The Music of Lucia Pamela, A Stereolab Favorite

By Aimee Levitt Wed., Mar. 10 2010 at 3:28 PM

Categories: MP3 Enhanced

Mere words cannot describe the music of Lucia Pamela, star of this week's feature story. Maybe it's because of her unique artistic vision. Maybe it's because her one album, Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela, was recorded on the moon. (This is what she always claimed, and really, there's no reason to doubt her.)

Whatever the case, we at Riverfront Times cannot let our story about Lucia Pamela pass into the archives without sharing some of her music with you, our dear readers. All MP3s are posted courtesy of Erik Lindgren at Arf! Arf! Records, which produced and still sells the 1992 CD reissue of Into Outer Space.

MP3: Lucia Pamela, "Moontown"

MP3: Lucia Pamela, "Walking on the Moon"

Sadly, Lucia Pamela never recorded anything after Into Outer Space. But her spirit lives on: Stereolab wrote a song about her, "International Colouring Contest," which appeared on 1994's Mars Audiac Quintet. (Video below.) Stereolab vocalist Laetitia Sadier recently told the RFT, via e-mail: "There was something radically optimistic about her, that imagination was strongest of all and would conquer all, which was really inspiring."

Pamela was just one of many practitioners of what is known as outsider music. The blog at WFMU, the New Jersey radio station where outsider music scholar Irwin Chusid toils as a DJ, also has a very fine repository of outsider work, including the legendary song-poems and a Japanese interpretation of the Beach Boys called Pot Sounds.