I’m in the process of creating a new personal website and in the course of sifting through old files from my previous site, dating back to the middle of 2004, I came across some “favorite music lists.” It’s interesting to recall what was in rotation for me back then and to see how my tastes have changed in several cases. For instance, I rarely listen to Pink Floyd anymore, and I haven’t listened to Transatlantic for quite some time, even though it an excellent band. While this will not be nearly as interesting to you as it is to me, I thought I’d share some of the lists.
Favorite Hard Rock and Progressive Rock CDs
faith hope love, King’s X
The Bends, Radiohead
Fallen, Evanescence
Images and Words, Dream Theater
JJ72, JJ72
V, Spock’s Beard
Three Sides to Every Story, Extreme
The Edges of Twilight, The Tea Party
Bridge Across Forever, Transatlantic
My Favorite Headache, Geddy Lee
Momentary Lapse of Reason, Pink Floyd
Empire, Queensrÿche
Robert Sibley reflects on what the power of music has to do with nostalgia:
The word comes from the ancient Greek words “nostos,” referring to “homecoming,” and “algia,” meaning “grief or pain or suffering.” Hence, nostalgia reflects the desire “to escape pain by returning home,” or, as some etymological dictionaries have it, “to return home safely.”
What this suggests is that nostalgia can be a form of psychological therapy, a break from the madhouse vagaries of contemporary life — you know, terrorism, killer weather, crashing airplanes, exploding towns, rampaging gunmen. To listen to fondly remembered pop songs, whether on the car stereo heading to work or at a concert, nostalgia provides such a respite. …
One of the major narrative inputs for my generation was the Beatles. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were effectively members of what psychologists refer to as our “fictive kin.” We didn’t know them personally like we did family and friends, but their music — from ebullient adolescent love songs such as She Loves You and the drug-mediated experiments of A Day in the Life to the symphonic farewells of Let it Be and The Long and Winding Road (the Beatles split as a group in 1970) — made them an intimate presence in our lives. The Beatles, in short, provided the musical accompaniment for many of the most meaningful moments of our lives.
I still remember doing my homework at the kitchen table in our house in north Red Deer when I first heard that brief trill of drums that opens She Loves You, my head snapping up to look at the countertop radio as if to ask “what’s this?” An insignificant moment in a life, to be sure, but somehow embedded with epiphanic clarity in my memory. Of course, I’ll never forget working up the courage to ask Maxine Edwards for a dance at the local community hall as Lennon belted out Can’t Buy Me Love. And when I hear the lyric “Out of college, money spent/ See no future, pay no rent/ All the money’s gone, nowhere to go/ … oh that magic feeling” from 1969’s Abbey Road album, I’m once again on the veranda of a dingy seaside café in western Morocco, hypnotized by the endless wash of the Atlantic Ocean as I celebrate my 24th birthday. Sun, sand, sea and song; it was pure magic.
Is this “homesickness,” an inability to cope with the world? I think not. The Beatles once sang, “Once there was a way to get back homeward/ Once there was a way to get back home.” The way, I suggest, is in the song itself. Listening to the old songs is like visiting your hometown after a long absence. You know you’re not staying, but there’s a feeling of rejuvenation in visiting times and places past.
And there’s something truly rejuvenating about cover versions of songs, especially when they defy jaded expectations and are done well.
For example, Jane Monheit has a very cool, head-turning jazz cover of “Golden Slumbers / Long and Winding Road” on her new album, The Heart of the Matter.
Jane seems to have a gift for doing terrific covers. Explore her discography and have fun discovering all her clever musical remakes and reconfigurations.
In particular, be sure to check out her stunning versions of Eric Kaz and Libby Titus’s “Love Has No Pride” (on In the Sun) and of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” (on Come Dream with Me).
But, getting back to the Beatles, let me end by recommending a personal favorite — Laura Crema’s soaring cover of “Blackbird.”
Considering castration, a certain strange displacement occurred. It didn’t really strike me until after writing the fifth look, but it was indeed a displacement, and as I think about it since, it seems stranger and stranger. Death is what is displaced, and the reason why its displacement is so strange is because it is normally simultaneously final and transitional.
The Death card in a Tarot deck is often understood as ending, loss, or conclusion, but also often as transition or change.
With shaving, biting and cutting given the symbolic pride of place, death — so often the BIG finality, or the BIG transition — turns out to be not that big a deal. Its caricature in The Lamb is in “The Supernatural Anaesthetist,” with its disarmingly brief and casual lyric:
Here comes the supernatural anaesthetist.
If he wants you to snuff it,
All he has to do is puff it
— he’s such a fine dancer.
Here is a figure of death unlike the skeletal Death of Tarot, or the darkly robed Grim Reaper. This guy sounds like someone you might like to get to know, or perhaps someone who would like to get to know you. Think of Joe Black (Brad Pitt). Or think of the bubbly and alluring Death of the Endless, from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. This may be the better association, as “Anyway” voices the expectation that “she” is supposed to be riding a pale horse. The anaesthetist merely “puffs,” presumably delivering a gaseous sort of sleep-inducing substance. And dancing? Why would he be a fine dancer? Perhaps because (as in The Sandman) the delivery, though dark, is welcome and pleasant.
Is it even clear whose death has this unassuming harbinger? Of course, the most natural reading is that it’s Rael’s death. But the real death that soon follows is that of the Lamia. I’m reminded of the Tarot reading at the end of The Gunslinger, the first volume of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, when the man in black draws that ominous card and speaks to Roland:
Death, but not for you, gunslinger.
And at the end of the series, this pronouncement is repeated, with amplification:
Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on.
It is as if Death, normally THE big deal, becomes no big deal. Rael “writes Death off as an illusion.” Yet death does come for another, and in both The Dark Tower and The Lamb, the death of the other is an immense burden on the heart of the hero (Roland/Rael). I’m not sure how much help this is, however. The doors come before in The Lamb, and the doors come after in The Dark Tower. Well, maybe so. But in each case there are doors.
This may be no more than the obverse of the previous look. I’ve urged you to listen to the ways in which the (in)scisions mark the liminal sites, the thresholds. The cutting is so much more significant, more to be feared than death. Death dances, and nonchalantly puffs.
But maybe we should also remember that, as Emily Dickenson pointed out, “The distance that the dead have gone / Does not at first appear…”
The only thing that seems clear to me here is that, if you try to see death as a major theme in The Lamb, it doesn’t quite work. I’m tempted to say that you’d be dead wrong. But that might be too strong.
Another poet (Eliot) put in the mouth of his magus: “I should be glad of another death.”
I continued to be mightily impressed with the skills of Billy James. Just got this from him about 15 minutes ago. Thanks, Billy–ed.
____
Legendary Singer/Songwriter Jon Anderson To Perform In The UK, Finland And Sweden,
And To Be Honored In Las Vegas – August 2013
Asheville, NC – Legendary vocalistJon Anderson, YES’s singer/songwriter for 35 years along with his successful work with Vangelis, Kitaro, and Milton Nascimento, will be performing special engagements in the UK, Finland and Sweden in August 2013. The shows promise to deliver an exciting mixture of material from Jon Anderson’s prolific solo career, collaborations with Vangelis and classic YES songs, along with new compositions, highlighted by humorous and enlightening stories told by Jon.
Says Jon, “Performing the classic YES songs I wrote for the band, and Vangelis work is always fun and rewarding… I’ll be doing some New song ideas, plus a classic Beatles song, plus a couple of surprises. I just have the best time singing on stage…Hope you find time to come and see the show!”
In other news, Jon will be presented with the ‘Voice Of Progressive Music’ special award at the 4th Annual Vegas Rocks! Magazine Music Awards at the Joint inside the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Sunday, August 25th. For more information: www.vegasrocks.com. Jon has made some recent guest appearances on several new CD releases: Acoustic guitarist Jeff Pevar’s debut album ‘From The Core’; French keyboardist/composer Jean Philippe Rykiel’s new CD ‘Inner Spaces’; and guitarist Dennis Haklar’s debut CD release ‘Lizard Tale’. Says Jon, “With the internet my musical world has evolved to an amazing degree, one day I’m singing with a Brazilian dude, the next day with peeps in Liverpool, the next creating a Symphonic work with a mate in India…then singing with Steve Layton ‘down under’ – it’s an endless musical world!” Jon is currently recording new material, including the follow-up to his critically acclaimed 21-minute opus “OPEN” from 2011 titled “EVER”.
Every summer growing up, we walked down to the Kansas State Fairgrounds on the Fourth of July. As the fireworks started, these songs always played. Soundtracks of my childhood–Brad
Mattias Olsson, drummer/percussionist extraordinaire formerly in Änglagård, is a busy man. He runs his own studio in Stockholm, called Roth Händle Studios, he collaborates musically with lots of people, he lends his talents to other progressive rock outfits such as Norway’s finest – White Willow and he kicks off projects in many directions.
One of the newest projects of his is Walrus – a band which in a tongue-in-cheek manner is described like this on its Facebook-page.
Kraut Rock / Progressive Rock Group from Stockholm, Sweden. Instigators and prime movers of that immensly popular style, Polar Kraut. Two drummers, one bass player, one cello player, one keyboard player, and one chord – what more do you need?
bakgrund
September, 2010 A.DThe scene:A dark bar at the End of the World, on the shores of the Polar Sea, in the Far North of Norway. The result of some highly spirited, wine induced bragging, five strangers find themselves sharing a stage under the assumed name WALRUS. The lights go on, and there, on the spot, they have to make up some music that can live up to the brazen boasts that got them on stage.The cast:An Organ Player who can turn from lyrical to mechanical in a moment, from shimmering to abrasive, from the dead calm of the ocean to the death rattle of an orca. A remarkable Cello Player with angelic features, who seems to be having a loud on-stage argument with his instrument, always teetering on the brink of a sonic fist-fight. A Bass Player who plays in an almost geometrically meditative fashion, angular, repetitive and hypnotic, and whose fuzzed out sounds could turn iron into rust. And then there’s the two-headed beast: Two manic Drummers playing the same, sprawling double drum kit, but attacking it from different sides and angles.The sound:While early German Electronic Kraut Rock seems to be in the band’s collective DNA, that’s just a small part of it. The roots of their music may be firmly planted in age old Psychedelic and Progressive Rock, but their branches reach well into the future – to a new kind of Post-Rock perhaps. And theirs is a sound that changes constantly. Going from pastoral and emotional to jugular aggression in mere seconds, the band ebbs and flows, back and forth, creating spectacular atmospheres and moods. Building tension and tearing it down, telling stories and painting pictures. There is nothing quite like it.The denouement:
Well, shaking their heads in disbelief after the show, they quickly decided that this group, albeit still half imaginary, was too good not to be true. And in tribute to the remote part of the world where their band and their music had been born, they named their particular brand of music ‘Polar Kraut.’
Epilogue:
Some time later they reconvened in one of Stockholm’s oldest and finest active recording studios to capture the music they had been improvising on their first few concerts, using equipment from the Golden Age of Recording on both sides of the glass. And after months of meticulous editing, Bitches Brew-style, four stately compositions had been thawed out of the ice (as it were) and were ready to be let out into the World South Of The Arctic Circle.
Beskrivning
Renowned film music composer and piano player Matti Bye on Hammond & Farfisa Organs, Mellotron and Wurlitzer Piano. The Tiny and Gul 3 member Leo Svensson on Cello and Minimoog. Producer and composer Kristian Holmgren on Electric Bass and Fuzz Bass. Mattias Olsson of Änglagård on drums, with Henrik Olsson of Gul 3 and Harr joining him at their double drum kit, The Sprawl.
The studio mentioned is the legendary Atlantis studio which really is a survivor in the music biz providing real old-school recording facilities.
Mattias is a funny guy regularly posting somewhat crazy YouTube-snippets from ongoing recording projects (right now Necromonkey) from his own Roth Händle studios. Matti Bye who is also in Walrus is a renowned Swedish composer of film scores. He’s a fine pianist with great improvisational skills! The film Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick which he wrote the score for was an Academy Award nominee 2008.
For listening and buying Bandcamp is a great place to go!
You know that Prog–as a genre–is healthy and thriving when a band can devote itself to what it calls “progressive rock exercise.” Yes, I’m not joking. Yesterday, a review copy of a new cd, Sadness and Companionship, arrived from Seattle in the Progarchy mailbox.
The CD consists of four songs–two 14-plus minute songs and a radio-length remix of each.
How to describe this? I’ve only given it one listen, but it’s. . . fun. Really fun. Imagine a lot of mid-80s acts such as Madness, Yaz, Erasure, B-Movie, or Pet Shop Boys, and then prog them up.
A card accompanying the CD states:
Johnny Unicorn has been making progressive rock, art pop, and silly music since childhood. He currently operates out of Seattle, WA, where he performs with his three-piece band, which is made up of songwriter Jesse Plack, and keyboardist Naomi Adele Smith (Autumn Electric). Johnny Unicorn also performs and recordes with Phideaux (L.A.) and Horace Pickett (Seattle).
The packaging, by the way, is rather charming. The cd packaging incorporates lots of houndstooth mixed with bright yellows, funny glasses, vicious looking animals, and what appears to be a Darwinian evolutionary chart from fish to man to alien to death to devils. I wouldn’t decorate my house in it, but I do like it. It’s playfully quirky.
Simon Godfrey hears an early playback of Rise Up Forgotten, Return Destroyed.
Today endeth the first half of an extraordinary year in prog, one that will go down as another milestone in the resurgence and regeneration of this much maligned and often misunderstood genre of music.
Tomorrow is July 1, the first day of the second half of the year and notable because it happens to be Canada Day. It was also the day in 1879 when American evangelist Charles Taze Russell published the first edition of The Watchtower, the world’s most widely circulated magazine and the British Government revealed in 1963 that former MI6 agent Kim Philby had been spying for the Russians.
So obviously, with Philby, 50 years on, now yesterday’s man, something epic has had to happen to make July 1 memorable again.
This was probably the train of thought which emerged during the first board, or should that be bored, meeting of the newly formed Bad Elephant Music founded by David Elliott, the esteemed producer of the progressive rock podcast, TheEuropean Perspective, broadcast on The Dividing Line Broadcast Network.
For reasons best known to himself and his accountant, he decided to dip his toes into the murky waters of record label ownership and to help him achieve this, he enlisted the expertise of legal eagle, and prolific blogger James Allen along with Tim “Mouse” Lawrie, a ridiculously talented young music producer and erstwhile Merch Desk sales assistant – such is his latent versatility.
Of course, if you are going to start a record label, the one crucial thing you need is “product” and if it is going to be your debut release, it needs to be a bit of a beast.
Well, it just so happened there was a certain progressive rock troubadour, Simon Godfrey, who was in need of a suitable platform from which to launch a new solo project under a brand new shiny title. It was a match made in heaven, surely.
As a result, tomorrow will see a new epoch in progressive rock begin as Shineback’sRise UpForgotten, Return Destroyed goes on general release on the Bad Elephant Music label.
Simon, as most of you know, was the frontman of those great English eccentrics, Tinyfish, who ennobled themselves with the title of the world’s smallest prog band. However, they built up a formidable following borne out by the antics in the Fishtank, their fans’ forum, some extraordinary music, culminating in the cult album The Big Red Spark and the general mayhem which ensued during their live gigs.
Cue July 8 last year and the band reluctantly performed their last live gig at the inaugural Celebr8 festival in south west London. This was due to Godfrey’s worsening hearing problems through tinnitus. It was a memorable performance which involved a Princess of Prog tee-shirt, talcum powder and gaffer tape. You had to be there.
Anyway, this may have been the end in one regard, but in another way, it was a new beginning for Godfrey, who decided he wanted to make an album of his own on which he could indulge his passion for electronica.
So, he packed away his guitar and set about writing an album with a suitably far-fetched theme, the story of Dora, a young girl who films her dreams, based on Godfrey’s own childhood experiences in and out of the Land of Nod. For it to be far-fetched required the lyric writing services of his long time friend and Tinyfish’s iconic narrator – as he likes me calling him – Robert Ramsay, or as Godfrey describes their collaboration, the Sir Elton John and Bernie Taupin of Prog without the hair transplants of course.
They gave us a taste at Celebr8.2 in May with a suitably chaotic performance which also involved a duck, but that’s a different story for another time.
The album owes a huge debt to some of the influential bands from Godfrey’s formative years such as XTC and Japan, as well as incorporating the discipline, excuse the pun, of projects by the likes of King Crimson.
You cannot make an album like this without having a tight-knit group of some of prog’s most “happening” musicians, such as guitarists extraordinaire, Matt Stevens, Dec Burke and from Dec’s band Hywel Bennett plus Andy Ditchfield from DeeExpus, plus much in demand drummer Henry Rogers.
The result is ground-breaking, a techno album made in a progressive idiom which never sounds like any of the traditionally inspirational giants of the past. Instead, you can hear Japan, Eurythmics, Kraftwerk, a smattering of 70s glam rock rhythms, a hint of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and even a touch of Bjōrk without the histrionics.
Bjōrk? Yes, indeed, because Godfrey discovered some samples made by Bulgarian dance singer Danny Claire in his files and without her knowing, he made her his Dora. Her breathy, spacey samples are included as blogs on the album to which he has added instrumental section to make them relevant to the story. Apparently, she is delighted with the results as well she may be.
So groundbreaking is this as a prog album that is humanly possible to either dance or throw shapes along to tracks such as the stand-out Crush Culture. Other songs such as Passengers channels The Twilight Zone while the title track, the longest on the album, brings together all the players for one huge techno workout with added progginess.
Co-produced by Godfrey and Lawrie, Rise Up Forgotten, Return Destroyed is a bit of a game changer in terms of what it brings to the progressive rock table this year.
The first half of this year has brought us a cavalcade of classic prog compositions, courtesy of The Tangent, Big Big Train, Lifesigns, Spock’s Beard and Comedy of Errors to name but a few personal favourites.
Shineback offers none of the above.
What it does instead is to start an entirely new chapter and therefore, it too is at least worthy of a mention on the Wikipedia page devoted to significant anniversaries of events which took place on July 1.
Considering castration, a certain strange displacement occurred. It didn’t really strike me until after writing the fifth look, but it was indeed a displacement, and as I think about it since, it seems stranger and stranger. Death is what is displaced, and the reason why its displacement is so strange is because it is normally simultaneously final and transitional.
Here is a figure of death unlike the skeletal Death of Tarot, or the darkly robed Grim Reaper. This guy sounds like someone you might like to get to know, or perhaps someone who would like to get to know you. Think of Joe Black (Brad Pitt). Or think of the bubbly and alluring Death of the Endless, from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. This may be the better association, as “Anyway” voices the expectation that “she” is supposed to be riding a pale horse. The anaesthetist merely “puffs,” presumably delivering a gaseous sort of sleep-inducing substance. And dancing? Why would he be a fine dancer? Perhaps because (as in The Sandman) the delivery, though dark, is welcome and pleasant.
Is it even clear whose death has this unassuming harbinger? Of course, the most natural reading is that it’s Rael’s death. But the real death that soon follows is that of the Lamia. I’m reminded of the Tarot reading at the end of The Gunslinger, the first volume of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, when the man in black draws that ominous card and speaks to Roland:
This may be no more than the obverse of the previous look. I’ve urged you to listen to the ways in which the (in)scisions mark the liminal sites, the thresholds. The cutting is so much more significant, more to be feared than death. Death dances, and nonchalantly puffs.
Progarchy 