Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship: Courtney Love - Uncrushworthy (1990)

K Records' Courtney Love was a duo consisting of Lois Maffeo and Pat Maley, whose output was limited to a few short EPs and singles in 1990 and 1991 and some later compilation appearances. There's nothing else to say about the duo, so here's "Uncrushworthy" from the EP of the same name.

Wait, what?

Reports vary as to the name's origin. Maffeo claims it came "out of nowhere", Love claims she and Maffeo were roommates and Maffeo found the name in her diary, which she stole, while an unsourced claim goes that the two were indeed roommates, but came up with the name together. Another unsourced claim states that Love and Maffeo were never roommates and that Love angrily told K boss Calvin Johnson to force the duo to cease and desist. In any case, Maffeo began her solo career under the name Lois soon after. Love didn't release anything under her own name until 2004's America's Sweetheart. Snail Mail covered "The 2nd Most Beautiful Girl in the World" from the Uncrushworthy EP in 2018.

 
https://ravenandcrowstudio.com/journal/seven-inch-sunday/

Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship: Van Morrison's Contractual Obligation Recordings (1967)

To sever his increasingly acrimonious relationship with Bang records, Van Morrison had to record 31 songs. They never said the songs had to be any good, though, so Morrison did what any disgruntled musician would do, and completely phoned it in. I can't emphasise that enough; this is nothing like the pointed, bitter Here, My Dear, Marvin Gaye's answer to a different contractual stipulation. If Morrison had any fucks to give, they didn't make it into any these songs. The first five songs - essentially a five part suite -  all use the same song title template - "body movement and/or vocalisation instructions": "Twist and Shake", "Shake and Roll", "Stomp and Scream", "Scream and Holler" and "Jump and Thump". Things don't get weightier from there. There's even a meta wink of a song called "Freaky If You Made It This Far", although the brevity of these songs makes that easier than it could have been. Morrison's musicianship can't save any of this, because it doesn't make an appearance; he didn't even bother to tune the guitar.

https://media.gunaxin.com/van-morrison-worlds-strangest-album/141941
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Sessions_%2767

Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship: Paul Banks - Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be (2013)

Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be (seriously?) is Paul Banks' stab at a mixtape. Released for free most of the way through the gap between Interpol's self-titled album, its most poorly received to date, and El Pintor, its best in a decade, it didn't renew any interest in Interpol, nor spark any in a potential new creative avenue for Banks. Perhaps it's unfair to judge it by the fact that it's outside Banks' milieu. It's a bigger leap than Dylan going electric - closer to Dylan going dubstep - but keep an open mind.

On its merits, Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be is not terrible (besides that title), but it is amateurish and forgettable, and only the names attached to it distinguish it from the same sort of stuff you'll find on Soundcloud. Banks doesn't rap, which is almost certainly for the best - instead, for the most part we get instrumental hip-hop a la J Dilla, but Banks is no Dilla. What little rapping there is comes courtesy of guests El-P, Talib Kweli, High Prizm and Mike G. Banks would go onto release an album with RZA under the name Bankz & Steelz. Its genesis predates Everybody, but Anything But Words didn't come out until 2016.

Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship: John Cage - As Slow as Possible (1985/1987)

Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship returns with another thing you could just read about on Wikipedia.

"As Slow as Possible" is both the title and the pianist's instruction of this John Cage piece, but the mandate is more like "as slow as you want". It was written as "ASLSP" for piano in 1985 and later adapted for organ so that the ability to sustain notes could take the idea even further.

Some of the longer piano performances exceed an hour; pieces of music as long as this are uncommon, but not unheard of. In 2011, The Flaming Lips recorded the six hour long "I Found a Star on the Ground". In 2015, Thom Yorke was commissioned by artist Stanley Donwood (the man responsible for all of Radiohead's artwork since The Bends) to write music for "The Panic Office", an exhibit of his art in Sydney, and wrote a piece that lasted 18 days, no two minutes being exactly the same. Erik Satie's "Vexations" from the late 19th Century is a precursor to Cage's piece which includes cryptic instructions that can be reasonably interpreted as "play 840 times" - no speed is given. Cage organised a performance of "Vexations" that lasted 18 hours using a large tag team of pianists that included his similarly named protegee John Cale. But in the late 90s, a group of musicians in Halberstadt, Germany conspired to take "As Slow as Possible" to absurd extremes - you have to remember that we didn't have smartphones back then and we had to make our own fun.

A performance of the piece using a purpose-built organ with the pedals held down by sandbags commenced in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640. The performance actually started what was effectively many performances of his better known "4:33" (minus the page-turning), as the piece starts with a rest which, for this performance, was interpreted as being two years in length. Right now it's most of the way through a rest which began in 2013 and will end after almost seven years in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
https://universes.art/en/magazine/articles/2012/john-cage-organ-project-halberstadt/
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/arts/music/06chor.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexations