Golding Institute - Sounds Of The San Francisco Adult Bookstores

(Planet Pimp, 1997)

With the Golding Institute series, Gregg Turkington gets to indulge his trash-record fetish with parodies of the bizarre spoken-word albums that clog America’s dustiest thrift store bins. “Sounds of the San Francisco Adult Bookstores,” like its two companion 7”s, takes on the world of documentary recordings in the painfully awkward – and funny! – fashion of most of Turkington’s work, with poor sound quality, strange pacing, and a straight-faced adherence to the conventions of the genre that’s strong enough to avoid betraying any overt wink to an unsuspecting listener. Boring tapes ostensibly recorded within adult bookstores – unidentifiable bumps and rustlings, a clerk making an inane phone call, nails being hammered, muffled conversation – are presented as titillating aural glimpses into the world of pornography by narrator “Ryan Kerr” (who also appears on the first Neil Hamburger single). The chasm between the naughtiness of the subject material and the mundanity of the actual field recordings makes for a disc cram-jammed with depressing absurdity. Sample narration: “What’s that vacuum cleaner doing? Wouldn’t you like to know, you dirty-minded bird.” It doesn’t get much more obscure than this in the Turkington discography, true, but laff-pals of conceptually solid Hamburger records like America’s Funnyman and Great Moments at Di Presa’s Pizza House oughta get a kick or two out of the Golding releases, all of which are truly proud achievements in the annals of dollar-bin fandom.