Apples & Oranges / Humanoid Boogie (10” vinyl preorder)
Andy has always had a special affection for the music of the late 1960s and so when it came to making initial recordings in his newly upgraded studio he turned to favourites from that era, specifically, Syd Barrett’s “Apples & Oranges” and The Bonzo Dog Band’s “Humanoid Boogie”.
Exclusive to the APE store, here’s your chance to own those recordings on a very limited 10” vinyl EP with the songs in both stereo and mono housed in a groovy picture sleeve.
All orders come with a postcard signed by Mr Andy Partridge. Only 1396 copies are available.
Preorder now for when the moon’s in June (the 28th, to be precise)
David Gilmour
Screen Prints (various posters pre-order)
Classic ‘Animals’ era image of David Gilmour with a Battersea Power Station& Flying Pig background.
These limited 24×36” screen prints are designed by Carl Glover and screen printed in various colours plus a gold, silver or rainbow foil.
– 24″ x 36″ print
– Each colour is a strictly limited edition and prices vary
– The most expensive prints include a bonus set of five 9×12” mini prints
Preorder opens at 4pm UK time on Friday 25th May (shipping 22nd June)
Reggie’s Rock Club and Music Joint has officially announced the line-up for Progtoberfest IV. Sponsored by InsideOut Music, the festival will be held on the south side of Chicago Friday through Sunday, October 19-21. Tickets go on sale Friday, June 1 Tuesday, June 5 at 12 noon CST at Ticketfly. Here’s the line-up, with event and band links included wherever possible:
Single day general admission (standing room in Rock Club):$75
Single day general admission VIP (including poster, BBQ buffet and meet & greets): $100
Three day general admission: $175
Three day general admission VIP: $240
Three day Above Stage VIP: $275 (general admission seating in Rock Club balcony; my choice for Progtoberfest III)
Three day Seated VIP: $325 (reserved seats up front on Rock Club main floor)
Three day Red Chair VIP: $400 (reserved seats up front in Rock Club balcony)
There are additional Ticketfly service fees, but they’re reasonable.
I hada great timeat Progtoberfest IIIlast year, and I hope to make it to at least one day of this year’s festival. This time around, I’m especially impressed by the variety of genres represented (including a generous amount of jazz-rock fusion) and the healthy mix of national/international big names (getting Soft Machine is a genuine coup), local favorites and hungry young artists. See you there?
Our last glimpse of real beauty–NAO’s compilation album.
Sam Healy–while complying with Big Euro Brother laws, regulations, and microintrusions–offered a wonderful teaser/trailer for the forthcoming North Atlantic Oscillation album, coming sometime this year.
Granted, it’s only a full-eighteen seconds worth, but it’s eighteen more seconds then we had before. . .
Musically, the British are much better than us Americans at admitting the failures of modernity, especially as it relates to how we interact with each other as humans. Steven Wilson so brilliantly lamented the isolation of the city in his 2015 masterpiece Hand. Cannot. Erase. Before that, Andy Tillison of The Tangent masterfully critiqued the contemporary 9-5 lifestyle in 2013’s Le Sacre Du Travail. Long before either of these artists, however, The Moody Blues commented on typical modern life in their 1967 concept album, Days of Future Passed.
In part 1 of this series, I argued that King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” started progressive rock as we came to know it. I still stand by that remark, but I’ll add that The Moody Blues were certainly an integral pioneering band in this genre. Looking back, Days of Future Passed is certainly a progressive rock album, but it is not prog as Yes, ELP, or Genesis later popularized the sub-genre. King Crimson sparked a very particular sound that The Moody Blues likely influenced but did not directly spark. What Black Sabbath did for heavy metal, King Crimson did for prog. With that said, Days of Future Passed deserves attention in this series. Specifically, I’m going to look at “Nights in White Satin,” the most well-known and probably most influential track on the album.
Fellow Progarchist Rick Krueger has already published a fine review of this young group, but here is my shout-out to Greta Van Fleet, up and coming rockers from the small town of Frankenmuth, Michigan. Inspired by Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, and other blues-based rockers, these boys (ranging in age from 19-22) are an emerging force to be reckoned with in the music world. Check out their live performance at Coachella from April of this year and try telling me that rock n roll has died…
Believe it or not, the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica includes an article on surf music, which defines the genre’s core sound (invented by Dick Dale) this way : “a distinctive style of electric-guitar playing that fused Middle Eastern influences, staccato picking, and skillful exploitation of the reverb amplifier (which he helped Leo Fender develop) to create a pulsing, cascading sound that echoed the surfing experience.”
Fast forward to today, and surf music (like progressive rock) continues as a strong, if insular subculture — doubtless one in which debates on “is [insert band name] really surf music?” find fertile soil. In theory, The Madeira fit Britannica’s definition perfectly — at least as they describe themselves:
“The Madeira plays surf music born of screaming wind over the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert, deafening echoes of waves pounding the Gibraltar Rock, joyous late-night gypsy dances in the small towns of Andalucia, and exotic cacophony of the Marrakesh town square. It is the surf music of the millennia-old Mediterranean mysteries.”
And honestly, that’s exactly what the band’s new live album, Center of the Surf, sounds like. Whether on roiling, high-speed workouts like the title track, “Leviathan”, “Hail Poseidon” and “Dilmohammed” or slower-burning explorations like “Into the Deep,” the Madeira’s drive and intensity never flag. Ivan Pongracic’s scorching lead lines and Patrick O’Connor’s unflagging rhythm work serve up all the guitar you can stand and more, breaking through to surf nirvana; Todd Fortier on bass and Dane Carter on drums pump up the adrenaline, barreling through with unstoppable power and momentum.
And just when it seems Center of the Surf can’t get any more exciting, The Madeira are joined onstage by surf music historian/rhythm guitarist John Blair and Jonpaul Balak on second bass guitar. The results on “Tribal Fury”, “Sandstorm” and “Intruder” are even more immersive: the thickened texture, intensified groove, and vaulting solo lines both amp up the thrills and bring out the lush romanticism at the core of the band’s melodies.
The audience at Surf Guitar 101’s 2017 convention erupts with delighted applause and encouragement at every opportunity throughout the Madeira’s set — and their reaction’s on the money! Center of the Surf is music that bursts the boundaries of its genre; it’ll connect with anyone who loves rock composition and performance at its highest level. Recorded and mixed by Beach Boys go-to producer Mark Linnet, this is a gleaming, glorious winner of an album. Order it (and the rest of the band’s catalog) from Double Crown Records.
In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
–C.S. Lewis, THE WEIGHT OF GLORY
It’s time to celebrate the depths and widths of all wisdom. Time to pull out Glass Hammer’s 2005 masterpiece, The Inconsolable Secret.
Un’altra verità – Conqueror Introduction… The Conqueror’s last release to date came out in 2015. Though it’s not a studio release and is very much a live DVD/CD release that features the band back in 2014 at the Naxos on the 16th of May to which they was touring their last studio album to date […]
Artist: Amorphis Album Title: Queen Of Time Label: Nuclear Blast Date of Release: 18 May 2018 Just when you think that a band has reached their peak, they come along and prove you wrong. The moral of the story therefore, is never think that a band can’t improve upon a superb release, because they can. […]
Progarchy 