Artist
Rollin Hunt doesn't say publicly what planet he's from, but it's safe
to say it isn't ours. Disguised as a healthy midwestern boy, Rollin
began infiltrating human society at an early age. As a teenager in
Chicago he was never seen without a tape recorder or video camera,
using the flimsy pretext of "art" to collect data for his
extraterrestrial research. By his early 20s, he began recording
pseudo-popular music as a way to synthesize and transmit his findings.
A capable anthropologist, Rollin's songs deftly penetrate various
human types--the Criminal, the Bum, the Waitress--while his music has
the odd quality of being both robotic and soulful. Rollin Hunt may in
fact be a cosmic being who has been programmed for earthly love.
There are echoes of other aliens who've come to visit our
turntables--Joe Meek, Roky Erickson, Sun Ra--but Rollin's outsider
take on humanity has the unique quality of tenderness. Much of his
charm comes from his bumbling attempts to approximate our
culture--like Balki Bartokomous of TV's Perfect Strangers, he can be
painfully foreign, employing stilted grammar and forgetting the names
of holidays. His pop sense is likewise skewed; Jessica Hopper, writing
in the Chicago Tribune, describes his sound as "unearthly
shoo-be-doo... as if someone was trying to imitate the Shangri-La's or
the Ronnettes but only knew them from a thirdhand description." It's
not surprising, then, that he's caught on among certain warped
segments of music-lovers. A bunch of worshipful foreigners have even
put together a tribute album, cryptically titled Him Who Is There,
that portrays Rollin as some sort of oddball Messiah. There's a sense
that this visitor, this interplanetary innocent, might have something
important to teach us about human life.
The two songs on this 7" serve as a raw and startling introduction to
Rollin Hunt. Already hailed as "savant-garde," his musical
explorations of Life on Earth will continue with a full-length album
due later this year on Moniker Records (recorded with whiz-kid
producer Donny Schroeder). As suggested by one of his early home
recordings, titled (significantly) Dear People of the World, Hunt's
musical messages are meant not only for aficionados but for our entire
species........................................Are we ready to listen?
