Back to the ReR with the missing 3.3 (Part 14 in my series)

Beautiful quasi-cubist artwork on the bottom...

It was surprising to me to see over the years how popular these compilations are on this blog, for certain people that is. I mean, I love these compilations personally, but obviously this is not approachable music.  Nor are we talking youtuber numbers in terms of popularity, or even instagram girls or "influencers".  In fact the average fat girl down the street on my block probably has more followers than this progressive music blog does.  So I guess when I say 'popular' what I really mean is 'unpopular'.  Anyways, it's perfect I guess for social distancing, especially if you want to go overboard (but not on a cruiseship) and maintain several kilometres distance around you.  Possibly the same could be accomplished by playing it out loud in the neighbourhood, may be a good thought for those stupidly irresponsible neighbours of ours who let their kids play together on their front yards near our house or congregate evenings at the park with multiple unleashed dogs yapping around, licking each other, and I'm sure everyone can relate to these experiences, wherever they are in the world.  What can you do, people are dogs, right-- oops I meant to say, dogs are dogs, right?

Information is all here, note that this release is from 1991.  This list purports to be relatively complete, I think, but it likely isn't.  It's possible almost all or all of these have been posted on this blog before.  As is always the case I mention that my favourite is 2.2 which is phenomenal from beginning to end.  Totally bored of it now though, unfortunately.  At this point, I really don't care, still obsessed with finding new music I've never heard before. Let me know if the link is inactive as sometimes happens over time.

Note that most of the music is abstract and basically totally alien to all humanity.  Perhaps not to the canines though, or the aliens soon to come to take over the planet when humanity is killed off by the novel corona created by them to clear us all off.  The most approachable tracks are the alternative Hail's Racer Hero and the inimitable 5 UU's with a non-LP track (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) called Carousel of Progress:




It's worth seeking out all the 5UU's albums you can find, if you can find them.

This collection from the Chris Cutler franchise beautifully closes out with a chamber composition (acoustic piano and cello) very reminiscent of my old favourites the Evergreen College kids.  Sadly, there is nothing else to be found under the name of the artist Erik Hug:



Not much else on this LP however to hang your hat on in here, I'm afraid. With a small hat you're fine.

TRACKLIST:

A1 – Steve Moore - Chiaroscuro
Gong, Cymbal, Tape, Composed By – Steve Moore
Violin – Harriet Wilder

A2 –Jocelyn Robert - Photoproject 1
Performer, Composed By – Jocelyn Robert

A3 –When - Bell
Percussion, Keyboards, Tape, Voice, Composed By – Lars Pedersen

A4 –Tom Djll - Tombo
Synthesizer, Trumpet, Composed By – Tom Djll

A5 –Hail - Racer Hero
Arranged By – Hail
Bass, Drums, Engineer, Mixed By – Bob Drake
Vocals, Guitar, Composed By, Lyrics By – Susanne Lewis

B1 –Illegal Function - Microclimats
Computer, Sampler, Synthesizer, Composed By – Marc Pira, Pierre Chuchana

B2 –5UU'S - Carousel Of Progress
Bass – Jon Beck
Drums, Percussion, Tape, Synthesizer, Composed By, Lyrics By, Producer – Dave Kerman*
Guitar – Greg Conway
Mixed By – 5UU'S
Piano, Harmonium, Mellotron, Synthesizer, Composed By – Sanjay Kumar
Voice, Engineer – Curt Wilson

B3 –Abdo Men - Intense Grace
Performer, Composed By, Engineer – Dave Fox

B4 –Erik Hug - Diary XI-V
Cello – Mathis Keller
Piano, Composed By – Erik Hug
Recorded By – Peter Drefahl
Violin – Isabel Schneider

Arturo Meza's Suite Koradi (Mexico 1985) and Nirgil Vallis with Y Murio la Tarde (1984)

Mentioned earlier on this blog in connection with the ReR Volume 2 Number 2 sample, I was reminded of this when listening to that edition again.  The album from whence the piece was derived came out in 1985, and was a significant departure for this artist who usually traffics in folk and acoustic pop (at least I think he did, I never delved any deeper).

The review from apps on rym presents a very clear picture:

Meza's next album started as a very ambitious idea, just bear in mind we're talking about 1985 here, and the man arranged ''Suite Koradi'' (1985, Gente de México) originally for an orchestra, proving how experimental his mind was.  Apparently lack of financial sources forced him to record the album with the help of analogue synthesizers. Who knows how this work would've sounded if a real orchestra was available, still ''Suite Koradi'' reveals a new direction for Meza, the one deeped into electronic and Classical sounds without forgetting his love for Folk Music. Very nice and dreamy Electronic Prog with symphonic undelines, performed mainly on synths and harsichord, containing elaborate and smooth melodic parts, but also heading to ethereal New Age/Folk at moments with acoustic guitar, flute and the likes. Fourth track ''Retorno de las almas atrapadas en la región de los Kliphos'' has to be one of the weirdest experiences of Meza, a complete pre-Industrial/Avant-Garde oddity with wordless vocals, effects and hypnotic drumming. Couldn't stand alone with dignity, but suits very nice to this whole effort. All in all, a work completely out of place and time and a certain upgrade for Meza, representative of his talent.

Another review, with a bit of background information:

Hell is the Womb of Heaven
After the pastoral folk of his debut album, Arturo Meza got significantly more ambitious for his sophomore release, a concept album that's halfway between prog rock and neoclassical darkwave.

Suite Koradi is based on Meza's theory that we currently live in a world dominated by the Aryan race, which is in decadence and will be replaced by the coming Koradi race, a name which he says means "clarity, something with no shadow, pristine, transparent, crystalline...the Koradis will be a race with no ego, which will be dissolved by mutual agreements between men or by the will of nature itself; pain will be liberating, eliminating everything rotten and unholy, leaving only good. A people that will purge all evil through pain, giving birth to a new life. This music narrates the eternal struggle of good against evil, light against darkness."

Following the concept isn't really necessary as the music is mostly instrumental - the only exception is the last track, a Coptic hymn - and Meza himself has said that it should stand on its own as a personal statement. And, in any case, it was good enough to attract the attention of Chris Cutler, who included an excerpt on a Recommended Records sampler.  Due to financial limitations, Meza was unable to record this composition with a full orchestra as he had originally intended and the album is mostly synth-based, which either makes it sound crappy and cheap or extremely cutting-edge, depending on how you look at it - remember that Spleen and Ideal came out just one year beforehand and that this was nearly a decade before In Slaughter Natives or Mortiis made their appearance.
There's definitely Meza albums I listen to far more, but this is the album that secured his reputation as one of Mexico's premier underground musicians and anyone with an interest in his music should be familiar with it.

And I think that says it all-- in fact, it says more than all since they are both overstating the case here-- I would emphasize the point that two of the tracks are really just noise, not music, and the excerpted piece, 12 minutes long, put in the ReR Quarterly was clearly the masterpiece composition.  So if like me you've already heard and assimilated that one, you don't necessarily need to even hear the rest of the album.

I'll throw in the 2 albums made roughly in the same year.

Note that the 1984-1995 (?) album with Nirgal Vallis, information here, is also well worth hearing with its symphonic instrumental compositions augmented sometimes by female vocals.  Sympho-prog fans will go nuts over this one.  A track called Memories of a Comet is particularly glorious and sure to please all those kids out there who might not have had the luxury to hear this relatively unknown work:





It's not entirely clear to me what Meza's contribution to this joint effort was, perhaps someone can enlighten us.  Note also the involvement of Ledesma Q here, credited as guitarist and as producer.
I see that Vallis made another album some years later, which we will have to search for now.
Annoyingly, the CD release omitted one track, the side b one, from the original LP by Nirgil (I will assume it was just a noise track or somesuch) and the LP is not cheap to buy.

Back to the dreaded ReR Volume 3, No. 2, by request

Against my better judgement, assuming such a thing exists and it probably doesn't based on evidence provided today, I bought this record on the request of some recent commenter and others who over the years have suggested completing the whole series-- recall I stopped after Vol. 3, No. 1, leaving out 3.2, 3.3, and 4.2 (I posted 4.1).  You can see the overview here on rym.  (In other words after today there are only 2 left from the series of 13 total.)  Using the tag approach we can see the number of posts for this series (in reverse chronological order on blogger).  It's nice to revisit the Vol. 2, No. 2, which I still love so dearly, the one that had Robert Wyatt's Chairman Mao poem.

Like all the later instalments this franchise edition is overall quite disappointing.  Info can be found here on discogs.  The long track by Lutz Glandien is all over the place, and really could have used some condensation processing.  At one point I thought the vinyl was skipping so I quickly ran back to the record player which I had wandered away from in boredom-- but it wasn't, it was just the repetition of the music-- and that's not a good thing.

An interesting blues-based guitar track called Release by Charlie Southern kind of brings things together, at least succinctly, if not totally cohesively:





Following this there is the usual only-percussion track which seems guaranteed to generate migraines in those susceptible and then the usual Eastern bizarreness-- I know it's not politically correct but I really hate Eastern music.

RēR Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 12: The Quarterly Vol. 3 No. 1 Magazine Scans

An essay relating to this drawing describes the inspiration which arose from the sign: Spa - Motel.

German expressionism from the inter-war period?

I wonder what has become of the artist today?  (Jane Colling, from London.)  I am reminded of Marcel Duchamp's piece in the Philadelphia Museum hidden behind the curtains.

An article about hypnagogic thoughts, i.e., those that occur at the start or end of sleep, "Dispatches from Nod" by Peter Blegvad.  It makes for some interesting reading and is in fact very well-written, discussing its importance in the spheres of literature and visual art.

___________________

For those interested in the discussions about the programme of music on this record, the information begins on page 47.  I love what Overflow writes about their oeuvre "Bakerloo Bugaloo," as well as the crazy Russian band ZGA.  There is a beautiful prose poem by Bing Selfish and the Ideals, who did one of those 50s-like songs I mentioned that I hated.  He actually made quite a few albums both with his band and alone, subsequently.

Overflow with their homemade instruments.

In this picture I'm not sure which is better, the gigantic alpenhorn, or the fact he [John Loretan] is wearing a mullet and baggy white shorts beside his poor neighbour's fence:

At the end, note the following statement below the headline "ReR Megacorp: eleven years of unpopular music:" "ÿou pay in advance and when the LP is released you get a special numbered and dedicated ed. with free extra subscription-only items.  Then you keep them for 27 years and sell them at auction to buy your retirement chateau."

In 2016 it will be 27 years but I don't think ebay will allow us to make that much retirement money from any of this material.  But that's not fair, it was clearly tongue-in-cheek.  When I look at the cost of the magazine-- 7 LB, I note that the record itself plus the magazine costs only a litte more today, even less if you were to purchase it at a used store in London, which is sad.

RēR Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 11: The Quarterly Vol. 3 No. 1

I had high hopes to make it through all 13 editions but even I am getting tired of this stuff-- particularly after hearing this disappointing number.  And if it was that way for me I imagine it will be really unsatisfying for most.  So I'll leave the other 3 for later.  These remain to be posted: Vol. 3 No. 2, Vol. 3 No. 3, and Vol. 4 No. 2.  No coincidence that they are mostly from the tail end of the series post-1989, since now we are definitely way beyond the glory days of progressive rock and RIO-- oh boy are we ever.  Perhaps someone might have them on CD for all to hear?



I have the magazine for this one and will discuss it shortly.  First, the music.  We start with composer Steve Moore's Iranian Rock composition, taken from actual recordings.  I wonder if the Ayatollah would have approved.  Certainly I don't.  The next and most approachable track is by a band called Overflow, who as far as I can tell did nothing else other than this composition, called "Bakerloo Bugaloo." The curious title is explained by the fact a subway train on the Bakerloo line of  'the tube' in London takes part in the ungodly proceedings towards the end.  Note that, as you can read in the magazine, these kids built their own homemade instruments to perform their music out of such materials as slates (for a xylophone-like instrument), and 'overflow pipe' for brass instruments.  There is even a hubcap immersed in water somewhere in the mix!   Though it starts in a marvelously well-composed way with some Bartok-like dissonances, I find, and I hope you don't disagree, it peters out as you get to the end with Philip Glass-like hammering simplicity.



The last track (on the first side) is all about bells and ship's horns and all about fast forward as well.  On the second side, we are treated to a really bizarre mixture, like an open house on a psychiatric ward in which medications are in short supply.  On the first track about War you will have Fred Firth on bass and Rene Lussier on electric guitar performing a quasi-punk song quite bizarrely.  The next track is a series of voice recordings and computer distortions of voices.  A band called ZGA that must have been the most unpopular band in all mother Russia performs a bizarre little RIO opus next-- their commentary contains that wonderful self-deprecating humour that is typical of the slavs and is really entertaining, all about how "10 concerts in 4 years had an audience of a dozen in total," etc.



Now I want to talk a bit more about Canadian avant-garde composer René Lussier, who was such a genius in Conventum in the late seventies and his first magnum opus "Fin de Travail" with its brilliant extended composition "Manifeste".  The pieces here apparently were throwaway elements of the later work "Tresor de la langue Francaise" which won some award or another-- definitely not for the music since I have heard it once or twice and decided to avoid it for the rest of my life.  Most amusing to me is the Manifeste Du Front De Libération Du Québec [different from the above piece despite the word in common] -- how was it that an advanced and wealthy western democracy required liberation like Angola or any other former colonial African country being tortured by the cold war heavyweights (USSR and USA) with untold billions of dollars of weapons and fighter jets to pursue wars whose only purpose was to make egomaniacal politicians in each of those empires fluff with pride like roosters at the thought they were 'winning' the cold war; today, this amusement at the Fronts' (as they appeared in every Western country) almost childish naivete is tempered with the horror at the thought a communist revolution like in Cambodia could really have been possible, with one tenth to one fifth of the population exterminated in a self-genocide.  Make no mistake about it-- I'm not a 'reactionary' or radical capitalist, finally, when it comes to ideal societies, it's enlightening to think it's not just any democracies that have the most equable and successful governments, but the Scandinavian democracies which combine intelligently and maturely socialist concepts with capitalist ideals, demonstrating yet again that moderation is the only road to human happiness.  Not only do they have the highest satisfaction with their condition but they are far more likely to be proud of their governments, in contrast to the US.



The track "Government of Love" by Bing Selfish & The Ideals reminds me of those ludicrous horror movies in which a simplistic and childish fifties song suddenly appears in the midst of the most horrifying or gory murder, completely incongruously, a cliché that just makes me weep it has been so overdone in Hollywood's both conventional and 'arthouse' movies, starting with for ex. David Lynch in his "Blue Velvet" (though it's quite possible he, as directing genius, initiated it).  At this point it's a cliché, like "Showtime!" exclaimed before action sequences, that must absolutely be retired from the form before it results in mass suicides.


So there you have it.  Nothing too impressive, a bit too experimental even for me.  In the next post I'll review the magazine.




                                                         

RēR Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 10: The Quarterly Vol. 2 No. 3 [no magazine]

Some more information here.

First of all this is where the title of the series changed from Rē Records Quarterly to RēR Records Quarterly.  On this episode we start with some noise tracks that definitely are beyond the (admittedly low dimensional volume) sphere of my patience.  Not until we move on to track 3 do we approach what is generally accepted as music within the species we belong to with the entry from the Italian guitarist Luciano Margorani.  Notice in his discography the cool LP from 1989 called "Home Recording is Killing Studios" which was pretty prescient 24 years ago.  I wonder if anyone has heard it and can describe it for us.

The "Brave It" track from a band called "Tone Dogs" (who did 2 albums back then) is the first big standout track.  Now get this, for those of you who are familiar with the alternative rock scene from the early nineties: the drummer for Tone Dogs was none other than Matt Cameron-- yes that guy who went on to superstardom in Pearl Jam and Soundgarden! (As well as the combo-band Temple of the Dog.)  (In fact when I was into that style, twenty years ago, I saw him smashing the drums to pieces many times when those formidable bands performed here locally… what a time we had back then when I was young and fit for metal and moshing, long before I mellowed out and discovered progressive rock.)  So it seems Matt himself had an involvement with prog in those early days and his drumming really does shine on this one track.  The singer (Amy Denio) wrote this track, with somewhat silly lyrics: "blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" it starts off with a baroque fugue, "for they know a stitch in time saves nine, old macdonald had a farm, eei-eei-o--"  (Huhh??)  She made a long string of albums and never of course abandoned the progressive or experimental streak that is apparent here.  Her voice is simply exquisite when singing in the upper registers, reminding me of the high purity and gem-like clarity of Barbara Gaskin or the beautiful canterburian Amanda Parsons.

Brave It by the Tone Dogs:



We continue on with another noise track that one must inevitably fast forward to get to an atonal piece by James Grigsby, who was guildsman in the Motor Totemist G, NIMBY, and U Totem.  Here his advanced modern European classical compositional skills (I should use the acronym MEC for this blog) are quite impressive.  Some will tear their hair out on hearing this, some, like me, will be delighted by the surreal sound and tone structures he has created.  He contributes another collaborative track in the tenth position of this album.

The Norwegian band When contributes a quite experimental rock song perversely called "Under the Xmas Tree".  This outfit made quite a few albums, at least one of which was posted long ago on the mutant sounds blog (for which blog all these ReR Quarterly albums seem tailor-made, though none were ever posted there so far as I know).  Kampec Dolores is a Hungarian band that also made many albums in this period (late 80s early 90s).  Their contribution is called Tango -- a 'fast forward on sight' songtitle for me.   La 1919 is a band everyone should not only know, but actively collect, they are a milanese band that has been active since 1980 and pretty uncompromisingly progressive throughout.  From discogs:
"Italian avantgarde/progrock/RIO/no wave/post punk duo from Milan, exists since 1980."

Second last track is from none other than Swede nutbar Lach'n Jonsson, whose two first very dark cemetarial albums, Music for a Dying Forest and Songs from Cities in Decay, are strongly recommended.  He was in bands Ur Kaos and Zut un Feu Rouge.  A fabulous track called "Flaubears Dancing" appears nowhere else in his output (I think), check it out:


Finally we get to my favourite piece here from Canadians Miriodor, another quite renowned prog band.  Their song here titled "Moyen Age" sounded familiar and sure enough, it appeared in the 1987 album "Tot ou Tard".  That one and the preceding 1986 album "Rencontres" are highly recommended for any progressive fan.  The albums diminished in my opinion in quality following the first two.

So let's summarize this series by saying that long after the heyday of prog rock with the kings ELP, Genesis and King Crimson in Britain in the early seventies, the spirit of experimentation in international rock music was still quite prevalent, with noteworthy albums from all the bands featured here (Miriodor, Tone Dogs, Lach'n Jonsson, La 1919) throughout the decade of the eighties and into the early nineties.  After this came the 'great revival' of the old style when younger musicians discovered the previous decades' efforts and attempted to recreate the style, thanks to bands like Anglagard.  Whether or not these newer bands were successful in their pursuit is a matter of intensely debated argument to this day.

Rē Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 9: The Quarterly Vol.2 No.4's Magazine Scans Part 2

An article on serialism by Roger Sutherland discusses this possibly now-defunct technique of writing music in the second half of the twentieth century, championed by such European composers as Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, etc.  Simply put the idea was to use the twelve tones of the chromatic scale in an equal way, taking an arbitrary sequence, possibly even randomly generated (called aleatory here), then playing it forwards, backwards, one octave up, one below, etc., in various rigid ways permuting the series.  Sometimes this style of music even provided explicit rules for loudness and so on with symmetrical or mathematical bases.  As a whole it sounds similar to the usual atonal stuff from earlier and is highly alien and odd to the average individual.  This was thought, as the article makes clear, to be the music of the future-- in the same way probably that the horrible square concrete government buildings or glass boxes made in the fifties were thought to be the architecture of the future.  These late art styles like Pollock's abstract expressionism remain for almost every ordinary human, impossible to enjoy.  What will be said about them now?  For me art must combine something recognizable with something brand new and creative, with an emotional underpinning or narrative that can hardly be missing.  When the only element present is the creativity as in serialism, we are really or merely denying our human nature.  As a result the majority of the population flocks to the extremely cliched and high-emotional content of such styles as pop music and impressionism.

Chris Cutler appears in this magazine with a handful of not so impressive poems.  Jean Derome as well has a kind of four-page poem discussing music in a very digressive manner which I found very tedious to read through.  At the end, each track is discussed individually, sometimes merely with images.  That artwork, as I said earlier, is what I love the most in these magazines, they remind me of the brilliant underground 'subversive' comics of the seventies to nineties...

RēR Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 8: The Quarterly Vol. 2 No. 4 from 1989

The album starts with German prog band Expander des Fortschritts, who did two really crazy albums in the late eighties that are recommended.   So far as I know their contribution included here doesn't appear on either album.  It continues with Werner Kotydek's track of street sounds and noise (musique concrete) collaged from actual recordings made in the city of Cairo from which you can conclude that as usual there is plenty of utterly unlistenable garbage on this record.  It ends with the Canadian flautist Jean Derome who all should be familiar with due to his involvement in Canadian prog band Nebu.  As you can see from his discography his early years there were a small part of his total output to date.

The most beautiful song is by Jean Derome and is called USA / Intolerance (I'll leave out the obligatory political commentary this time).  His contribution forms a small progressive chamber music suite with wordless female vocals in the first part leading into a gorgeous small orchestral chamber work (Italy) and ending in Ghana's jazzy street riot.  These passages are derived from the soundtrack to a film called "Paul Strand under the dark cloth".  Interesting.  His friend Rene Lussier is performing on the guitar and some percussion here.





This was one of the records for which I have the magazine that was included in all the ReR Quarterlies.   Thus I'll focus on this instead of the music.  Bear in mind that reading off scans is quite different from holding the actual magazine especially for old-timers like myself who still can't get used to reading a book on an e-reader.  One of the most interesting articles is about the supposed advantages of CDs over vinyl, written by Michael Gerzon who invited a type of surround sound.  I recommend all audiophiles read this for its very early discussion of the issue.  It's highly interesting that the change from purely acoustical horn recording (early 20th century) to electronic recording on vinyl in itself caused a loss of musical quality-- would be wonderful to create such a purely acoustic analog recording device again.  Other articles discuss serialism (atonal music subjected to mathematical rules), allotments (personal farms), and there is creative material as in short stories and poetry.  For me the visual art material is particularly enjoyable.

Unfortunately I could only get halfway through the scanning process before giving up due to the monumental tedium of the process especially when in conjunction with a misfit and intemperate scanner that often cut off pages into pieces.  So I'll finish the process tomorrow and post the rest separately.

As mentioned in an earlier post it's a shame no one can put this material into a box set with the complete music, not necessarily the complete magazines, since many articles will appear quite dated.  Maybe Tom Hayes should take up this cause.

Btw notice that here the series is no longer Re Records, but for some odd reason the title is now ReR Records, starting with Vol. 2 No. 3 which I'll get to tomorrow.  I'm guessing the explanation has to do with the different corporate entities Chris Cutler created and is contained in that wikipedia article I earlier mentioned.

Rē Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 7: The Quarterly Vol. 4 No. 2

This is the very last disc in the ReR Quarterly series. Overall, this disc sits on the more experimental side of the series and includes avant music stalwarts such as Tom Dimuzio, Steven Tickmayer and Marie Goyette, You'll wonder what the traditional song "Shenandoah" is doing on the disc, but there are a fwe other more accessible tunes on the disc, too. There's even a track by Volapuk.

Track Listing:

1. "Sacrifice to Isis" by Q.R. Ghazala – 2:26
2. "Three Cold Floors" by Mike Hovancsek and Paul Guerguerian – 4:01
3. "Inception" by Tom Dimuzio – 4:08
4. "Short-Cuts: Brahms" by Marie Goyette – 4:25
5. "Danseuse" by Ken Ando – 5:13
6. "Congo" by Robert Iolini – 2:35
7. "Zimbabwe" by Robert Iolini – 1:42
8. "From 'Le Ombre di Otello'" by Giovanni Venosta – 3:47
9. "Feu Brilliant" by Keith Rowe and Alain De Filippis – 5:54
10. "Shenandoah" / "Innsbruck" by Brian Woodbury's Variety Orchestra featuring Dudley Saunders – 5:44
11. "The Unthinkable" by Richard Barrett – 6:28
12. "Heterophony" by Stevan Tickmayer – 7:19
13. "Des Objets de la Plus Grande Importance" by Volapük – 3:26
14. "Interludium: Two Drums" by Boris Kovač – 2:46
15. "Virgo Ramayana" by Philip Perkins – 5:56
16. "After Hours" / "The Colour of Blood" by Shelley Hirsch/Jon Rose/Chris Cutler – 5:00

Rē Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 6: The Quarterly Vol. 2 No. 1

This album features Joseph Racaille, the R in RIO band ZNR.  His contribution here called "Pegase" is simply awful and not representative of his compositional talents as evidenced on "6 Petites Chansons" which I think I'll upload next to give you all a break from this stuff.  Unlike other RIOoids I never liked the duo Iva Bittova and Pavel Fajt and in fact overall this edition was a disappointment for me and will thus probably be horrendous for you. 

The track "Imperialism of the Future" is for me the best, by a Swedish band called Ur (or Ur-Kaos).  Their 1987 ST album called Ur-Kaos I recall enjoying greatly, try to hear it.




I really love the first track, by the Blitzoids, called "Puptent", too.  It's simply crazy.

Rē Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 5: The Quarterly Vol. 2 No. 2 from 1987 [Recommended!]

It's my opinion that the best issue is this one, Vol. 2 No. 2 --  as a result I'm going to discuss it at length, but I beg you to read on.  As well I think everyone should hear it and for this reason I will post a lossless copy for a limited time only (one week).

First of all we have a fantastic song by the 5UU's which I believe is one of those treasures left out of the sampler CDs, for which reason I thought it important to amass these records.  This is followed by the legendary Robert Wyatt with an item called Chairman Mao.  I've tried to listen to it a few times to see if it is pro-communist in order to get a few political comments going regarding the radical conservatism now sweeping the United States like a tsunami of triclosan, with deficit-reduction austerity serving as propagandal excuse to gerrymander society into a pre-depression quasi-fascist kleptocracy -- refashioning the future into not a welfare state, nor a police state, but a slave state, in which the one-tenth percenters and the corporations with which they are inseparable will be the masters -- but old as I am and thus unable to multitask I get too distracted by the beauty of his musical composition, the harmony vocals, and the bizarre clarinet-like background keyboards he uses here.  It's a testament to his genius that the song remains in the key of G minor but maintains interest throughout by building slowly in intensity and weaving such strange snatches of lyrics that to me suggest he put a pre-existing poem to music.  Simply amazing.  But we knew that about Robert Wyatt.

The highlights of this record are the two longer suites.  A4 is excerpts from Arturo Meza's Suite Koradi, which is recommended in its entirety because it is available and appeared as an album in 1985.   It's a shock that there's so much fantastic Mexican prog-- the land that is now infamous for cocaine smugglers, drug-packed homemade submarines (not the sandwiches, the u-boats), and bloodthirsty drug cartels once had a beautiful path down the alley of progressive rock and it was a wide and productive trail indeed.  Too bad at the end of it we now find decapitated bodies everywhere amidst AK-47 casings.  Anyways, it's a very tricky suite because each time you think the track is over, suddenly it starts up again, like a person you shot with a high powered rifle who you think has died -- only to rise up again.  So I had to rerecord it about half a dozen times each time expecting it to be finally over, cursing it, like a half-fried chimichanga.  You'll see what I mean.


Starting Side B is the other long piece called Suite (Resume 84-86) [presumably based on years of composition?], which is as beautiful as music can get, to me.  I realize I make these pronouncements far too often, but it's because the music I'm presenting is some of my favourite material.  (Almost by definition I won't post stuff I find terrible.)  It's by a band called "Intellectual Cabaret" and was written by one Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer.  From discogs:

"Composer, pianist and music essayist, Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer was born in 1963 ( Novi Sad , Vojvodina / ex-Yugoslavia) as a member of Hungarian national minority. Since 1991, he lives in France.  Studied piano & double bass, graduated in composition at the Academy Of Arts in Novi Sad under Rudolf Brucci, subsequently studied composition with Louis Andriessen & Diderick Wagenaar at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He had also a scholarship from the Polish Section of ISCM. With the members of his ensemble studied with Marta and György Kurtàg and by time established a long-term friendship with them.

In 1986 formed his ensemble Tickmayer Formatio in which classical trained musicians was employed as well as new jazz or improvised rock performers. Very soon, the group got an international profile: in different combinations over than thirty musicians collaborated with the group. For four years, Tickmayer was a member of the editorial of New Symposium, a magazine for social questions, art & culture in Novi Sad. In this period, he organized two international festivals for contemporary music & arts. In 1988, he gave lectures in summer course for improvised & composed music in Szombathely (Hungary) and one year later formed a piano duo with the father figure of Hungarian contemporary improvised music György Szabados. In the period of 1990-1997 he composed music and performed it with his Formatio for the Orleans based dance group Jel led by the choreographer Josef Nadj. ...

On the other hand, it's a mystery who were in the Intellectual Cabaret, unless it was a nonce band for the composer for this particular purpose.  Definitely an artist whose work I will have to search for more in the future.  This is clearly chamber music and it wouldn't at all be out of place in a concert hall so your enjoyment of it will entirely depend on your tolerance of modern European classical music.  Note the applause at the end, btw.  Later, Tickmayer reappeared on the 1997 CD Vol. 4 No. 2 which we shall get to eventually, assuming I don't give up on this tedious enterprise first.

B3 features an unreleased (I think) track from Danish nutbars Hunk Ai, one of my favourite out-there oddity RIO bands, whose two albums everyone should hear at least once, if only to determine whether they should ever be heard again in one's or one's procreants' lifetimes, or that of the species.

There are of course two throwaway tracks, A3 which is purely percussion, and B4 which is purely dog barking-- seriously.

Finally we have Jocelyn Robert, a Canadian avant-garde composer this time.  I'm not sure but I seem to recall his material is as avant-garde as it gets-- we're talking musique concrete, noise, recorded snippets, etc., not what most humans including myself (or excluding, more appropriately) will refer to as music.  However, his track, entitled Christi Crucifixi Ultima Verba is highly accessible as indeed it should be on this compilation.  The choral vocalizations, unaccompanied by musical instruments, are utterly enchanting, mysterious, and other-wordly, have a listen:




It ends very abruptly on the record, it's not my recording.  This track is the one that when I heard it many many years ago, on one of those ReR CD samplers sent to me by an older and wiser connoisseur of this music, caused me to listen to it again and again, along with some Jean Derome tracks that we'll get to later this week.  Then and there I swore that one day I'd try to collect all the original material, and then of course, I swore again once I'd obtained it all.

Note on this release:

Comes with 64 page magazine & screen-printed cover.
A1 has no track duration given on the release.
225 subscription copies came with an additional numbered and personally dedicated poster.
Some copies came with another addition still: a 12-page booklet by John Oswald, titled ''Plunderphonics''.
Magazine printed by Black Rose Press, London.
Record cover printed by Third Step Printworks, London.

It's a shame my copy lacks all the above except the amazing music.  In a future installment I'll discuss the magazine I do have.

Chairman Mao by the incomparable Robert Wyatt:

Rē Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 4: The Quarterly Vol. 1 No. 1

Modern art from the early twentieth century was the inspiration here, with Braque an influence on the back.  Opening with staccato string chords reminiscent of a Night on Bald Mountain growing psilocybin mushrooms on the ground for the plucking, from Steven Moore, and proceeding into complete Norman Bates' Psycho territory, this first installment is probably one of the best in the set.  The other record I will present next tomorrow, Volume 2 No. 2, is my favourite, foolishly I kept it for the 5th part of the series by which time guaranteed everyone will have had enough of this crazy music designed to clear the room of any normal human being.

Standout track here is unknown Swedish band's  "Mission Impossible" (not to be confused with the proto-alternative band of the same name which featured a young Dave Grohl) and their song Indefinite.  Notice the brilliant use of the tritonal B flat on a song in E.  I would love to know if they made any more recordings, if anyone has any info, please let me know.




The other fabulously jittery track is Lars Hollmer's, with its angular melody and bizarre chords with crazy dissonances, it's pretty much a definition or anthem of the RIO style.  I know it drives some people to distraction on hearing this, while others like myself find it utterly fascinating because of its off-the-wall mutational originality. 


...

Rē Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 3: The Quarterly Vol. 1 No. 4 (from 1986)

In this installment the first side is given over to a suite by After Dinner, a marvelous Japanese chamber rock or RIO band that I strongly recommend provided that you actually enjoy that subgenre.  For me it's wonderful because it combines all the best music the human mind was able to create in its thousands of years history of musical instrumentation and experimentation.

It's too long to post as sample so instead I posted a representative track by Canadians Wondeur Brass, which I'm not as fond of, but this track called L'heure des louves, is pretty good.



Rē Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 2: The Quarterly Vol. 1 No. 3

Look at those beautiful images! It's incredible.  As I've said so many times, the artwork is always worth resuscitating as well as the music.

I should have checked Wikipedia first for information on this series.  From there:

The RēR Quarterly (also known as Rē Records Quarterly and RēR Records Quarterly) was an English "quarterly" sound-magazine comprising an LP record and a magazine. It was published at irregular intervals between 1985 and 1997 by Recommended Records and November Books, and edited by English percussionist, lyricist and music theorist, Chris Cutler. It was sold internationally by Recommended Records via mail order and in specialist record shops.
A total of thirteen issues were published (four volumes of four, four, three and two issues respectively) plus two "collection" issues featuring music selections from volumes 1 and 2. From volume 4 the LP was replaced by a CD and the CD and the magazine (now entitled unFILEd: The RēR Sourcebook) were sold separately or together as a set.
The record in each issue contained previously unreleased music by artists from across the world, including commissioned pieces, projects and live recordings. The A4 magazine (varying from 42 to 112 pages per issue) included artwork and theoretical and practical articles on music, often by the composers and performers featured on the record. In keeping with the goals of Recommended Records and its prime mover, Rock in Opposition, a number of new musicians and groups appeared on the records, many having their music published internationally for the first time.
Cutler described the RēR Quarterly as:^[1]

“

... firstly a sound magazine - not a sampler or a compilation, but a window on what was happening, essays in the possibilities of sound, introduction to new people. And secondly a printed magazine without the usual interviews and reviews, avoiding the language and outlook of the vapid music press ...

”

Paul Oldfield wrote in the English music newspaper, Melody Maker in 1985: "Theirs [RēR Quarterly] is the pursuit of unimaginable, packed in artwork of giddy luminescence."


I will try to scan and post some of the magazines but bear in mind the work involved is unimaginably tedious.  However it would be nice if someone made the effort to return all these to the world in CD format with a reproduction of the magazines, perhaps a box set of all 13 (rather than small CD samplers) would be the best vehicle to restore these to their former splendor.


An exemplary track, Nazca's Nadja:

This Mexican band is well worth collecting out for its wonderfully dark and chamber prog sound especially the first two albums on this discography, called Nazca and Estacion de Sombra.

Rē Records Quarterly -- A Series, Part 1: The Quarterly Vol. 1 No. 2 from 1985

I hope in the coming weeks to present to you the entire discography of Rē Records Quarterly (not to be confused with the similarly named ReR records label!!) because it's one of the least known but most treasure-packed set of records in progressive history.  At least I'll try to do the first two volumes which are the best, each consists of four numbers.

From the discogs Profile:

Rē Records was founded by Chris Cutler in 1978, as a vehicle for Art Bears and then other projects of his own. At the same time he launched Recommended Records, a specialised mailorder service which established its own label for outside releases. A Recommended shop opened in the early '80s, and in mid-decade the shop and distribution functions separated from the labels, becoming a workers collective and changing its name to These Records. In the early '90s Cutler merged the labels under the name ReR Megacorp and set up a new distribution and mailorder service under the same name. These Records continued until 2006, when it finally closed.

Often telling which label a release is on can be confusing, even with the release in front of you. The way to tell them apart is by the catalog numbers:
Re or Rē numbers = Rē Records [generally releases featuring Chris Cutler]
R.R. or RR numbers = Recommended Records [releases by other artists]
ReR numbers = ReR Megacorp [releases after 1988]

The quarterly albums they put out are compilations of the some of the best and most advanced progressive music the earth had ever heard.  In this installment you have a side-long suite that is incredibly well-composed by the Berlin Programme but the best tracks are from the famed Polish RIO group Reportaz.  Their music here is both advanced and accessible.

Note that many of these tracks were put out on CD samplers much later in the nineties, but on a quick scan of those track lists, I noticed they left out many of the most interesting and ingenious tracks, not surprisingly.  Why is that always the case?

The Fluent Reportaz:

These albums are very much in line with what the blog mutant sounds used to post. I was surprised they never posted any of these records in there, though I might be wrong.