SIFF Blipvert: Telstar

Special to Seattlest: Tony Kay.

Telstar plays at the Egyptian Theater this Sunday at 7 p.m.

Back in the 1950s the entire British recording industry was run by studio moles in white lab coats, in a near-hermetically sealed, generic environment. Engineers and producers were discouraged from any sonic risk-taking, and pressured to keep their recordings as faultlessly polished as possible. It took a tone-deaf, lone-wolf loon to shake the industry up and blow it wide open.

Producer Joe Meek’s recordings from the '50s and '60s get dismissed as novelty piffle nowadays, but five decades ago he was the British equivalent of Phil Spector. Like Spector, Meek generally recorded anonymous pop acts, but he threw out the rock and roll production rulebook by experimenting with compression, distortion, electronics, and all manner of odd sounds and instruments. In non-music-nerd-speak, that means he recorded records that sounded like pop songs, only beamed to Earth from another dimension.

Weird as the songs sounded, though, they were hits, and Joe's kitchen-sink experimentation changed the face of music recording. With that legacy—and a dotty personal history that included occult fixation, closeted homosexuality, drug use, and violent death—it’s no surprise that someone would eventually make a movie about his life.

Telstar (named after the Tornadoes’ pop instrumental that put Joe on the map) screens at SIFF this Sunday--advance word is iffy, but the West End stage production on which it’s based was a hit, plus the movie reputedly features plenty of samples of Joe Meek’s musical handiwork in all its demented original-recording glory. And when it comes to Meek’s recordings, hearing is believing.