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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Yoko Ono’s “Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins,” “Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With The Lions” And “Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band”

Now a respected doyenne of avant-pop dance music with hints of skronky jazz and new wave thrown into the mix, Yoko Ono was once a hated-upon former member of the Fluxus art movement whose greatest crime was loving a Beatle. That it was the already-risk taking (and risqué, from the duo’s nude front-and-back covers of Two Virgins) John Lennon as her partner, Ono flourished in a manner befitting a superstar.

Yet, these were home-recorded experiments in tape loops, heavy sound FX, monophonic manipulation—a portrait of the married pair’s new life as living-together artists in the late ’60s. Only the primal, avant-blues of her Plastic Ono Band (versus Lennon’s own) begins to resemble that which she does at present, only less musical. Spoken/screamed words the likes of which were made for great kitchen magnet poetry touching on the subject of her miscarriages married to the bleatings of saxophonist Ornette Coleman mixed with vocal technique from kabuki theater—the entire vibe of Plastic Ono Band is as aggressive as it is transgressive. These three albums are the beginning of the Chimera/Secretly Canadian reissue program of total Ono Immersion. Collect the set.

—A.D. Amorosi