Where am I?
Oh yes, I remember now... I had been racked by recurring dreams in which
a dark and beautiful phantasm beckoned to me, wreathed in scarves of red.
My psychiatrist, Dr Muller, suggested that I was overworked and should take
a vacation. So I sailed to Madeira, where I was granted the hospitality
of this pagoda-like castle, a labyrinth where I might lose and find myself
again and again. Imagine my disturbance upon meeting my hostess, the Countess
Nadina-a perfect incarnation of the siren whose song I had travelled so
far to elude...
The Countess escorted me to a baroque chamber where the very air was alive
with red and yellow bubbles, and there she danced for me, looking like a
Black Angel lending incantatory ferment to an uncorked sparkling wine. With
the skill of an artisan, she removed her costume piece-by-piece and used
it to clothe a wooden mannequin... then the mannequin sprang to life and
undressed itself, now revealing warm flesh underneath, the better to seduce
the doctors who had driven her brilliant husband to suicide, lovers whom
she then killed in ecstasy... and then she stripped once again, all the
way down to her true identity as Jane Morgan, a gun-toting agent with the
British Secret Service. Overwhelmed, I staggered across the Oriental carpet
to a fluorescent orange mirror in which I was confounded to find a reflection
of the late Dennis Price.
When the music stopped, the red and yellow bubbles dissipated and I awoke
to find my hostess gone. I walked the corridors in search of her, but found
the castle vacated and deep in dust. In fact, it was no longer a castle,
but rather a cluttered suburban house in Cincinnati, Ohio. The only explanation
for my misadventure, I realized, was this compact disc from Lucertola Media,
a compilation of music heard in three amazing films written and directed
by Jess Franco: VAMPYROS LESBOS, SIE TOTETE IN EKSTASE (MRS.
HYDE, SHE KILLS IN ECSTASY) and DER TEUFEL KAM AUS AKASAVA
(THE DEVIL CAME FROM AKASAWA), all made in 1970.
Feeling close to an explanation, I played the disc again. The music of Manfred
Hubler and Siegfried Schwab-originally released on two rare 1969 albums,
PSYCHEDELIC DANCE PARTY and SEXADELIC-had a style all its own; it was "acidjazz-pop,'
alternately electrifying, languid and effervescent. The surface was often
lively, with bold horns and laughing sitars, but beneath this ocean of sound
lay a dark and delirious undertow, conjured by ominous swirls of Hammond
organ and reverberating psycho-chords which invited the listener to inhale
and succumb. I'd loved this music for years, but had only heard it on the
dulled-down, mono soundtracks of various bootleg videos. Hearing the bold
stereo mix of this compact disc for the first time had been an awakening:
it breathed such vivid, three-dimensional life into those once-tinny soundscapes
that I had been transported. As the music washed over me a second time,
once again it turned Ohio into Madeira, like water into wine.
How sad that digital technology cannot similarly restore to us Soledad Miranda-the
beautiful star of these three films-who lost her life in a car crash shortly
after making them, at the age of 27. But wait for the track entitled "The
Message." If you cherish her memory as I do, you'll find that this
tysergic rhapsody has all the conductive power of a se6nce. Play it, and
I guarantee that the Dark Lady of Franco's celluloid sonnets will dance
again-just for you.
TIM LUCAS
Cincinnati, Ohio-April 11, 1995
