Of the 22 tracks on Greatest Hits, some three quarters use the same pre-set keyboard melody, minor, major, shifted up and down the octave and at different speeds, but very much the same pattern. It’s somewhere between relaxing and utterly unnerving, as if you can’t quite believe someone had the bravery to make music this way. 

Subject matter, meanwhile, includes Rock n Roll McDonalds, Urge Overkill, The Chicken Cow and the whupping of Batman’s Ass, with each song’s chorus essentially consisting of Willis loudly emoting the song’s title in a run of marginally different melodic shapes.

It’s easy to listen to Greatest Hits as either a novelty, something weird to make your friends laugh, or perhaps a tragedy, given Willis’ circumstances. But if that was the case, if the record can be reduced to such easy shorthand, then why do I keep coming back to Greatest Hits over the years? 

Because, I think, there’s nothing else really like Wesley Willis’ work. This is the kind of record that could only be made by someone who either doesn’t know - or who frankly doesn’t care - how music should be (see also: Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs). 

And this is incredibly rare. Even the makers of the weirdest, most out-there sound you can imagine - Autechre, say, or Captain Beefheart - know what music should sound like. They just ignore convention or run counter-clockwise to it. Willis’ music doesn’t even acknowledge it.

As a result, Willis’ output feels spectacularly free. It’s like breaking out of school and spending the afternoon roaming the countryside, delivered from all obligation. Why shouldn’t music sound like this? Why shouldn’t art be different? And why can’t I be different, if only for the 61 minutes that the record lasts. It’s a very liberating experience.

It’s profound, too. Willis’ subject matter may be unconventional but he has a smart observational eye and knows how to construct a lyric - see: “McDonald's will make you fat / They serve Big Macs / They serve Quarter Pounders / They will put pounds on you” (from Rock n Roll McDonalds).

He’s a talented storyteller too. He’s Doing Time in Jail, by the Wesley Willis Fiasco (a band he put together in 1991), recount Willis’ true-life experience  “about this guy who slashed me in the face and back as I exited the 4 Cottage Grove bus” in unsettling detail. If one of the purposes of music is to transport the listener to different places, to make us experience situations we may never be in and to feel empathy for fellow humans, then Willis’ work is some of the best.

And if all that sounds a bit to serious, then Willis has a way with a hook, too. The songs’ choruses may be basic but Willis has a way of bringing out subtle variations in the theme (see the surprisingly melancholy I Wupped Batman’s Ass.)

All of which adds up to a record that, yes, is strange in that it runs irrelevant to any kind of music convention, but it also deep, moving, funny, catchy as hell and even liberating.

Rotterdam Termination Source - Poing (1992)

Growing up on Chicago House, rave and British dance hits, delivered via the medium of Top of the Pops and Radio One would, you might imagine, prepare my tender ears for most far-fetched musical things that the early 90s could offer.

Or so I though, anyway, until I met Poing, a 1992 single by Dutch gabber group Rotterdam Termination Source, aka Maurice Steenbergen and Danny Scholte. Poing, you see, consists of a drum machine and a beautifully springy “poing” sound (sampled from a jaw harp) for all of its near four-minute run time. And nothing else. 

And don’t think that the “poing” sound is manipulated, stretched or somehow prodded into new, novel shapes. No, the “poing” sound stays the same - exactly the same - falling relentlessly, inevitably, regally on the beat as the 909 drum lines shifts around it. 

And even they doesn’t change very much. Percussive elements drop out and come back in, the hi hats change pattern a little, but it is still fundamentally the same, slightly distorted four four pattern for the length of the song.

Naturally, Poing went to the top of the charts in the Netherlands and Denmark and made it to 27 in the UK, where I heard it on the chart rundown.

I’m not, on the whole, a huge fan of minimalist electronic music; and I certainly don’t like gabber. So why do I love Poing?

Because it’s funny, maybe, and ridiculous but still utterly sincere in its intentions. From the description, you could maybe imagine Poing as some kind of sneering parody of the emerging gabber scene. But it’s not: Rotterdam Termination Source came from the gabber scene and they loved it.

They weren’t laughing at the scene, then, they were celebrating it. And Poing came from this love: “At one point, I went out with a friend of mine to a house party in Ahoy,” Steenbergen told 3voor12. “It was 1991. I noticed that people were jumping more than dancing. I thought: we should do something with that. Not to ridicule them, but to accentuate it.”

It’s hard to say how, exactly, but you can hear this love in Poing. You can hear the accentuation, the celebration even, of an extreme dance music scene that was just gathering speed.

Poing is very European too, a sign of a global dance scene that was starting to find its own identity. The songs takes cues from Detroit techno - principally the 909 - but I can’t imagine anyone from the Motor City making a song this gloriously ridiculous. And that has to be a good thing.

The Beach Boys - Adult/Child (unreleased, recorded 1977)

Are The Beach Boys a weird band? I suppose so. Although a lot of the supposedly “weird” things that The Beach Boys have done - getting Paul McCartney to chew on celery for Vegetables, going heavy on synth pop for The Beach Boys Love You, narrating the musical story of a Pied Piper figure who lives within a transistor radio on the Mount Vernon and Fairway EP - work brilliantly well when you actually hear them, which, in turn, males their creation feel considerably less strange. 

Much of this, of course, is down to the genius - and I don’t use that word lightly - of band leader Brian Wilson, a man whose innate musical knowledge survived all kinds of mental turmoil and drug abuse.

The one exception to this is Adult/Child, an unreleased (although apparently, according to Al Jardine, soon to be released) album that was recorded in early 1977, to follow up The Beach Boys Love You.

It’s a record that doesn’t work on any kind of cohesive level, an album that alternately makes you want to shut it away in a cupboard and lean into its embrace, an ill-fitting mixture of musical styles and lyrical themes that blends genius songwriting with gnarled vocals and bad ideas. 

Dennis Wilson, talking in 1977, called Adult/Child the “strangest album I've ever heard”, which is something of an exaggeration. But you can imagine the band’s eyebrows raised right to the ceiling when asked to put their name to Adult / Child’s swing / synth pop fusions and bizarre lyrical subject matter.

The title refers to the idea that human personality can be split into “adult” and “child” modes of thinking, something Brian Wilson had explored before on the gorgeous Child Is Father of the Man. But that goes no way to excusing the horrors of Hey Little Tomboy, a chirpy 70s pop number that is undercut by lyrics like (shudder): “Hey, little tomboy, I've had my eyes on you / Thinking what a girl you could be / Mmm, I smell perfume, let's try some cut-off jeans.” 

Biographer Peter Ames Carlin called it “the most unsettling moment in the entire recorded history of the Beach Boys” and I find it hard to disagree. Although that didn’t stop them including a re-recorded version of the song on M.I.U. Album, which was released in 1978.

That the album’s adult / child theme was, apparently, the idea of Eugene Landy, the controversial psychologist who “treated” Brian Wilson at great expense in the 1970s and 80s, only makes it all the more creepy. 

Mixed in with that, you have Brian Wilson’s attempt to record a swing album, with It's Over Now and Still I Dream of It both apparently written for Frank Sinatra. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it sounds bizarre to hear Carl and Brian Wilson sing lines like “Why don't you get up at eight, feelin' so great / Cut out the sweets and start eating three times a day” on Life Is For The Living, over a saccharine orchestral pop backing, just six years after the band dynamited the pop landscape with the baroque magnificence of Surf’s Up. 

The schmaltzy, elevator-lite cover of Peter DeRose’s Deep Purple is equally ghastly and it doesn’t help that Brian’s voice is sounding particularly rough throughout, the result of a four-pack-a-day cigarette diet.

So why do I rate Adult/Child? Because, while many albums fail because of lack of inspiration, Adult/Child probably has too much inspiration, in a way that suggests an ultra-creative mind gone a little haywire.

You have the swing sounds - but also the band continuing with the use of synths that they pioneered on … Love You. The Moog-heavy take on Shortenin’ Bread - a song Brian Wilson is seemingly always covering - is particularly satisfying, an absolute monster of groove.

Added to this you have at least two tracks that come from entirely different periods of The Beach Boys: the summer-y funk of Games Two Can Play, originally recorded for 1970’s Sunflower; and the enema-referencing but still absolutely gorgeous H.E.L.P. Is On the Way, which was recorded for Surf’s Up.

The stunning It's Over Now and Still I Dream Of It, meanwhile, despite being sung by Carl and Brian, sound like they could have fit on Dennis Wilson’s majestically aged solo album Pacific Ocean Blue, which he was recording around the same time as Adult / Child. Still I Dream Of It, in particular, is one of Brain Wilson’s very best songs and you can only imagine what Sinatra would have done with it. (Brian Wilson was 34 when he wrote Still I Dream Of It; and yet he sounds unimaginably wise.)

Adult/Child has moments of utter brilliance mixed in with the detritus and I love it for that; it feels like a record to understand just how off-the-rails The Beach Boys had stumbled by 1977 and I love it for that; and it’s also utterly unique, a mixture of swing, synths, dark 70s pop, exercise, food and more that no one else would think of even starting out on, let alone seeing to its conclusion. 

And if, as AL Jardine recently, claimed, the album does come out on a new … Love You box set, then we should welcome The Beach Boys’ troubled child into the world with open arms. Hey Little Tomboy excepted.

Some listening

Basic Unit - Vacant

The real advantage of being so far ahead of the game is you can come back 20 years later and sound simultaneously futuristic and classical. This is the case with drum & bass duo Basic Unit, whose classic 1998 album Timeline I compared to Kazuo Ishiguro’s famously audience-splitting novel The Unconsoled earlier this year.

The Redux EP is the duo’s first new music in 20 years and it draws on a lot of the same elements: stuttering, almost drum & bass beats, industrial ambience, confounding structure and loads of wide-open space, like techstep that has evolved beyond all human understanding. 

I could have picked any of the EP’s six songs to feature here but in the end I went for the closer Vacant for its slightest tease of classical melody and a drum beat that occasionally flashes into life like a firework dropped into a bucket. The music is all mechanically perfect but there is a fierce emotion behind the sheen. A very welcome comeback.

SML - Taking Out The Trash

Take the funk, add the gnarled dash of a lingering infection and you have Taking Out The Trash by LA improv wonderkids SML (who included the thoroughly wonderful Anna Butterss in their line up.)

The song is like Afrobeat on the turn, a wonderfully fluid funk that sounds like it just might be about to get nasty, underpinned by the world’s steadiest bass guitar groove. Rather brilliantly the rest of the album, How You Been, sounds totally different, no two songs showing more than a vague thematic connection, as if genre alone can’t contain such fierce innovation. Also, full marks for choosing Reflections in the Plastic Pulse - of all things -  as the one Stereolab song to be influenced by.

Disiniblud (feat. Cassandra Croft) - Serpentine (The Field remix)

Did Axel Willner (aka The Field) go away? Or did we just leave him spinning his heels in one of his infinite loopathons and leave him to get on with it? 

Whatever the case, his remix of Disinblud’s Serpentine is the perfect example of that old Field magic, in which he takes a simple sample, loops it as far as it can logically go, then loops it some more, the results being impossible beautiful and satisfying, as if all the particular artist’s career has been leading up to this moment, their entire existence justifying the two-second clip that Willner has smeared across the stereo.

Serpentine feels like a song that is constantly changing, only to end back up again where it started; and somehow you’re fine with that because the journey was so damn fragrant. 

Danz CM - Lärm 1 (Hey Angel)

You’ll go far with a steady pulse, as Danz CM illustrates sweetly on Lärm 1, the opening song from her new album LÄRM!. This is a record that seems to ponder the question of what Krautrock would have sounded like if it had succumbed to its sweeter instincts and left the angle grinders at home.

Lärm 1 - despite having a frankly unacceptable two chords to its name - has all the cosmic pulsation of the best Krautrock records, the synth bubbling along like a lunar jacuzzi as it builds in intensity, with Danz’s charmingly simple vocal riding the sonic waves. Not sure how long the song would survive in a freezing rural commune on the outskirts of Cologne but, in my house at least, Lärm 1 thrives with the delicate charm of understatement.

Eliza Rose and Oppidan - Too Slow (All Night)

2 skipping garage with a classical edge, of the kind MJ Cole used to make, allied to the subtlest hint of acid = dance-floor hit for Eliza Rose and nu-UKG upcomer Oppidan. There are many things to admire in this three-minute jewel, not the least Rose’s excellently heartfelt vocal; but the cinematic string rush is what will remain forever in my heart.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - LCD Soundsystem special with Jim Butler

I spoke to journalist Jim Butler about A Disco Pogo Tribute To LCD Soundsystem, a new book from the Disco Pogo crew that was published at the start of November 2025. We covered the unique appeal of LCD, Disco Pogo’s history with the band, the godlike Nancy Whang and the importance of dance music history

La HISTORIA de UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE: dioses subterráneos de DETROIT TECHNO 

Uno de los hispanohablantes. Hablé con DJ Fra, leyenda de la música electrónica en Barcelona y booker de Primavera Sound, sobre la importancia de Underground Resistance, antes de su concierto en Primavera Sound 2026. ¿Quiénes son este misterioso colectivo de Detroit? ¿Por qué son tan importantes para el techno? ¿Cuáles son sus mejores temas? Todo se revelará en un programa tanto para los fans de UR como para quienes los descubren por primera vez.

The Playlists

Available via Apple Music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.

And Spotify (for the moment): The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest.

Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.