Auracle's Glider, 1978

Auracle's two albums have been available already in poor quality mp3s (mono) for some inexplicable reason and I felt they deserved better, in addition to which they're cheap to buy, so I ripped them again. For the same reasons I 'll throw in some lossless rips too, for a limited time.
This band seems to be the brainchild of keyboardist John Serry, Jr., who made 2 albums around the same time (1979 and 1980).  Of note is that it was produced by my old favourite, the legendary Teo Macero.

I really love the title track's gentleness, like a paper airplane made of three-ply velour toilet paper:





Definitely nice and soft on the bum.  As is the rest of the record.  I love the way in the middle section the song tries to modulate out of the original F major into E flat suspended, but then becomes so enamoured of the beautiful improvised curlicues greated by the horns and synths it decides to stick to the same chord, eventually quite majestically or craftily returning to the original F.


Sorry, forget all that.  Herewith the scientific review:
Auracle - Glider (USA, 1978)
Rating: 4425.22
Category 4 (fusion with less than half featuring progressive moves, approximately 32%, give or take 40%, with fusion split into 74 percent jazz and 26 percent rockier sounds)

UHF Timeless Voyager

A great cover drawing from the days when musicians really cared about their cover art.

I suppose that now that everything is digital and/or online, it's impossible to under-think it, anyways.  Yet another aspect of the past we've lost in our rush to 'progress' technologically.

I was thinking yesterday I should classify all the albums on this blog in one of 5 categories, in order of their importance to me.  This would also satisfy my wife's constant complaint that 'your music always sounds the same.'  

The first would be classic progressive rock such as Genesis was I guess everyone's number one.  Unfortunately, there isn't much in that style still left to discover, though I might have one or two up my sleeve in that dept.  OK, maybe just one which you've already heard.  The second would be through and through progressive fusion, such as National Health.  Luckily there is still more in that vein, it was definitely a very popular style back in the day.  The third and fourth categories are rock with progressive moves, which often is AOR or hard rock with some inventiveness but not permeating throughout, and jazz or jazz-rock with progressive moves.  The fifth category is everything else, including progressive folk and library.  I should probably separate those 2 since library deserves its own solitary confinement cell.  Make it categories 5 (progressive folk like Comus) and 6 (Alan Hawkshaw still my favourite).

So from now, instead of describing an album, I'll just say something along the lines of:

UHF- Timeless Voyager (USA 1981),
Category III, 42.4 percent progressive.

Overall rating: 169730 

Information here.

Best track (that is, don't expect much better), Don't Look Over your Shoulder:

An impressive try-out for the instrumental progressive guitar composition meet.

Incidentally, I really love this album, its rough hard rock sound is really appealing to me.

As it was indeed to Tom Hayes, who made us aware of it ages ago on the ol' cdrwl and then moved the review to unencumbered here.
It was a priority 2 at that time, and it still is for us today.

And does everyone out there remember what UHF TV was?

Rantz (1982), for those who missed it

From pnf:

First off, note the beautiful cover art.  Although it can be rotated by pi, I don't actually see an image coming out the other way, though this is perhaps my visual fallibility.

This was another discovery from the mighty osurec and it hails from 1982, 31 years ago.  Why do I always harken back to those wonderful days of the eighties?  Why do I always remember the great late Ronnie Reagan with his doll-like rosy crabapple cheeks and glistening black courtierly pompadour shaking his head rhythmically while intoning the words "the evil empire" and "the mad dog of the middle east" from his teleprompter-- which used to fool my scientist father who thought he as an actor had actually memorized his lines--  imagine his chagrin when I told him POTUS was simply reading not looking the viewer in the eye... For little did my dad know that at that time Ronnie couldn't even remember his own name or the B-movie actresses he had slept with, let alone a long-winded speech by Peggy Noonan-Safire or William Safire-Noonan, full of idiotic and ahistorical platitudes.  But he was full of conviction, that same one that motored the McCarthy boat against communism to nowhere, that same certainty which in truth only true robots can achieve-- that the USSR must be destroyed at all costs, even with the creation of a star wars system of lasers in space that scientists told him from day 1 would never work.  It didn't matter to him that it wouldn't work, what mattered were the words alone, and the words worked.  To this day his words still work.  If millions of humans died in the process, the game theory mathematicians in service of politics said, it was worth it for the survival of the rest of us.  Too bad that game theory at that early point had not progressed to fully include cooperation as the optimal rational strategy-- too bad for us who don't understand game theory and were destined to die in those war games, right?
So I mean yeah, how can I not remember those crazy nuclear-holocaust-eighties with fondness?

After all, his magic religion of capitalism is still the spiritual altar to which we all pray.  We pray for the god of capitalism to make us rich, to give us luxury cars, to let us win the lottery (every day I go to work I hear someone mention this)...  We can grow our money like magic, if we just think the right thoughts.  And the priests, the economists, still stick to the script, they don't believe there is any other way for us, they assure us of a future cornucopia of abundance for all, with perpetual exponential "expansion" of the economy, in a limitless infinite earth that will accomodate 10 billion, even 100 billion humans (cf. Julian Simon RIP).  Now all bachelors can go on reality TV, become rich and famous, then have countless females to sleep with just like the heaven of Islam.  All women can have plastic surgery to make themselves as desirable as their evolutionary imperative instructs them to be, with large breasts, white skin, large red lips.  For a person to question our religion is heresy of course, they are laughed at in serious company, they are ostracized as childish or naive, they are talked down to as if stupid, they are universally ignored in any public forum.  In this way are religions perpetuated through falsehood and irrationality until the day their foretold or unforetold apocalypse passes-- like when the Comet Hale-Bopp passed by without a doomsday and the believers were forced to commit suicide.  Unfortunately our high priests the economists will not be immolating themselves when they are eventually shown to be wrong, they will simply stand in line for unemployment insurance and food stamps like everyone else, probably not even showing shame at their prior false promises or a full belly despite their financial wisdom.

And while I'm on the subject of doomsday (as usual!)  let me mention that all those cruise missiles, the creepy nuclear-powered subs patrolling the oceans that never surface, the thousands of warheads that would kill us all 'thousands of times over' in a nuclear winter as they used to say, they are all still with us-- Reagan and his warring legacy of words that work can still destroy us totally if there does arise a world war three.  Today it seems impossible, but what if there were worldwide famines and mass migrations for many years?   What if the recent economic downturn extends and gets worse and never ends, for anyone anywhere?  And how likely is it that these weapons will never be used, ever?  This seems very low probability to me.

[Interesting that in the 6 years since this was written the probability of nuclear war has gone up by so much.]

I include two fantastic tracks, the Indigo Sunset softer instrumental, and a hard-rocking guitar song that is virtually proto-alternative with punkish singing and incredible tritonal chord changes, nothing bluesy about it at all.

Track 6 (Tesnus Ogidni):





Track 8 (Gnostic Blues):






I wish Tom Hayes and cd reissue wishlist would feature this since I feel it should be priority 3 at least.  There is a wonderful mix of hard, soft, instrumental, no fusion, but a lot of ingenious composition and some killer tracks.  Reminds me a bit of Syn Cast the first Stone, but with a harder edge.

Why are these magnificent records so completely lost???  
But this is our purpose here, to ressuscitate them and preserve them for posterity as the patrimony of our culture, when music reached its absolute apex of creation.  Assuming those nuclear warheads don't rain down on us instead in some distant future.

How interesting that I referred back to Syn here, in the same way I referred to Rantz yesterday.  I guess great minds think alike, especially when they're the same.  The fact is I think this is the better album of the two.

Syn's Cast the First Stone (1980)

Herewith begins a long, long string of American prog, rock, and fusion albums from the same period, obviously late seventies to early eighties.  This will go on for weeks, if not months.  Although I've posted tons of this already, it amazes me there is still so much 'new music' to listen or rediscover from the past.

Let's start with this guy, a completely unknown or hidden obscurity.  A one-off obviously Xian band that made this progressive rock/fusion/pop album in 1980 with a kitchen sink in styles along the same lines as for ex. the recently posted Sunrise, but also, Window's Empyreal Ballet, Ariel's Perspectives, Jester, Luna Sea, etc., etc.
Information here.  Mostly it reminds me of my old favourite Rantz, for which I still have so much affection, with the mix of female vocals and very slight eighties sound.  But inevitably, it's not quite as good overall.

Track 9 which is called Second Time Around:

Hiroyuki Namba / Nanba, 4 albums (1979-1984)

There is an extensive bio on rym, which you can read if interested.  I am not sure why that turn of events would ever come to pass.  Suffice it to say he made some remarkable music in this period, very reminiscent of the earlier posted (but perhaps a bit superior overall) Masanori Sasaji.  The latter in particular used to very good effect his classical music education to provide some really interesting creative directions.  Namba, on the other hand, is more straight electronics-soundtrack-fusion in style,  I'm sure you know what I mean by that genre, often descending into the light fuzak territory, for which he can't be reproached given this was the apocalyptic trend in the early 80s.

On the 1982 album the Jun Fukamachi aspects of the fusion are both undeniable and irresistible:





While later, on the 1984 opener called Prologue, it feels like the good ol' days of prog rock could last forever:





Though in reality, like Gatsby's dream or Ronald Reagan's 'Morning in America again', those days were already dead and long gone, never to return again.