The Kennedy Assassination
Captain Xanadu and His Orbiting Orchestrions
The front cover of this record credits Martin Deneville and his Orbiting Sounds. This is the only thing about this album that anyone can agree on. Nobody in the music industry has heard of Martin Deneville. Nobody in the music industry has heard of his Orbiting Sounds. A thorough search of every known recording catalog, every musicians' union ledger, and every cocktail lounge from here to the Gulf of Mexico has turned up nothing. The name is on the sleeve. The name is all there is. What is indisputable is the music itself. Eight tracks. One motorcade. A vibraphone where the answers should be. Somebody with access to twenty-six volumes of Warren Commission testimony, a complete brass section, a theremin, and a very good martini sat down and made the space-age lounge record that Dallas deserved and never got. The bossa nova is impeccably voiced. The liner notes are forensically sourced. The brushed snare on track four alone is worth the price of admission, and the through-composed suite that follows it suggests a band that has spent as much time with the Zapruder frames as they have with their chord charts. The arrangements are too precise to be accidental. The research is too deep to be casual. Whoever is behind this record has been thinking about Dealey Plaza for a very long time, and they have arrived at the conclusion that a muted trumpet can do what six decades of congressional testimony could not.
Those in the know whisper two words: Captain Xanadu.
We can neither confirm nor deny this. Neither, it seems, can anyone else.
