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.




                                                         

Requested: Arakontis Live at the Quasimodo (Germany 1981) + Changes/Arakontis/Chameleon/Margo - Berlin Fusion (bonus)

Note that this is not my rip and I want to warmly thank whoever first made this available, because it's a wonderful set of European fusion.  I think my copy is derived from an old blog about fusion called "Flight Never Ending" from about 4 years ago which I still remember with fondness.
Information on this release here.






Certain tracks have a bit of a progressive edge to them, but most are straightforward fusion similar to Margo.  They contributed 2 other composed tracks to the Various Artists album called Berlin Fusion, which featured Margo, Chameleon, and Changes, and which I strongly recommend.  The latter put out 2 albums that are more jazzy in the fusion spectrum, but still good-- did prognotfrog possibly post one or two of them?   Chameleon's first ST album and the later one by the Fuchs-Goos Band called Chameleon 2 with a different line-up I highly recommend as perfectly wonderful Euro-fusion.  So we see that just like the ancient Greek saying: the more I learn, the less I know, it seems the more music we hear, the more we still need to hear...

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.