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Friday, February 5, 2010

Crickets / Music / Visual Art Today in "Finally"

Posted by Miles Raymer on Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 6:21 PM

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kingsgoforth.jpg
Music freaks have known for years about Mingering Mike, a stranger-than-fiction outsider artist who hand-painted cover art for fictional soul and funk records on cardboard album sleeves with hand-painted cardboard "records" inside. His "catalog" of made-up LPs consisted of "soundtracks to imaginary films, instrumental albums, a benefit album for sickle cell anemia, a tribute to Bruce Lee, a triple-record work titled 'Life in Paris,' songs protesting the Vietnam War and promoting racial unity, and records of Christmas, Easter and American bicentennial music," according to a New York Times piece on his discovery by crate diggers.

That article ran in early 2004. And only today did I get a press release saying that a band had finally hired Mingering Mike to produce art for one of its records. How did that not happen sooner? Seriously, everybody, the next time someone discovers an absolutely brilliant artist making obsessive, mind-blowing fake LPs, let's try to get a record cover out of him in less than six years.

The band in question, Kings Go Forth, fittingly make the kind of high-energy throwback soul that sounds like what Mingering Mike might've recorded if he'd cut any of his songs in a proper studio with actual instruments. Way to go, Kings Go Forth. You did something extremely cool that should have happened literally years ago.

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