"This is not only music, it is life itself" someone once said to me about a rare privately pressed LP I had sold him that really flipped him out with the intense personality and sound of the music. I started, like many of my friends, with an obsession for finding unknown '60s era psychedelic and garage records, the key ingredient motivating me being to discover things that would Flip Me Out.

In 1977 a newly issued self produced private pressing LP titled "Attic Demonstration" by Kenneth Higney changed my focus. It Really Flipped Me Out. I felt like I was seeing, or rather, hearing into the mind of the creator vividly, no other record I had heard until that time sounded at all like it and I knew instantly none ever would. The personality, the human being was right there in the music, not hidden behind it.

That LP captured for me the first in an ever growing cast of characters, individuals, strange bedfellows, so to speak, sharing that realm of isolated artists who were driven to make private "vanity" pressing albums of their musical vision back in the pre-digital pre-internet days when it was a much bigger deal to pull off making an LP let alone finding someone to hear it without having any 'showbiz' connections. Days of near guaranteed obscurity no matter how brilliant and original the music.

Names like Bobb Trimble, Peter Grudzien, Jerry Solomon, Mark Mundy, Damon, D.R. Hooker come to mind, made a masterpiece, fated to be discovered long afterwards, appreciated only by those with a passion for something special. Another quality these types share besides making a 'lost masterpiece' is that none of them sound at all like any of the others. Each has his own sound, creates for you his own unique world, magically uncorrupted by the compromise and blandness of commercial product even if they were aiming for that. Each so unique as to seem a different piece in some loosely defined puzzle of a community.

Michael Farneti is now available to you for your enjoyment. He Flips Me Out. He joins the club because no one else in the club is like him. The thrill here has a lot to do with the sense of discovery, finding the buried treasure of seeing through someone else's eyes. Thousands of privately pressed LPs for each one of this special quality, needle in the haystack style. Some are fun at first but wear off, with the special ones like this the sense of discovery never diminishes no matter how many times you listen. You always feel like something special is occurring as you listen, in part afterglow from the excitement of initial discovery, but more importantly, you just met someone intriguing and you can invite him (or her) over anytime you like, even introduce them to your friends and Flip Them Out.

Of course, the music is only created for you individually by your perception of it, falling tree making no sound with absence of ears, so let Michael Farneti introduce yourself to your perception of him, pay attention and you can go beyond he surface, hear that world that myself and assorted friends with well travelled ears experience. The sound of what some call "real people". They did it themselves against all odds. While they may reflect familiar elements and influences, no one else has the secret ingredient in their recipe, namely their own personal vision, their own personality up front infusing their songs with unique character.

Michael Farneti has his sound and skills together, highly developed and realized. Many of the more obvious special private pressing LPs are enhanced by limitations, unintentional but fascinating "gone wrong" aspects, glorious amateur aplomb, even the tricky 'so bad it's good' designation that often accompanies surface appraisals. Detecting that "real people" specialness in private press LPs by more accomplished deliberate musicians like Michael Farneti, those who have their sound fully together is a more subtle affair, as the line between a unique original and an imitation of some popular sound can be deceptive, even 'now you see it, now you don't' elusive. But once you do hear it, 'get' it, it remains undeniable. New ground has been broken.

As hardcore longtime fans of private pressings know, back in the '70s and '80s every big used record store in every locality had totally unknown private pressings, usually in the cheapest section of the shop. Only a handful of people were obsessively looking for the personality driven self made albums as compared to genres like garage, psychedelic, progressive, etc. so they ended up in the junk piles. Then people got more connected, started trading the good spare copies they found to get stuff they needed... and then inevitably reissues abound for years of great stuff but the well dries up, the really special ones nearly all known or buried forever.

So it is more special when a great one emerges from ultra obscurity, for me my copy was so obscure I don't recall when or where I got it, didn't tune in to it after I got it, but could see why I would have grabbed it with the moody pic on the back cover and a song titled "ESP Switch", something could be up. And was up when I finally did drop the needle... the first four tracks are a wild ride, a sequence starting with a surreal trip to Rio, then through a swirling "Movie Star" crescendo of sounds which gets hallucinatory with the lyric "movie screens...on your blue jeans" weirding me out nicely, then the "ESP Switch" is flipped on and expansive, then chill out with "19th Summer" haunting moody edgy music.

Include Michael Farneti in that special section where you are not only listening to a record, you are hearing life itself, the singer in your room, your room in your head, the songs creating this personality you customize to your own view in sound. One personal thing about my enjoyment of these sorts of albums with such intimate force of personality like this one is that I get a 'twilight zone' sense, an underlying warm but surreal eerie feeling, demonstrating the superior inscrutable strangeness of reality and people over supernatural imagined worlds as being the more rewarding, mysterious and miraculous way to perceive existence. I say this in spite of the fact that the very premise I just stated implies all music is strange (which it is, of course if so you choose), but more as a matter of taste for me, the real people music self-illuminating, the people fascinating in the image they make my mind create of them. It's also about mysterious treasure from the past, the enhancement of having a period being 'lost in time' and then rediscovered to have a timeless voice being so communicative in a way that is his own, that's a high standard and "Good Morning Kisses" gets it right to you.

-- Paul Major, 2011

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