Weena from George Pal's The Time Machine (1960) intones the decadent dirges of Charles Baudelaire while sarod master Ali Akbar Khan enshrouds her funereal intensity in poppy-seed brocade. It's one of those records that could only have been made during the 1960s, when Caedmon Records, Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message with Marshall McLuhan - Columbia Records, 1968), Sidney Poitier (Poitier Meets Plato - Warner Bros. Records, 1964), Timothy Leary, Mort Garson & Ruth White (Flowers of Evil - Limelight Records, 1969) were releasing the true Head Music.
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| Yvette Mimieux & a Morlock, The Time Machine (1960) |
While Mimieux's readings aren't particularly remarkable, the producers wisely chose the most ornate translations of six poems from Les Fleurs Du Mal, Baudelaire's florid & death-obsessed masterpiece (first published in 1857). While many translations over the years have sought to create less mediated readings of the poems, condensing the syntax a bit to more accurately reflect the precision of Baudelaire's poetry, it is the translations by Edna St. Vincent Millay & George Dillon that evoke the sickly smell of rotting funeral flowers English readers have come to expect from the poet. And couching Baudelaire's "sickening green-house atmosphere" in luxurious, slow-falling petals of sarod, sitar & tabla, creates the perfect aural equivalent to Nicholas Roeg & Donald Cammell's orientalist mindfuck noir, Performance (1970).
The Baudelaire libretto for Track Three, "The Murdered Woman":
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