Dr. Philter Banx

There's a lot of lore surrounding this record, which, like many cult classics, was brought into our world abruptly and spontaneously, preserved only through DJs trading it amongst themselves and audiophiles finding it anew while traversing the second-hand circuit. The two sides making up Insertion in Middle "C" are the only two sides Dr. Philter Banx ever recorded or released.

Insertion was conceived by a few students enrolled at Fanshawe College's Creative Electronics program back in 1975, Phillip Ross and Robert Leth. Armed with too much gear and the requisite sophomoric humor (e.g. "Philter Banx" is a spoonerism for a synthesizer filter bank; each side's runtime, twenty-two minutes, is the duration of a "mating cycle for a typical sexual human interlude"), the young men, from their London, Ontario, base, manifested their kraut and prog masterpiece in a flurry of studio wizardry fueled by an irreverence for the heady, cerebral Germans who defined the sound. They then self-released a vinyl edition of it on an imprint created for the occasion, Criminal Records, and made it available in regional specialty shops and through a classified ad placed in Rolling Stone. The original run of five hundred quickly sold out, and when it came time to manufacture more, Deutsche Grammophon, irked by the manner in which the boys had referenced their graphic identity for Insertion's sleeve art, slapped them with a cease and desist. A second edition was never pressed and, accordingly, its asking price hovers around a couple hundred USD.