Thursday 7 January 2016

Audio Oddities - Final Relaxation (The Golding Institute)

 
Billed as "your ticket to death through hypnotic suggestion", Final Relaxation is not an audio oddity for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.  A quick glance at the album cover - an image of a decomposing dolphin carcass washed up on an otherwise serene-looking beach - should be indication enough of that.  Final Relaxation proclaims itself to be "the most unusual recording ever sold", an audacious claim for sure, although I would certainly be hard-pressed to name a novelty record founded upon a more deliciously warped concept than this one.  Released by Ipecac Recordings in 2006, Final Relaxation was the fourth (and, to date, final) in a series of releases attributed to the mysterious "Golding Institute".  The three previous installments, Sounds of the American Fast Food Restaurants (1996), Sounds of the San Francisco Adult Bookstores (1997) and Sounds of the International Airport Restrooms (1998), were all released on 7" by Planet Pimp Records, and served as pastiches of the field recording/sound effects record (with Folkways Records' "Science Series" being a particularly obvious target), deliberately picking out some of the most simultaneously mundane and unappealing subject matter imaginable.

Final Relaxation, released on compact disc, has its sights upon a slightly different target - the relaxation record, a recording purporting to benefit the listener by offering techniques in stress management.  Such recordings had been in existence for decades - indeed, Folkways Records had taken their own stab at the genre in 1959 with Lee B. Steiner's Sounds of Self-Hypnosis Through Relaxation - and were going strong well into the 2000s, a more contemporary example being Paul McKenna's Deep Relaxation, released in 2003.  These weren't just limited to instructional recordings from noted psychiatrists and hypnotists - anybody could create a "relaxation record" by whipping together a bit of new age-style music sprinkled with natural sound effects of some variety, and throughout the 1990s trendy gift shops were rife with discs and cassettes with names such as "Ocean Dreams" or "Songs of The Coyote", promising peace, tranquility and re-connection with nature, their covers typically adorned with calming imagery of clouds, waves or bottlenose dolphins.  The dolphin was certainly a persuasive animal where relaxation records were concerned, with one such recording, Dolphin Touch by Ilizabeth Fortune and Dr. Jeffrey D. Thompson, utilising modified dolphin noises "to induce the production of alpha, theta and delta brain-wave patterns in the human cerebral cortex for the purpose of deep relaxation, inspiration and meditation."  It's here that we might appreciate the playful subversion embedded in Final Relaxation's rather unpleasant choice of cover image - it gives us a dolphin alright, but a dead, decomposing one, evoking the decay and mortality that permeate every corner of the natural world.  Mortality is very much the primary occupation of Final Relaxation, although the recording itself never flat-out admits it.  Make no mistake - this is a relaxation record looking to make you relax to the point of no return.

Final Relaxation does have something of a vague narrative surrounding it - the press release information explicitly identifies the Golding Institute as "a radical cult-group masquerading as an educational organisation", while the CD inlay takes the form of a mock will, bequeathing the owner's estate to The Golding Institute, "so that they may continue their work for the benefit of all mankind", and declaring that "The Golding Institute is in no way responsible for my passing, and that I died solely through weakness of character and intellect."  While there are a few hints within the recording itself indicating that Final Relaxation may indeed be the work of a radical cult seeking to harvest multiple victims and their money - notably when it instructs the listener to first leave a note letting whoever finds their "body vehicle" know of the benefits of their programme and setting out instructions for the disposal of their financial assets - for the most part it's the undercurrent of sheer misery and malevolence that makes it so fantastically sinister.  For Final Relaxation is intent not merely upon making you die, but upon ensuring that your final thirty-two minutes will be as painful and uncomfortable as humanly possible.

Final Relaxation, unsurprisingly, makes for one hell of a freaky listen, and much of its success in that regard rests upon the performance of "medical adviser" Christoph Heemann, our guide to the final relaxation process.  Final Relaxation takes the (not unreasonable) assumption that nobody will be entering into it blind and from the start makes no attempt to pass itself off as a genuine relaxation record, with Heemann's narration hitting an immediately unsettling note - an exemplary combination of skin-crawling monotony, uneasy pauses and sudden, peculiar emphasis upon particular words and syllables (the manner in which he occasionally hisses the "x" in "relax", for example, is a real tension-spiker).  Heemann begins by citing a few examples of famous people who have successfully used the "Final Relaxation" technique: "Jan Berry of Jan & Dean,  actor Richard Harris, top chart maker Robert Palmer, entertainer Bob Hope and England's beloved Queen Mother".  At this point alarm bells should already be ringing - these are all celebrities who have passed on and, more specifically, celebrities who had passed on in the early 00s, making them recently deceased at the time of Final Relaxation's release.  Heemann never explicitly states that the final relaxation technique means death, emphasising merely that is a "sleep so deep that it could only take place in a graveyard or an urn", that all of our worldly troubles will permanently cease once the technique has been successfully applied, and the benefits of having a body that is beyond all sensation, to the extent that "ten men can put their cigarettes out on your naked chest."

Heemann himself is evidently not a happy man.  As the recording continues, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between instructions to the listener and personal outbursts revealing his bitterness, disappointment and general disgust at life, although on occasion he will slip unabashedly into the latter ("Last year alone I paid 14,000 dollars in taxes, yet the road leading to my home is riddled with potholes...").  He makes his sexual frustrations plain when he instructs his female listeners to "remove your clothing, starting with any skirts or dresses, continuing to the undergarments, such as a brassiere, or any sorts of lacy sorts of underwear that may restrict your ability to take part in the final relaxation."  Most troubling of all, Heemann hints that he may be deriving some form of twisted gratification from the suffering of the listener - read this particular sample of dialogue out of context and tell me that it doesn't just drip with malice:

"I hope it's hot in your room right now.  I hope you're sweating and choking.  Is blood trickling out of your mouth and onto the pillow?  Good.  How do you feel?  Relaxed?  Not relaxed enough?  Oh, you will soon, for in approximately five minutes, you will embark on the final relaxation."

Heemann's performance ensures that this is all brilliantly understated, however, conveying our adviser as someone weighed down by an overwhelming sense of pain and weariness, increasingly manifesting itself as spite.

As noted, Heemann isn't quite as interested in soothing your troubles as he is in deepening your agitation, his "relaxation" technique consisting of little more than having the listener imagine themselves in all manner of gruesome and grotesque situations.  The frequency with which these scenarios flicker between stomach-churning horror and laugh-out-loud hilarity is a great part of what makes Final Relaxation such an uneasy, but also rewarding listening experience.  Some of the imagery Heemann evokes is outright bizarre (one of the more benign examples being a totally left of field reference to Gene Krupa's final concert), at other times he piles on the horrific details to the point of absurdity ("rats on your stomach, eating their way through to get an apple!", "the eyes are stinging, as if they've been urinated into, or as if a box jellyfish has taken up residence on your face"), and at others Heemann's blatant underlying malevolence is what really sells it ("are you allergic to hay?").  And then there are a few select moments that stand out as genuinely, unreservedly disturbing, the pinnacle undoubtedly being when Heemann advises the listener to snap their front teeth off, which, if carried out correctly, should leave the taste of the saline in their mouth.

The intensity of the recording really kicks into gear within the last five minutes, as Heemann assures us that we are drawing nearer to the final relaxation, and his own vitality undergoes a notable deterioration.  It would no doubt be unsporting of me to reveal the full details of the ending, but I will say that it concludes on an appropriately (and chillingly) abrupt note.

Ultimately, Final Relaxation is best recommended to those who like their humour particularly dark or those who are gluttons for punishment.  Its macabre concept and decidedly gruesome content mean that it is awfully difficult listening at times - however much you may laugh, you'll find yourself wincing and retching all the more more - and yet the sheer strangeness of the recording, coupled with Christoph Heemann's hilariously repulsive performance, make it a must-have for all hoarders of audio oddities.  I can only hope that, over time, a robust and richly-deserved cult following will develop.  "I Survived The Final Relaxation" bumper stickers, anyone?

No comments:

Post a Comment