Raised in a coop by chickens, Buckethead got his face and throat scratched up real bad, so he taught himself to play guitar for his friends in the cemetery. He wears a bucket on his head like a lightning rod to channel the spirits of the dead chickens straight through his nubs. With his power over sound frequencies (The Deadly Sonic Arts), he protects chickens and his theme park Bucketheadland from attackers.

For those unfamiliar with Buckethead the above statement, clipped from the trading card sized biography on the back of the Secret Recipe DVD, sounds like some genuinely weird shit. You're 100% right. We're talking about a man who only goes out in public in a featureless porcelain mask, and his signature KFC bucket hat, usually emblazoned with an orange “FUNERAL” sticker. We're talking about a man who conducts interviews by speaking through a rubber fright mask held on his hand like a puppet.

Amazingly, we're also talking about one of the most dynamic and technically amazing modern guitarists out there. Buckethead's inimitable style is as visually fascinating as it is aurally, watching him work his fingers along his heavily modified Les Paul, producing a sound that's equally chaotic and systematic, a sort of guitar-virtuoso-cum-math-metal hybrid.

For new fans and old die hards alike, Shriek Show presents the two disc set Buckethead: Secret Recipe, and much like Buckethead himself, it's simply too weird to try to explain. The best comparison I can think of is the “multimedia” boom of the mid-Nineties, when bands released video clips, sound bites, and other digital detritus all tied together with a thematic menu system no more interactive than a Choose Your Own Adventure book. However, Secret Recipe seems almost revolutionary in its complete and utter absurdity. The menu for the first “wedge” (that's a disc to you and me) is built around the “packaging” for a hypothetical Buckethead “Violence Doll,” complete with all the accessories and a “Coop of Horrors” playset. Clicking various parts of Buckethead bring you, seemingly at random sometimes, to the various sections of the DVD. Clicking on a pounding speaker embedded in a robot's chest gives you a handful of early demos. Selecting the nunchucks brings up an immensely amusing guide to Buckethead's “Deadly Sonic Arts.” Most ingenious of all is when one attempts to remove Buckethead's mask despite the warnings from the disc's narrator (the inimitable bass king Bootsy Collins from Parliament) results in an “unknown disc error,” which thrashes your screen before actually turning your DVD player off. Besides that, we're given music videos (including one exceptionally kickass one based off of the works of Bosch), scads of strange camcorder footage (Buckethead actually plays both the bass and treble parts of the Halloween theme on the same guitar), posters, stills, etc. Seriously. It plays out like an extras disc, yet the whole thing is tied together so tightly with menu design and thematic elements, I can't imagine it working nearly as well in a more traditional context.

The second “wedge” comes across as far more traditional fare: two concerts recorded in New York and Boston. Fair warning to concert DVD junkies: for those of you spoiled by clean video and super-duper 5.1 Dolby Digital, you might want to keep walking. Simply put, both concerts look like they were shot on camcorder (and not even a nice one, at that) with the camcorder's onboard mic capturing the audio. It's dirty, crusty, muffled, and trashy...yet again, I can't imagine Buckethead putting out some 24P high-resolution video for our consumption. Hell, once again looking at the back, we see that one of the features listed is “Newly deteriorated transfer from materials buried underground to maintain the lowest possible picture quality.” He's practically spitting in the face of what's “expected” of a musician's DVD, and it works out in his favor.

Even if you're not interested in his music, Buckethead: Secret Recipe is simply one of the most fun things I've gotten my hands on in years. It's non-traditional, absurd, ugly, offensive...and yet its worth every penny and every minute. Highly recommended...and if you can score some alcohol or narcotics, it's practically required viewing!