Y. Bhekhirst
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Y. Bhekhirst is an outsider musician about whom next to nothing is known, but whose one album, Hot in the Airport, released in New York on HDG Records in 1986, is prized by some outsider music collectors for its bizarre, shambling songs.
Hot in the Airport is full of meandering lyrics about cars and rain and love, sung in a thick, unidentifiable accent; Bhekhirst's method is to sing a verse, in itself very repetitive, two, four or six times, and then to stop abruptly. This is typically backed up by one or two guitars, bass, and drums, with each of the stringed instruments playing a different melodic fragment, over and over again, creating a texture made up of several of these strange, angular, asynchronous patterns. No one knows whether all this is the product of a band, or of one person repeatedly overdubbing parts on different instruments. When these patterns are combined with the semi-random drumming and the bizarre vocals, the effect is unique. The title track of the album, which has been released a number of times on cassette, was also released as a 7" single; it is slightly more polished musically than the other songs, and includes a number of lines seemingly sung in Spanish.
One song on Hot in the Airport, "I Will Sing," features the repeated line, "And I will do anything for love." By coincidence, the melody of this line is nearly identical to that of the title line of Meat Loaf's 1993 hit "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)." [1]
Information on Y. Bhekhirst is scarce, to say the least. Irwin Chusid, who brought Bhekhirst's music to the public's attention in the mid-90s, reported that a man calling himself Y. Bhekhirst was distributing his cassettes in New York record stores; handing them over to the clerks and then walking out abruptly without further explanation. Recent searches at the U.S. Copyright Office have revealed that the driving force behind Bhekhirst is probably a man named Jose Hugo Diaz Guzman, born in 1946, as the name "H. Diaz" or "H. Diazg" shows up on most known releases of material from Hot in the Airport. Under these and other pseudonyms (such as "Al Pol"), Guzman appears to have copyrighted numerous songs and cassette recordings, the earliest in 1981 and the latest in 1992. If these recordings were made publicly available, they do not seem to have come to the attention of the outsider music community yet.
