Song Of The Day 12/12/2015: The 4 Instants – “Bogattini”

Song Of The Day Outtakes 2015 – This loopy 1966 instrumental was cut from Vital Organs week, most plainly because I can't hear an organ in it. Other songs from the 4 Instants' album Discotheque, like their cover of "Night Train" and the title track, feature an organ front and center. But "Bogattini" (by the way it's spelled with two "t"'s; the YouTube label is wrong) is such a miniaturist masterpiece that I really couldn't afford the shame of overlooking it on these pages, so here you go. Information on the 4 Instants is impossible to come by, but their primality has made Discotheque something of a message board cult favorite. "Bogattini" is... god, it's just so great. There's a wobbly bass line that sounds like it could be acoustic stand-up, but it's just an overdriven electric. The guitars and bass are swinging a bit but the drummer's playing pretty even straight eighths on the hi-hat so the whole thing feels a bit off. Then there's the duck call. They use the duck call on the downbeat of every second bar. It wasn't sampled because this was 1966 and sampling equipment wasn't affordable to consumers -- so it's a manually performed duck call. An honest duck call. Not one of those cut-corner duck calls. A session was booked and the duck call player was paid union scale. We don't need to go into the shocking, meter-independent drum freakouts or the fact that the song ends with the sound of a toilet flushing. It's just a source of great comfort that they're both there.