Iconic American composer and synth innovator Richard Teitelbaum’s influential soundtrack to Suzan Pitt’s cult short film “Asparagus” has finally been unearthed and fleshed out for a proper release via Black Truffle, presented in its original form with an expanded “European Version” and a new performance of “Threshold Music” from Leila Bordreuil, Alvin Curran, Daniel Fishkin, Miguel Frasconi and Matt Sargent.
Suzan Pitt’s jaw-droppingly good surrealist short film “Asparagus” emerged in 1979 and was notorious for being paired with David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” for midnight screenings in New York City and Los Angeles. Teitelbaum, who’d been working with synths since the ‘60s (he was the first person to bring a Moog to Europe), was also a founder member of Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski, and was tasked with the soundtrack, but it’s never been released officially until now. We can thank Matt Sargent for doing the heavy lifting here, who went through Teitelbaum’s archive and found the original tapes, stumbling across the “European Version” that the composer recorded between 1975 and ‘76 using a Moog modular system and a Polymoog.
The material itself is just stunning, a mind-bendingly odd take on effervescent, kosmische-adjacent swirls with with peculiar jazz sequences played by Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacy, Steve Potts and George Lewis that capture the transgressive surrealism of Pitt’s film.
Bit of a special one, and surely one of the weightiest and most important archival editions of the year.
Richard Teitelbaum “Asparagus” is out as deluxe gatefold 2LP at Black Truffle Records.