Coconut Hotel

It fits Red Krayola logic that the album they recorded after their debut, 1967’s The Parable of Arable Land, was so obtuse, their label shelved it indefinitely. Eventually released by Drag City in 1995, you can see why International Artists were gun-shy about Coconut Hotel. Parable combined the ‘free-form freakouts’ with songs; Coconut Hotel gets rid of the songs, and most of the freakouts, for that matter, replacing them with a set of structured incidents that are closer to conceptual art and composition than popular music. So it’s not going to hit you like Crayola classics “Transparent Radiation” or “War Sucks,” but it’s still fascinating, a slightly curmudgeonly set of tests for what a collection of humans, and instruments, can do in a room, from oscillating organ drones to messy free improv to pouring water to a set of one-second biffs and clangs.