Do any of you Pitchfork readers have kids? If so, what kind of music do you play for kids? My experience of the world of Bruce Haack had led me to perceive a terrible oversight in Pitchfork's otherwise godlike scope: children's music. As Pitchfork Moms are slowly on their way to becoming a demographic group, we have a journalistic obligation to provide options for the fussy baby who throws tantrums to the Dismemberment Plan and wails the whole length of Slint's Spiderland. No, Pitchfork can't tell you if your children are defective; we can merely suggest some way- out sounds for hipster rugrats. Remember Mom and Dad, angst makes babies gassy.

But that's neither here nor there. In any case, Bruce Haack is as way out as they come. A native of rural Alberta, the son of hunchbacked father and a mother who was, in his own words, "wicked," Haack (b. 1931) received a degree in psychology from Edmonton University and was accepted into the Julliard School for music. Finding the school indifferent to his brand of experimentalism, he dropped out after eight months to pursue a 30- year career of virtual obscurity and manic eclecticism. Haack died of heart failure in 1988.

Bruce Haack was the Lewis Carroll of computer music, making several albums of oddball electronic music for kids on his own Dimension 5 label in the mid '60s, with the aid of a creative dance instructor, Miss Esther Nelson. Listen Compute Rock Home presents a posthumous compilation of the best of Dimension 5.

What can I tell you? This is some of the weirdest shit imaginable. It took multiple listens to determine whether this was legitimate, or some mindfuck cut- and- paste in the vein of Zappa's Lumpy Gravy or Civilization Phase III or Faust's X-Ray album. I can assure you it's not all that. Listen Compute Rock Home features mutated home appliances chugging and chirping happily under a man barking, "I sell fresh fishes!" only to be answered by the prim Miss Nelson doing her Glenda the Good Witch impression: "I sell golden wishes!"

"Let's park our magic carpet under this big fig tree, Bruce!"

"Mudra" is one of the album's greatest tracks, if only for its concept of computerized Indian raga, featuring synthesized sitar over drum machine pitter- patter and interjections by Miss Nelson's daughters who offer suggestions on how to be like rainbows. The other treat is the curiously titled "OK Robot," which features Haack talking to a robot in a John Wayne impression over a computer cowboy twang. And there's more spastic fun on "Coco the Coconut," "Jelly Dancers," and "Army Ants in Your Pants."

You will find Bruce and Miss Nelson's skits and lyrics nearly insufferable, fused with an Aquarian rhetoric of "powerlove" (part of Haack's new age hippie ideology), but if you can get past that, you'll find the music somewhat intriguing. Somewhat. This is still the infancy of computer music, and Haack's Dimension 5 recordings eschew the compositional profundity of a Morton Subotnick or later followers like Luke Vibert, Add N to X, Mouse on Mars, or Trans Am. The novelty of owning an album as truly weird as Listen Compute Rock Home, on the other hand, may be its own thrill. But I'm sure there must a subset of curvaceous Pitchfork Moms out there who require the hippest that children's music has to offer. In the meanwhile, "Let's pretend that we're clocks of many different shapes and sizes!" Ladies, I'm game if you are.

-Brent S. Sirota