In order to truly blow one’s mind, one must travel to the far reaches of the music cosmos – to a place where Throbbing Gristle, Barbra Streisand, Captain Beefheart, Bongwater, Tim Buckley and Sun Ra reign supreme and sonic adventures into the unknown are an essential part of daily life. A dimension where flipped-out acid rock rubs shoulders with records that reconfigured our conception of what music could be while manifestations of further-out lunacy – some barely recognisable as music at all – hover while laughing maniacally.

Welcome, then, to MOJO’s list of the 20 most “out there” albums of all time. Dig in, and hold on tight…

20. Pink Floyd, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (EMI Columbia, 1967)

“Piper was Syd”, said bassist Roger Waters, “and Syd was a genius.” Under the stewardship of Waters and Syd Barrett’s replacement David Gilmour, Pink Floyd would go on to become one of the most commercially successful rock bands of all time, so it’s easy to overlook just how close to the sun they were flying on their Syd-helmed debut. Switching schizophrenically between eerie nursey rhymes (The Gnome, Bike, Scarecrow) and frightening whooshes of LSD dissonance, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is the aural approximation of Barrett’s own crumbling mind, reaching for mental freedom but risking mental collapse. 

19. Throbbing Gristle, Second Annual Report (Industrial, 1977)

Punk might have preached chaos and anarchy, but of all the groups who broke through in ’76-’77, only Throbbing Gristle truly created it. Known for their Arts Council-funded pranks involving the public letting of blood and semen, Throbbing Gristle took punk’s audience-baiting philosophy and ran with it. The titles on their debut hint at some of the sonic slaughter within (Slug Bait, After Cease To Exist) but only listening can reveal the true terror frontman Genesis P-Orridge and co. unleashed in their maelstrom of disfigured guitars and bass, proto-industrial electronics, screams and samples of true crime reports. Definitely not for the faint-hearted.

18. Bongwater, Double Bummer (Shimmy Disc, 1988)

Opening with maniacal shrieking about Russian lesbians over contorted rockabilly guitar, followed by schizophrenic covers of Soft Machine and Johnny Cash numbers and Led Zeppelin’s Dazed And Confused (sung in Mandarin), it was clear from the off that Bongwater were never guided by commercial intent. The artful assemblage of producer/Shimmy Disc boss Kramer and singer/actor/performance artist/waitress Ann Magnuson split acrimoniously in 1992 after a seven-year pop-schizoid avant-cabaret, best represented here.

17. John Zorn, Naked City (Elektra/Nonsuch, 1990)

 Taping Looney Tunes soundtracks from the TV as a kid, saxophone player John Zorn later adopted a similar surreal and mellifluous approach to music. Hence Naked City’s debut album saw him squeeze jazz, country, film music and eight under-50-second blasts of underground Japanese noise into his musical meat grinder. A 26-song set that appealed to Napalm Death and Ornette Coleman fans alike. 

16. Mercury Rev, Boces (Beggars Banquet, 1993)

How might one describe Mercury Rev’s second album to those more familiar with the grand cosmic Americana of the band’s post-Deserters Songs oeuvre? Eight-year-olds on heroin are unleashed in the school music room and play imagined soundtracks to Walt Disney cartoons while a Balinese gamelan group crash a New Orleans funeral, gnarly garage rockers The Groundhogs fall from the sky and a scary tramp impersonates Billie Holliday? Mercury Rev’s last record to feature lose cannon co-singer David Baker, they went on to far greater success and acclaim but would never again venture so far into the freak zone as they did here.

15. Tim Buckley, Starsailor (Straight, 1970)

By the late ’60s Tim Buckley had swapped baroque folk for jazz impressionism and wordless shrieking. Often singing like a man having his liver removed through his head – over Bunk Gardner’s freeform sax and flute – Buckley embarks upon surrealistic manoeuvres through shapeless bucolic landscapes. Aural punishment and musical rite-of-passage, Starsailor is also, conversely, your ticket to the sighing beauty of the immortal Song to The Siren.

14. CA Quintet, Trip Thru Hell (Candy Floss, 1969)

Although formed in 1966, Trip Thu Hell was Minneapolis garage rockers CA Quintet’s debut album. Why the wait? Drugs? Possibly. A sonic descent into thew acid underworld the record’s wordless female wailing organ wig-outs, screams for help, backwards distortion epic drum solos, blaring trumpet, mixed-into the red mastering and spectral not-there vocals had but one message: the ’60s are over, we’re all doomed.

13. Barbara Streisand, … And Other Musical Instruments (CBS, 1970)

… And Other Musical Instruments is a record so bonkers that even the likes of Frank Zappa might have thought twice. The soundtrack to Streisand’s fifth TV special was designed to explore the entire word of sound and music. Cue: traditional Japanese music, bagpipes, snake charmer pungi, darabukas, new-fangled synthesisers, tape loops and more helping to bend some of Babs’ standards into unrecognisable new shapes (getting into the spirit, she sang One Note Samba dangling from a rope). Perhaps strangest of all is The World Is A Concerto, a piece “in tune with the rhythms of our daily lives” and so made from toasters, orange juicers, hoovers, kettles, a washing machine, blenders and telephones. Fans of Woman In Love be warned, this is some crazy shit. 

12. Scott Walker, Tilt (Fontana, 1995)

When former teen idol and Walker Brother Noel Scott Engel broke 11 years of silence with Tilt, he presented a journey into evil and despair. Featuring an oblique narrative of global murder, and a soundtrack that veered between hammering industrial and shrill operatic – the organ of the Methodist Central Hall appeared on three tracks – Tilt finally delivered on that 1966 Walker Brothers promise that The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore. 

11. The Beatles, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone, 1967)

In which the most popular group of all-time blow everyone’s mind. Forever. Forget the concept album tag: Sgt Pepper… is nothing less that rock’s equivalent of abstract art’s transcendence of the flat as The Beatles build a new universe with every song, each with its own infinity of laws. A Day In The Life’s existential five and half minutes – brilliantly sabotaged by a 41-piece orchestra in false noses and party hats playing car crash nonsense – is devastating. OK, we’ve all heard it, but just imagine hearing it for the very first time upon release and knowing that nothing would ever be the same again.

10. Joe Meek And The Blue Men, I Hear A New World (An Outer Space Music Fantasy) (Triumph, 1960)

Even by his own eccentric standards, Joe Meek’s concept LP about the adventures of imaginary groups of aliens was the definition of “out there”. With song titles including March Of The Dribcots, Love Dance Of The Saroos and Disc Dance Of The Globbots, the producer’s obsession with space and UFOs fires a record that sounds like little else on this planet, or any other. Speed up chipmunk-like voices, Meek’s pioneering use of stereo and echo (later used to far more commercial effect on Telstar) imagines what little green men might have been spinning at the disco while they watched Sputnik whizz overhead.

9. Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy (Verve, 1967)

Even for the supposedly hip, mind-expanding tastes of the hippie crowd, Frank Zappa’s 1967 “failed ballet” was a trip too far. A post-modern orchestral work in two movements – both over 15 minutes long – Lumpy Gravy provided the listener with brain-scrambling collage of sounds. The equivalent of rapidly spinning through a radio dial and being hit with snatches of unconnected dialogue, moments of static and random music ranging from surf rock to surrealist toy tunes and classical menace. Of the 62 albums he recorded in his lifetime, Lumpy Gravy was reportedly his favourite. He would say that though, wouldn’t he? 

8. Perry & Kingsley, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Spotlight On The Moog (Vanguard, 1967)

Cover versions of Moon River, Spanish Flea and Winchester Cathedral aren’t usually the stuff of brain-searing madness. Thanks for Franco-German Moog innovators Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingley, however, these innocent jingles were transformed into analog avalanches of electronic squawks, roars and belches. Each required a week of tape splicing to complete, prompting Kingsley to describe their work as both “fun and painful”. He wasn’t bluffing.

7. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Axis Bold As Love (Polydor, 1967)

Like one of those space age pill we were told would offer a 12-coirse meal in one does, Axis Bold As Love packs all the eclectic claptrap of the 60s counterculture (e.g. UFOs, The Books Hopi) into an opiated dream, while a horizontal Hendrix makes guitars sounds “like jellybread” on the cubist Little Wing, promises a trip through cotton-candy clouds on his, er, dragonfly, on Spanish Castle Magic and strives for a stereo sounds that, in his own words, “goes up and behind and underneath”. Far out indeed. 

6. John Coltrane, Ascension (Impulse, 1966)
 

A year after the release of A Love Supreme, the ever-restless John Coltrane placed his tenor sax in the service of the New Jazz Revolution and unleased Ascension – a squalling one-track quest for musical and spiritual freedom. A guttural, five-sax orgy of improvisation during which the participants were known to scream out-loud, five decades on Ascension remains a uniquely draining, frighteningly human and intense experience.

5. Faust, The Faust Tapes (Virgin, 1973)

When Faust’s previous label complained that the band’s second album, 1972’s Faust So Far, wasn’t commercial enough (one does wonder quite what they were expecting from the krautrock experimentalists) they signed to Richard Branson’s Virgin records. Part of the deal involved the group handing over the miles of tape they had recorded while living in a disused schoolhouse in Wümme, Germany. A still dazzling, disorientating collage whose 26 parts leap between hammering motorik, musique concrète, machine noise, massed vocal chorales and mutated pop songs, thanks to a marketing gimmick where it went sale for just 49p (the price of a single at the time), The Faust Tapes sold 60,000 copies in the UK and in the process blew 60,000 minds. 

4. Butthole Surfers, Locust Abortion Technician (Blast First, 1987)

While tripping on acid in San Francisco, Texan art punks Butthole Surfers had the idea to relocate to Athens, Georgia for their next album. The hometown of one of their current favourite bands, R.E.M. However, holed up in Winterville, a small community on the outskirts of Athens, rather than recreate the jangling alt-rock sounds of Stipe, Buck, Berry and Mills they cooked up one of the most unsettling records of all-time. Locust Abortion Technician is an unholy cacophony of sonic experimentation, a bad trip of demented sludge rock, prog, psychedelia and avant-garde cut and paste tape effects (the terrifying Hay features recordings of the screams emanating from a nearby slaughterhouse). Shiny Happy People it aint. 

3. Miles Davis, Agharta (Columbia, 1975)

Alongside Pangea, Agharta was one of two albums Miles Davis cut live at Japan’s Osaka Festival Hall on February 1 1975. Tired and sick (disintegrating hips, bleeding ulcers), it finds him at the furthest reaches of his post-Bitches Brew avant-funk mission. The already dense sound conjured by Davis’s ’73-’75 band enters even deeper waters here, guitarist/synth maven Pete Cosey goes full Hendrix in space as Sonny Fortune’s feral sax goes 15 rounds with Davis in his mutant, minimalist pomp. The trumpeter’s musical explorations at this stage had taken him so far out, in fact, that following a concert on September 5 that year at New York’s Central Park an exhausted Davis didn’t perform again for five years. 

2. Sun Ra, Space Is The Place (Blue Thumb, 1973)

According to biographer John F. Szwed, Space Is The Place was Sun Ra’s attempt to interpret The Urantia Book – a 2,000-page account of the history of the universe which claimed to be the work of celestial beings and was designed “to present enlarged concepts and advanced truths” to further the advancement of mankind. Regardless of how far he succeeded in uniting human consciousness with the cosmos. Ra – accompanied by the Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra ad June Tyson’s Space Ethnic Voices – still created space jazz’s most out-there statement: a mind-blowing voyage to the outer limits propelled by African rhythms, proto electronica, wild group skronk outs and saucy exotica.

1. Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969)

The result of seven gruelling months living in a shared house under the tyrannical leadership of the Captain – aka Don Van Vliet – who also enforced a strict soya bean diet and new names on the members of the Magic Band (“Drumbo”, “The Mascara Snake”, “Antennae Jimmy Semens”), Trout Mask Replica’s 28 tracks were largely recorded in one four-and-a-half-hour session, overseen by Beefheart’s old school friend and fellow freak Frank Zappa. So intricate is the musical language inside its surrealist mutant blues that it makes Miles Davis’s pioneering Bitches Brew, also released that year, sound like a one-note samba. “Unlike anything else you’d ever heard in your life” declared lifelong TMR evangelist John Peel. Over 50 years later, Beefheart’s widest hour sounds as weird, wonderful and startlingly original as ever.