3 Albums from Frank Van Der Kloot and Fontessa + multiple reups from the past....

Some years back I heard their wonderful first album with its guitar-based progressive rock sound and the darkly charged atmosphere full of invention and mausoleum abstractions (nekronomicon):

Only last year, this was released to CD by label Tone Arm, and thus can't appear here.  But I didn't realize till I randomly searched the name 'they' (Frank van der Kloot + friends) produced two more records, as below:

And in this second 1976 outing, the progressiveness is quite to the fore, mostly instrumentals which remind us of Finch and Focus, sometimes the one, sometimes the other, in almost alternating tracks recalling one or other of the F'ey influences here, occasionally smooth, by turns harder edged, all of it on a slick and gorgeous guitar (a Les Paul?) evocatively flying the melodies, almost anthropomorphic in the bent notes and tender slides and bluesy flats that sing so closely to us, so directly into our hearts.  Perhaps many will agree with me, the greatest invention in patented musical apparati in the history of man / woman (do they agree though?) is the electric guitar, with coming a close second or tie the electric piano, in particular, the Rhodes sound.  

A very enjoyable album you will see, not too complex at all to tax the frontal lobes, but of course our tired lives cannot withstand too much of the atonal difficulties, we yearn for something more approachable after a day's listening to Zig Zag or somesuch similar and dealing with idiots in accounts receivable or collections agencies...

I particularly adore the 'long track' chopped in subsections called "Heaven is across the street."  Surely this deserves to be transformed fully into a work of poetry, as it aspires to be.

But is it, indeed? Victor Janos some 4 years before filmed the murders of four in the Last House on Dead End Street...  a movie as rare today as it is unappreciated, much like the music we listen to here in this blog.

What about their last work from 1978?  Sadly, we have here lost almost totally the progressive in favour of direct funky rawk, similar to Daddy Warbucks, but obviously not as good.

Hear it and auditorily appreciate what I mean-- though stop to smell the roses of the (Focus-like) progressive track arriving last on your doorstep, "One of these days:"

Sadly, it doesn't quite compare to the great Focus tracks of yore, such as Love Remembered, The Gossip, Sylvia, Moving Waves... those progressive masterpieces of yore that set me on this irrevocable path towards complexity in music and that odd addiction to its energizing and pleasurable contents, which indeed, make life so much more a tiny resemblance of heaven on my block...


From this great review of rare Dutch prog:

Frank van der Kloot started his musical career in a band called Bobby's Children. He played with them from 1971 until 1972. He then formed the band Drama with whom he recorded an album.  In 1973 he formed his own band Fontessa, together with the Drama drummer Shel Schellekens. In 1974 they recorded an album and a year later a single was released, A look in your eyes/Where have you been.  After the decline of Fontessa, Van de Kloot recorded a solo album, in 1976, also titled Fontessa.  

Then, in 1978, a second solo album is released.  

He is currently the owner of a guitar shop in the Hague.

Ryan Cayabyab's magnificent Prog-Fusion Roots to Routes, Pinoy Jazz Volume II, from 1977

From quimsy again we have this marvellous, utterly enchanting and out of left field entry. We all know there was Indonesian prog as well as fusion in the seventies, particularly thanks to the magnificent Giant Step, who released seven unforgettable albums in the period, but prog from the Philippines too?

Born Raymundo Cipriano Pujante Cayabyab, from the discogs profile:

Ryan Cayabyab (May 4, 1954) [note he was all of 23 years old on this release!] is a Filipino musician and was the Executive and Artistic Director of the defunct San Miguel Foundation for the Performing Arts. He was also a resident judge for the only season of Philippine Idol in 2006. His works range from commissioned full-length ballets, theater musicals, choral pieces, a Mass set to unaccompanied chorus, and orchestral pieces, to commercial recordings of popular music, film scores and television specials.  Cayayab's current project includes the Ryan Cayabyab Singers (RCS), a group of seven young adult singers comparable to his prior group Smokey Mountain in the early '90s. After FreemantleMedia decided not to renew the Philippine Idol franchise, Cayabyab transferred to rival show Pinoy Dream Academy (season 2), replacing Jim Paredes as the show's headmaster. PDA 2 started on June 14, 2008. 

He is now the executive director of the Philpop MusicFest Foundation Inc., the organization behind the Philippine Popular Music Festival, a songwriting competition for amateurs and professionals that seeks to uplift the Philippine Music industry by putting the spotlight on songwriters, and encouraging Filipinos to preserve our musical identity. 

According to the database this is his only work from this period, sadly.  Perhaps at a later date we can try to seek out some of his composed work, hard as that may be.

For those who love prog, be prepared to fall off your chair when you hear the dissonance and angular chord changes as sudden as a space capsule on reentry hitting the Pacific ocean on Pen Pen di Sarapen:





A weaker track called "Telebong" (great name, huh? should be the title of a Hollywood comedy) sounds like the old Weather Report jazz standard, Birdland:






But boy, are those ultra-high-pitched female vocals wonderful to hear!  Note the spoken voice at the end: "it's too noisy in here! I can't hear anything! Does anyone have a  -- " [unable to distinguish the word.]

The gorgeous soothing sax sounds of Manilac Lay Labi:






The inimitable and oh-so-European Lulay track sounds like anything randomly drawn from the glorious progressive fusion LPs of Italian Goblin, French Gong, Transit Express, or the great national Finnish treasure Finnforest:





In particular the sustained and plaintive bowed cello playing here interrupted by improvised noodling by finger-played bass behind the grand piano accompaniment are absolute musical bliss for me.  There is no terror or calamity in life that can happen that could take me away from the beauty and happiness this music injects in my soul.  We must thank the composer from the bottom of our hearts for his power to blow away the dark clouds that have that potential to destroy our days and that appear like bad weather with such frequency today.

Note that all the tracks I am quoting here are based on folk songs.


Full credits here in an insert:

Ryan Cayabyab - vocals, all keyboards : fender rhodes, String ensemble, acoustic piano, synthesizer, Vibraphone, Xylophone, Glockenspiel, Clavinet 
Roger Herrera - Electric and acoustic bass 
Eddie Munji III - elec and acous guitars, vox 
Jun Regalado - drums, tympani, percussion (afuce, bamboo)
Boy Alcaide - Percussion (congas, bongos, bamboo) 
Rudy Barria - Soprano and tenor sax, flute 
Ernie Mendoza - Tenor sax, piccolo 
Rudy Sucgang - Alto & tenor sax, flute 
Eddie Sangcap - Alto Sax 
Hermina Ilano - Cello 
Perfirio del Rosario - oboe 
Fred Concepcion - Trumpet 
Passionata - vocals 

"Somebody along the way used a jew's harp - thanks" 

Produced by Jim Paredes and Cecilio B. Cas 
Technical engineer and mixer : Jess Payumo
Recorded at Sampaguita Studio under an Aquarian Sun and a Scorpion Fever. 

Highly, highly recommended album here, it's available for cheap download on amazon as you can see here-- along with a criminally inappropriate & inadequate review.  I am to presume the artist will benefit from each download, so please, go there to hear this and note that despite the availability of the actual mp3 content, the original vinyl sells for hundreds of dollars.

the cdrwl has signed off... keep on truckin' Tom...

With great sadness I am told the cdrwl is no more, as of this week.

I remember like it was yesterday when the news broke of an unknown masterpiece called Ginga Rale Band, some three and a half years back.  For my contacts I am grateful I didn't have to wait long to get my ears onto that piece which, inevitably, turned out to be as fantastic as promised.   Around that same time a superb slice of progressive history and absolute masterpiece-level creation was made available in an LP reissue that I treasure to this day, Rob Thomsett's work Yarandaroo, and it goes without saying that without Tom's illumination I would never have known about that one either.  Today you can judge for yourselves the aptitude of his remarks at the time with regards to both Ginga and Rob.  As well you can easily ascertain how indebted I am to Tom's work if you do a quick search of tags relating to the cdrwl, keeping in mind that several if not dozens of albums that are in our compilation here appeared there but I have forgotten their entries in my rush to post.

Definitely Tom's knowledge of progressive music and gifts at unearthing gems (along with, obviously, his able contacts), and, presumably, a healthy dose of craft beers, was or is unparalleled, especially when it is understood he was there in the seventies & eighties at the time these works were being created, or shortly thereafter (which I cannot claim for myself, having come quite late to this game).

I for one certainly hope this is a momentary lapse, perhaps a temporary epiphany in the Colorado mountains may give way once again to the profound and ineradicable yearning that I can definitely endorse of sharing these discoveries with the wider world out there...  born out of the deepest love for this maligned music: progressive rock.

Keep on truckin' and keep on shinin' your light...




A beautiful little lost 1972 Canadian pop-soul album full of delightful songs, BST-style soulful and bluesy...

The Beafheartian Swedes Boojwah Kids in the early eighties

These guys are not for everyone, being the Swedish Capt Beefheart-- really, they are for those who loved the old Mutant Sounds blog.  But they certainly are progressive in the purest most possible or actual sense and their uncompromising dedication to unlistenable insanity is to be duly prized.  The discography on discogs is not complete, but can be seen on rym.  How amazing they lasted for 9 years as a band!

I love the song Fake Golden Palmtree as it's almost as if Radiohead were harking back to this in their huge alternative hit from 20 years ago, 'Fake Plastic Trees.'  [Not so unlikely, since only a decade separated the two.]

Jean-Luc Chevalier back with Saharienne (1987) and Zantic (1988), TIbet to come

I love the cartoonish drawing of Zantic, but what is the fish or animal he is carrying?

Whilst the cover for Saharienne appears more like one of those wonderful Folio French books one finds in Paris' Quartier Latin:

As mentioned before, it's this last record wherein, reunited with Jean Chevalier (from Zig Zag), he repeats, rather faithfully in some places, the old compositions from that era with as little change as we can hope for given the lateness of the decade.  So in a sense we have come full circle with his discography here.  The old exemplar Ballade, reinterpreted in 1987:





Don't tell the artist but I find it slightly amusing that these themes lend themselves to both a Saharan and Tibetan world music style, when initially they started out as zig-zaggy chamber music compositions.

Note that he subsequently, in the CD era, made two more albums, 5 km a Bangui, and Hommage a Jaco.  Both those I can recommend you safely avoid unless you are, like us, an obsessive-compulsive completist.