Grupo De Experimentacion Sonora Del ICAIC (Cuba 1974)

 

This album is discogged here. A nice surprise from my friend to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for continuing to dig up gems from an earth already exhausted from the ceaseless mining of these lost things from the past, time perhaps to turn to new technologies like fracking.  

In fact, this agglomeration did release a bunch of albums back in the day. 

First the bio of the band, from Cuba:

Cuban experimental band founded in 1969 by Alfredo Guevara, president of the "Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos" (ICAIC) to experiment with new sounds different from the typical folklore sounds of previous Cuban music. It was directed by Leo Brouwer.

Members :

Daniel Aldama , Eduardo Ramos , Emiliano Salvador , Leo Brouwer , Leoginaldo Pimentel , Manuel Valera , Noel Nicola , Norberto Carrillo , Pablo Menendez , Pablo Milanes , Sara Gonzalez , Sergio Vitier , Silvio Rodriguez , Vicente Feliu.

The whole album posted on youtube here. The best track is b4's Grifo which unfort. you can't listen to on its own on that site, but it's a great little fusion instrumental that really hits all the marks for me.

Well, lo and behold the internet archive is back up, so let's try this:

They made more albums, a lot more actually, so I'll try to track those down and see if they're any good and report back about the issue.

Earthrise the legendary US Band from 1978 plus more from 2017

 

Discogged here. I think everyone knows their 1978 masterpiece of symphonic prog with the beautiful cover painting, very similar to traditional US prog bands Ethos, my favourite Cathedral Stained Glass Stories, etc. A wonderful one. 

I just by chance was looking at the discography though, and observed they had a more recent release. Happily, it's one of those instances where a classic prog sound led to some nice further material well worth hearing, similar to the case with Happy the Man.  So in 2017 came Day 2. 

I never imagined the olde English epic of Beowulf would be represented as a hard-driving dissonant electric guitar riff as herein, youtubed here.

It's Frippesque, classic...  Top of my playlist all week-- all month?

For a gentler track, Reverie is youtubed here. A few tracks are similarly worth hearing, over and over again, with enough creative intensity and originality to interest us greatly.

Note that Bill Drobile their keyboardist, confusingly, put out a solo album in the same year called For Earthrise. Sorry to say that one is not quite as good as the group effort. Unfortunately that one is not listed on youtube and doesn't appear there at all. Overall with the keyboards heavy sound it is a lot like my old rip of Don Muro, which was posted way back here. My issue, sorry to say, is with the level of composition which although proggy is not quite inventive enough (for our jaded ears) though the overall sound is definitely symphonic progressive rock.

Sadly, Bill passed away 2 years after this release.

Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra, from Germany Pt.2 [Bum, Live on Planet Earth, Vula]

 

Here are the three later albums, check the discography here.

Le Pretre Vire from Bum is here.  You can appreciate how well composed the music is for the intro, a sound very similar to great soundtrack music, but suddenly, after a minute, it transforms into that jumpy dance style that for ex. Julverne and other RIO artists from Europe used to do back in the day, somewhat destroying the cohesion. The song progresses further into a kind of orchestral or symphonic passage that sounds quite Stravinskyesque before returning to the jumpy part, finally a gentler chamber music sound that appears to close it out before abruptly in the last minute the initial intro passage returns.  Personally I think there are too many parts to this thing and they don't necessarily work together well. So unlike the first album's material, I would say that you see almost the 'seams' between the parts where the song got stitched together from different ideas that are a bit disparate.

Sozialbao from the Live album, here.

The track Lakta Mata Ha (from the album with the puzzling name Vula) is like the first album, youtubed here. It's pleasant, cohesive, and sounds very much like soundtrack music from an exotic movie.

Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra, from Germany Pt.1, Take Off

 

This is one of those sad but common musical cases where a grand initial promise leads to some disappointment in later works. The info from discogs is here.

You can see it's a large orchestra that was founded in Berlin in 2007 and they made 4 albums so far.

But the first one is by far the best for some reason, full of wonderful ideas, an unholy amalgam of orchestral composed parts plus big band, fusion, jazz, and dissonant chamber stuff too. Oddly enough they meld it all together, in each song, into a wholesome union of appreciably good music.

Take Off 

Gamma Pluto Delta can be found on youtube here, for ex.

Lava Lovers is another wonderful composition, youtubed here.

Yeti Part 3, Live at the Wreck Room, Live at the Sockmonkey

 

The first live at Wreck Room (2001) has 3/4 of the songs from the Things to Come album plus Raga Gaj as the other song, while the second one, from the same year, has again Raga Gaj plus 3 other compositions: Two Fingers, Recapitation, and Fragonard's Homunculus.

I notice on youtube this track (not on the CDs) from apparently the same location.

Tracklisting for Live at the Sockmonkey is the following, based on the announcements by a band member:

Track 1 - Two Fingers [1st track from Things to Come]

2 - Raga Gaj [again! obviously they loved that one]

3 - Est Mort  [last track from TtC]

4 - Indication (?) [with Chris Forest on clarinet]

This track unfortunately (to me) sounds like it's completely improvised.

However, I've never heard a Raga like that before and I doubt I ever will with those thundering chords that open it up. I am not sure how much the Brahmin will be happy with the peaceful meditation quality of that raga.

I'm never too crazy about live recordings because I find the noise distracting and the recordings, inevitably, subpar, but I know many love it for its authenticity. Plus I had to post these so we can complete the output of this marvelous and brilliant band.

Yeti part 2, unreleased: Demonstration, Man with the Lamp

The first EP Demo from 1999 includes Interstellar Biplane and Est Mort which of course appeared on their first album from 2000. Obviously the recording is not perfect, the sound is rough, and some might enjoy the less polished and harder feeling to these compositions.  For me it's lacking the complexity of texture featured in Things to Come.

The 2nd one also an EP from later though, specifically 2002, is actually dedicated to Doug Ferguson therefore doesn't include him. The 2 tracks are called Strangled by the Light and Black Pills, presumably a Matrix reference since that movie, a touchstone for all the 'slacker generation' like me, or the once-called generation x people, came out a few years before. Of course nowadays in common discourse there are only 2 generations left: the notorious big baby boomers and gen z. The rest might as well not even exist, pity esp. the poor millennials who lost the limelight completely because they're 'too old' now. It seems like ages ago when even I made fun of them for being juvenile, self-absorbed, and incompetent at workplaces.  (As for the baby boomers, we can for sure accurately describe them as at once collectively the richest generation to have ever lived on this planet and probably the richest generation who will ever live, and never die. Little chance whatever generation comes after 'z' is able to pry away the wealth and real estate from their ancient arthritic fingers, ever...)

Moving on (thankfully) to Man with the Lamp (2006) we have more of the same, drony, hammering, dissonant and spacey electric-based music which meanders like a spaceship adrift in a cosmic dust storm, smashing into meteors and comets with abandon sometimes losing speed but accelerating anew to pass into the distant distorted darkness of another supermassive black hole filling up the galactic centre. 

I want to emphasize what I love about this band is they really do evoke a wonderful space-travel feeling, the sound of the synths, the percussion, everything works. It deserves to be the soundtrack to a science fiction movie set in distant space. The only negative you could put forward is at time it gets a bit boring when the music isn't developed enough and appears to me at least overly improvised.  Much like the earlier posted Bozon, it does change a lot in each track, sometimes in really abrupt and surprising or unexpected ways, and I love the hard guitars that always appear inevitably.