Degenerazione Musicale

This mysterious Italian aggregation issued a one-of-a-kind explosion of art-damaged weirdness on their 1988 four-song 7" EP. Inspired by the Residents, each of the four cuts sounds like it could have been made by a different artist. The musicians steer through industrial cacophony, raw garagey guitar chords, gurgling laughter sounds, creepy English dialogue, spacy synthesizer, and psychedelic guitar, and horrible operatic vocals like kids playing crash cars at the amusement park. The packaging is also an event in itself, with shards of mirror glued to a sleeve with a sadistic cartoon of dogs running a terrified human through a power saw. As a crowning touch, there are small holes drilled through the vinyl in the grooves separating the tracks, which makes it necessary to hover over the turntable and lift the stylus over the gaps every time the record is played.