Music Arcades: Frank Zappa: Uncle Meat

I remember exactly what led me to buy this. It was the late '80s and I was reading books about the history of electronic music. They seemed to cite Uncle Meat as one of the Zappa album that demonstrated his innovations. I quote from Paul Griffiths' Guide to Electronic Music:

Zappa is another resourceful musician who has explored the specific potentials of electronic rock, often in music which… extends the dimensions of the rock number well beyond those of the three- or four-minute song. His Uncle Meat and other records of the late sixties, in which he performed with the Mothers of Invention, demonstrate a thorough use of studio techniques, including speed change, tape reversal and the use of filters to change timbres. He has also often acknowledged the importance to his work of Varèse, Webern, Stravinsky and other 'classical' masters of the twentieth century.

That was written in 1979, and sounds quaint now.

Yes, there are a few of those studio techniques, but mostly it's a jazz rock album, fairly typical of 1969, except that it's faintly clinical — as Zappa can be — and has quite a lot of harpsichord and celeste on it. (And being reminded of how that sounds half-explains why he later began just to program his music on a Kurzweil without involving musicians.)

I say it's mostly a jazz-rock album, but there is also 37 mins and 34 secs of Uncle Meat Film Excerpt Part I on the second disk. I let it play all the way through, so you don't have to. I promise the track contains nothing of any interest.