PNEUMERSHONIC
Frequencies Of The Beast

Catalog reference number: Tray Full Of Lab Mice reference.
CD release date: 1997. No longer available via In Poly Sons.
This record is home produced by Matt Jasper. The Pneumershonic song "The Ticking" is on the IPS compilation Rythmé Brut.

Pneumershonic is one Paul Bourre, homeless for over 20 years and nuts for probably as long (luckily his poison is coffee), and his songs have all the elements that make up the familiar "ain't it weird" genre. But that's exactly not why we like this disk. Bourre is talented, to be sure – he improvises his songs on the spot, and unlike, say, Westey Willis or Daniel Johnston, he can actually sing, when he wants to, with a soft, mellifluous voice and phrasing like a slight, quiet Elvis. In this record, heavy on the Optigan (sound we're not sick of... yet), marimbas and free-range quitars, light on any kind of recognizable meter, the music cascaces around Bourre's rants about girls and Martians and hippies and love and more girls. The brief, untitled track seven is a perfect jewel of overlaps and repetition, with jungle beats derailed into free-rhythm land. And Bourre himself has a few tricks up his sleeve : "Paul Emulates Trumpet" is just that, and "Farewell, Marimba Bimbo" has him scatting in an abstract duck-and-spittle style. "Table Girl" multi-tracks Bourre's voice, turning the song into a round for a crowd of Pauls: some mumble, some whisper, some croon, but all eventually get around to singing the same song, if not all a the same time.
(Robin Edgerton)

"Paul is homeless and as been a friend for 8 years. He needed a job so I paid him $20 an hour to record songs (usually improvised -- though check out song # 9 because he wrote that one out) in my basement."
(Matt Jasper)

1 Hippy freakout
2 The mark of the beast
3 Clothespin cha cha
4 Creature double feature
5 Martian girlfriend
6 Greetings earth
7 Untitled
8 Paul emulates trumpet
9 The ticking 
10 Beyond the moon
11 Thelonious Paul
12 She's my chicken pie
13 Pretty young lady
14 Bubonic plague
15 Backwards
16 Table girl
17 Farewell, Marimba bimbo