Blacklight Braille

Blacklight Braille is one of those bands that even my most music-nerdy friends consider "weird shit." I admit that the music is pretty weird and some of it might not even be considered music so much as performance.

My collection of Blacklight Braille vinyl

I discovered the band by chance, thanks to my brother's college radio station. (I think that was my freshman year in college.) Most people I've played the records for consider them to be "music" — at least one person referred to it as unlistenable art wank — but I have a major soft spot for them.

Blacklight Braille labels themselves as "fringe rock." I consider them American prog rock with more non-instruments than synth. While I've never really been a fan of prog rock, there's something about this band that captivated me. The combination of reworked Arthurian poetry and experimental music (and instruments) was (and still is) unlike anything else I'd heard.

I had wanted to find more of Blacklight Braille's music, but couldn't find anything in the stores. (As it turned out, these were limited pressings and I'm not even sure how they managed to wing their way out of Ohio.) Back then, you could write to the label for a catalog and buy music that way; so that's what I did. (This was the early '90s, the Web was still "cool" and "futuristic" and "pointless" — no companies were actually using it.)

So, I wrote to the label and asked specifically about getting additional Blacklight Braille albums. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the band's frontman, Owen Knight. We talked for quite awhile (in my memory it was almost an hour, but who knows…) and I got to learn about him and the band. He was particularly interested in how someone in Louisiana had even heard of them and then more interested to learn that I was a music student. He made a real impression on me at a time when I was seriously considering dropping my music major.

Sadly, I don't have any of the band's releases past 1993. (The label is now defunct.) It looks like they may have only released a few more and at least one is a compilation of songs from other albums.

I don't listen to the albums too much anymore. But every once in a while, I pull them out and enjoy how different they are from pretty much everything else in my collection. "Music to Mow Lawns By" still has a special place in my heart…