Seriously whacked-out space-age bachelor pad music from one of Müller's good days. Under the ropey theme of the sun, sky, and stars, Müller works on twisting 12 standards, throwing in whistling, meteors, cowboys on the attack, and much more lunacy. "You Are My Lucky Star" keeps upping the tempo and throwing in new instruments; on "I've Got the Sun in the Morning" he processes the backing vocalists through some sort of strange early delay effect, doubling them back on each other. This is one record worth searching out in the thrift store bins -- the arrangements bring a smile to the face.
(This is one of a group of LPs I bought at 3 for a dollar in Branson! That brought a smile to my face!)
Bandleader Werner Müller's LPs for the London Phase 4 label remain some of the most seriously deranged easy listening records ever released. A bizarrely beautiful mélange of wordless vocals, pioneering production techniques, and oddball instrumentation, the music possesses an otherworldly splendor unique in the annals of space age pop. Released in 1961, Percussion in the Sky remains Müller's masterpiece: a concept record assembling a dozen pop standards linked thematically by their celestial titles, its use of cosmic sound effects, vocal delays, and other chicanery still sounds revolutionary -- if Spike Jones collaborated on an album with Galileo, it would sound exactly like this.
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