Pierre Henry – Ceremony: An Electronic Mass

This album is pretty good overall if you like that 1969 soundtrack to a bikers and hippies go to woodstock type movie. Its just ruined by one track where a retard is making burp noises through one channel. There's really no need for it and it should be edited out.

Definitely not what we could call a "bad" album. Of course, Pierre Henry's sonic touches sometimes irritate and have a pointless dimension but the music remains interesting 90 percent of the time. There's only a few painful moments, moments during wich Pierre Henry looped voice samples. The psych rock compositions are cool anyway but I think both Pierre Henry and Spooky Tooth are better taken appart from each other. I would rate it between 3-3,5/5 as it remain an historical collaboration but I prefer François Bayle and Soft Machine short cooperation for "L'Expérience Acoustique" in the early seventies or the utilisation of rock elements in "Petite Suite" from the great Jacques Lejeune. Bernard Parmegiani also used to blend genres in "Pop'eclectic" or "Du Pop À L'âne" without being anecdotal. A last project I would add to this list is probably the Horacio Vaggione's It - Viaje project, mixing guitar sounds with electroacoustic elements, quite pertinent whereas it's own creator, Horacio Vaggione hates it so much (met him in an electroacoustic festival in Monaco and he literally went mad when I told him this record was highly sought after, retorting it's a shame that such a bad record could even exist !).
Anyway, Ceremony worth a listen and I'll probably keep it for years !

I've had this album for decades and it still shocks me with how terrible it is. Still, I can't let my decent $1 bin copy go, it's so mesmerizingly horrid a display of pompous tomfoolery from all ends. I flat out don't dig the growly mud of Spooky Tooth, although Wright went on to make at least one shitty pop song worth slowing down ("My Love Is Alive" or whatever it's called. Fuck "Dream Weaver.") and good King Henry is a lucky duck who had his share of sheerly brilliant and overly indulgent experiments, but then this ludicrous album... Like the at-the-time fashionable fusion LPs by Hubbard & Mimaroglu and Cherry & Penderecki (and certainly Jon Lord & Eberhard Schoener if you wander that far), this is a titanic musical mess that will never live up to the wine and food these artists dined on during those lascivious '70s nights of record company moolah madness. "We're finally gonna SELL the maddening chaos of 20th century electronic wizardry to the rock and jazz kids!" Fat chance! At least the artists had a bitta fun and got to make one of the most difficult and bewildering failures of rock's strange history. Not bad!

Just to warn you in advance:
"Ceremony - An Electronic Mass" can in no way be classified as easy listening or tea-time background music. It also has little to do with the SPOOKY TOOTH one knows otherwise, although the name acted as a virtual trademark for the first release. And this music didn't bring much luck for Spooky Tooth, either, for in the end this electronic rock mass actually meant the split of this popular rock band.
On Spooky Tooth itself: Very few music fans today know that long before its official formation the group existed under the names "VIPs" and "Art". It was first christened Spooky Tooth when the American Gary Wright ed the combo band in the late autumn of 1967. The group developed from an insider tip with one bluesy LP to become one of the most striking rock bands on the scene. Already in 1969 they were mentioned in the same breath with the other so-called super-groups.
And songs like "Waiting For The Wind", "Evil Woman" or "Better By You, Better By Me" belong to the classics of rock music. But the group had scarcely reached the climax of its career when fate caught up with it. It came in person of French composer Pierre Henry.
Gary Wright (keyboards) was not only a fan of this modern classics specialist, but also an attentive student. Wright was the one who talked to other , Mike Harrison (keyboards, vocals), Luther Grosvenor (guitar), Greg Rudley (bass) and Mike Kellie (drums), into working with the Frenchman.
Furthermore, Wright was the only one who worked on composing with Henry. His percentage of the work, however, was slight compared to the Frenchman. And Mike Harrison and Co. regarded the whole project pretty helplessly anyway. They felt like "Tools without a say" .
But finally they let themselves be pulled along again by Gary Wright's enthusiasm, for at this point nobody could foresee that "Ceremony" would speed up Spooky Tooth's split. When the recording was over and the relatively satisfied musicians went on holiday from the studio, Pierre Henry grabbed the tapes. Without informing his colleagues he added the sound elements of his own musical world.
The effect was explosive, not only between the Frenchman and the band. "Ceremony" became one of the most controversial albums of the 60's. On the drug scene the electronic mass became the musical accompaniment to eerie trips into dream-world.
In accompaniment to the gruesome-beautiful, mystical and often threatening sounds various pill poppers and juice drinkers experienced glorious psy-fi trips into artificial paradise.
The experiment touched off a bitter controversy in the rest of the rock world. Some found it hideous, repulsive and crazy, others saw new doors being opened for infinite realms of music.
For Spooky Tooth, however, the "Ceremony" LP honestly didn't mean much. Only Gary Wright would have liked to have worked further in this direction. This was perhaps the most important reason why the group split after only one more album.