Dark Entries score further Patrick Cowley recordings

Previously unreleased music the producer made with Candida Royalle in the early ’70s features on the upcoming Candida Cosmica.

It is business as usual at Dark Entries Industries, with the intrepid archivists readying a trio of late September releases thar canvas the underground cassette trading world of Europe in the 1980s. Along with a vinyl edition of the 1983 Stadia LP from Spanish group Diseño Corbusier, the San Francisco label are reissuing two French acts in no-wavers Bocal 5 and Philippe Fichot’s prolific Die Form project. You can hear previews for both those releases at the Dark Entries SoundCloud page, but what has us really excited is a new batch of Patrick Cowley discoveries on the label to celebrate the Hi NRG disco pioneer’s birthday.

It was the School Daze soundtrack from Cowley Dark Entries reissued in late 2013 that introduced the label to many people and they’ve continued to profile his work with releases issued to coincide with his birthday. Following the reissue of the Catholic album Cowley recorded with Jorge Socarras in 2014, and last year’s Muscle Up issued in conjunction with Honey Soundsystem, Dark Entries have hit paydirt for this year’s birthday celebration.

The early ’70s era of Cowley’s life whilst residing in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco is the focus, a period when he recorded music with Candice Vadalla, a singer, actress and art student from Queens, NY. Vadalla would go on to take the stage name Candida Royalle and progress from acting in pornography to becoming a producer and director of feminist erotic cinema, and then a sex educator. Sadly, Vadalla passed away last year, but the brief period she worked with Cowley will be celebrated by Dark Entries.

The two apparently crossed paths after being introduced by Cowley’s room-mates, and he was soon arranging, embellishing and recording music pieces for the various theatrical Vadalla was performing in. Dark Entries tell us Vadalla took on the role of “musical muse and sex goddess” for Cowley with the pair becoming occasional lovers and collaborating on his experiments in the studio. These now form the basis of Candida Cosmica, five tracks of seemingly-unheard music discovered on tapes in the attic of Cowley’s college classmate and studio mate Maurice Tani.

Available to preview below, this 30-minutes worth of music offers some insight into some of Cowley’s earliest musical experiments as well as a celebration of two individuals who were taken too soon. By happenstance, Cowley and Vadalla’s birthdays are mere days apart and the release of Candida Cosmica arrives in the week they would have both turned 66.

Dark Entries will release Candida Cosmica by Patrick Cowley & Candida Royalle on October 17.

Tracklisting:

A1. Candida Cosmica
A2. Elementals
B1. Shimmering (Where Am I?)
B2. Tantum Ergo
B3. Tomato Song

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