Later prog masters Accordi dei Contrari, 4 albums [limited time only]

I rarely am interested in the recent bands, but this one really stunned me.

From discogs:

Italian progressive rock group established in 2001. "Agreement Of The Contrary" took several years to develop their style, balancing their roots in 1970's prog, with a new vitality and compositional feel of their own. Their début "Kinesis" could be compared to Anekdoten or Änglagård with elements of instrumental Premiata Forneria Marconi.

For once, the review is right on the money there.

Specifically what threw me off the chair one day years ago, was hearing the gentle fuzzy voice of Richard Sinclair in a recent album, singing prog that should've been released in the seventies:





Checking out all the music there is a definite masterpiece track which I've listened to hundreds of times since I first found it:





Clearly this composition is as beautiful as anything written in the heyday of European prog, and the violin plus acoustic guitar combo is something you never hear outside of there.

The four albums of course are Kinesis 2007, Kublai 2011, AdC 2014, and Vilato Intatto 2017.

Page Eight's Well well well if it isn't from 1988

The band only made this cassette-only release of improvised jammy half-jazz half-crazed stuff, such as:

A rarity if ever I saw one, to impress your friends...

EGBA's Ulf Adåker + the Swedish Radio Jazz Group in Chordeography, 1986

Ulf Adaker was the trumpet player and one of the composers in the Swedish fusion group the Electronic Groove and Beat Academy, or EGBA.  I sure hope those who weren't familiar with them were suitably impressed with the high quality of their entire corpus, particularly, as one person mentioned, the first album.  (Like math, music is something to be made by youngsters...)

This album was somewhat jazzier in the big band direction than I was anticipating given the extraordinary fusion he was capable of generating, tokamak-like, in the context of the whole group.  Of course, being a horn player, that would completely make sense.  There are 4 long tracks that have been composed and despite the apparent dissonance on display in the musical notation above, I'm not hearing as much of the Stravinskyesque polytonality I was hankerin' for. Having said that, the title track:




Note the 'silly-swingin' dancin' eighties' style here we've heard so frequently before in these pages.

I'll throw in some more from Radiojazzgruppen that I have in inventory, that to me mostly recalls the Gil Evans / Miles Davis collaborations of the Miles Ahead period (obviously, not as good).

Love Live Life's 10 Chapter of Murder, by request

Somebody requested this a while back and I only just remembered about it.  Amazing how slowly the brain works sometimes.  How it succeeded in bringing back the latent memory indelible in the hippocampus is just amazing.  Good thing I'm not about to become a judge and have to remember precedents.  From discogs:

Love Live Life were an important seminal hub of Japanese rock, a stepping stone between the beat of the 1960s and more experimental rock of the 1970s. They are best-known for the heavy blues rock album Love Will Make A Better You, featuring guest star Kimio Mizutani. However they made another album largely devoid of English text on the cover, mysteriously titled 10 Chapters Of Murder - from Colin Wilson's "Encyclopaedia of Murder" according to the labels, which was some sort of conceptual rock outing with brassy, jazz and soul elements.

Personally I was really and totally underwhelmed with the quality of the music here, it's pretty ordinary jazz-rock of a variety that was common in the late 60s on soundtracks, with very little of the subtlety of the Now '75 compositions.  They throw in the perfunctory dixieland, the crazy yelling, Sousa-like martial music, gunshot sounds, references to familiar songs (The Shadow of Your Smile is quoted on one track) the kind of unmusical zany stuff that was so common back then, but the music itself is completely interchangeable with some of the worst Akira Ishikawa records I posted before.  If you look on discogs's release page here notice the record still sells in the hundreds, proving to me once again how quality of music bears no correlation whatsoever with price as we've seen time and time again (cf. Rhea, the Metaphysical Animation (sold for thousands!), etc.)  I'm guessing part of the attraction of this has to do with the creepy subject matter. 

Also, notice too that Kosuke Ichihara who appeared on Now '75 is on here, along with Shigenori Kamiya who made a nice electronic album called Mu in 1980.  A typical track called Chill at Foggy Night:





Of course when you look online, it's a totally different story, consider the following rabid and hyperventilating quasi-delirious review:

750. LOVE LIVE LIFE + ONE: “Satsujin Juushou – 10 Chapters of Murder” (CBS Sony – SOLL-74002) (Record: Near Mint/ Gatefold Jacket: Near Mint/ Insert: Near Mint). Their follow-up to the highly acclaimed “Love Will Make A Better You”. Unlike its predecessor, “10 Chapters of Murder” is more progressive heavy rock tinted. Released in 1972,“Satsujin Juushou” is a  killer LP, taking off where “Love Will Make a Better You” left off and taking towards the next level of delirious madness, mixing outward bound jazzy moves with heavy progressive rock freak-outs and psychedelic incantations and private ecstatcies. Kimio Mizutani’s wrist-slashing fuzzy guitar licks wah’s through it all like a surgeon operating on some defractored brain, Hammond organ lines slice through it all and heavy horn sections give it a LSD soaked mid seventies Miles Davis kind of vibe you won't be able to recover from without leaving behind a piece of your sanity. Demented howling female laughing vocals pop on through at unexpected times, rendering the whole into an even more disjointed teeth-grinding frenzy, all fused in a cloud of smoke, making it a stranger fusion of fucked up eclectic jazz moves, with unhinged psychedelic rock jamming and transporting it into driven jams of explosive jazzed out cosmic rock. The whole disc is booming over with the proper ingredients for a musical outrage, fucking up with and fusing musical traditions and stranding in a hazy but potent universal horizon obscured by mind bending lysergic mutations and sweating out heavy psychedelics. In short this is a fucking MONSTER. One of the best and still undetected Japanese heavy psychedelic & transcendental jaw-dropping jazzy explorations, all embalmed into one cinematic epiphany meshed together into intoxicating boosted crescendos of crystalline hallucinogenic quivering sonic attacks. Head-spinning, mind-altering freeform psyched out jazz rock, a vicious musical beast from the east, still undetected, bloody rare and unreissued. Highest possible recommendation. Price: 875 Euro

The lysergic-soaked bath is actually taking place in the reviewer's house, not so much on the record.
I'm guessing some of those hundreds of euros went to paying the writer or perhaps paying for his stash.

Swedish fusion masters EGBA in 9 albums

The kind of eurofusion I always talk about, and yearn for, with the mix of classical and very emotional pieces and the warmth and energy of electric fusion although to be honest they never quite get up to the maximum stress test heart rate of others such as Scope or German Katamaran.  Obviously, they were distinctive in their latin influence which I personally detest (mostly due to its sad tendency to descend into musical simplicity) but thankfully it doesn't permeate the whole albums.

Although I thought maybe the name of the artist denotes the E minor chord it actually is an acronym for Electronic Groove and Beat Academy.  What's most tragic about these guys is the fact none of their albums, even the first two masterpieces, were ever released to CD, and they collectively must have put a ton of work into these well crafted compositions, from 1974 all the way up to the 1989 full-named-ST release, a fifteen year tour of duty!  And not even an honorable discharge.

As an example of the highly emotional fusion of which they were capable, which was rare on the North American side of things, Bland Tomtar etc., from Jungle Jam:





It's too bad that spacey solo synth is no longer heard today, it just seems so designed to tug at the heart strings, doesn't it?

The title track of Bryter Upp always surprised me with its ingenious modal jazz hints of Gil Evans + Miles Davis, done in a more abstract and advanced style:





Note that a terrible mono rip of Omen is still circulating online, which is the one I used here down below. I'm going to buy it and rerip it (not at all an expensive investment this time, my wife will be happy about that, not that she will ever find out of course), since it really deserves better.  The track about the Tour de France always really thrilled me, even with left and right channels playing identical sounds thus making it an entirely one-dimensional ride on le vélo:





Finally, notice how attractive the first few covers were compared to the later 80s ones, perfectly coordinated with the musical quality as time passed.