The First Light from down under in 1978

My favourite fusion album from Australia, no question.  It really covers a lot of territory in one album, with Mahavishnu-style guitar arpeggios, softer jazz ballads, acoustic guitar solo, etc.  I'll let the music speak for itself.  First example, the stunning ballad (track A5 called Zenith), starting with a chromatic descending arpeggio on acoustic guitar, leading into a beautiful female chorus singing the lines, the chord changes, to a musician, are just astonishingly creative.  As usual flute provides a delicately bucolic and transcendental experience to the whole.  Again, there has never been another song with this sequence, guaranteed-- (in the stanza not intro) (major chords unless otherwise indicated) C, Dflat, Bflat, Eflat, Eflat minor, Dflat, Eflat7, Bflat, C7, Gminor7, Gmajor.  An incredible sequence that works because of the wavering melody which pulls all the disparate keys and modulations together.  Have a listen:




The ninth track (Solar Illusion) is your basic Mahavishnu guitar-fusion machine, but beautifully composed:



The well-reputed and usually on-the-money Tom of course was ahead of us and gave it a priority 3:

' First Light is a mighty fine instrumental jazz rock effort. Sunny in its approach, with some fine guitar leads, at times reaching a Santana like intensity, but falls just short (sadly). Some nice ensemble unison runs with sax, flute, electric piano, and the female voice on side 2 gives it a Northettes feel, that adds points. Back cover says: "Mellotron and special effects kindly supplied by Aleph". Solid effort. File next to Crossfire and Mackenzie Theory. A natural choice for Aztec I think.

According to a good friend of this site, we have it on authority (someone who knew the band) that 1978 is the correct release year.

Martin from Germany tells us: "FIRST LIGHT from australia is the band formed by ALEPH drummer Ron Carpenter. He also plays with AC DC in 1974 and COLD CHISEL in 1978. Release date must be 1979 i guess." '

[ -- P.S. is he talking about Martin Pruckner, the famous krautrock specialist? -- Editorial note]

There is more information to be found here in the comments, credit to the prognotfrog group.  Btw those links he gave go to a different rip than the one I am presenting here, which is fresher.  And of course this record deserves to be bought as vinyl to be truly enjoyable-- I think that goes without saying.

Now comes Edo Zanki / Don Anderson's Jetzt Komm' Ich from 1977

The curiosity overtook me and I was forced to buy this record on the basis of his prior installments as aka Don Anderson.  It's clearly the same singer with the beautiful warm voice born to sing rock unfortunately it is now singing pop and a couple of reggae songs in German.  What a shame that after such a superb opening in bluesy progressive rock in the early seventies he should move into complete commercial territory.  I apologize for the skips on the title track, A3, which few will notice I'm sure.  His songwriting still teeters a little too precariously close to the god-awful Elton John.  At any rate after this posting few will make the same mistake I made here.

The small songbird that most approaches the perfection of the eagle that once flew high is A4's Nie mehr, an excellent and beautiful song if you take it on its own radio-friendly terms:





Coming soon: more classic progressive gems, more fusion, more library, I bet you'll be surprised at how much great music is still out there from this period in time that you haven't yet heard, guaranteed.

Requested: Zoom-Thin' Else from Bruno Spoerri, 1979

I believe this album was shared on a website long, long ago, or at least I vaguely recall seeing it there some 2-3 years ago -- surely an eternity in today's digital world in which people change phones every year and purchase new hardware every few months to the detriment of coltan miners and the 'african world war' still raging in the Congo and other parts of sub-saharan Africa. 

At any rate it's a fantastic little euro-fusion album featuring some perfectly bionic melding of synthesizers with fusionoid noodling -- close up of Lindsay Wagner's ear tuning in to the grooves... [and smashing the transistor radio to pieces?]  Notice that Bruno Spoerri was the producer, he has a long list of credits to his name.  His 1978 Voice of Taurus album is recommended for the electro-disco-prog-pop fan.

Those who are fans of Charlie Mingus (like myself in a long-distant past) will note the song B4 (Dreamline) is very much derived from seventies Mingus albums like 'Mingus Moves' as you can hear here on the plain internet archive upload:



Requested: Coley's Goodbye Brains from the UK of 1972

A testament to the politics of our time, perhaps? 
In which a rotund and balloon-animal-like mayor can smoke crack 'maybe in one my drunken stupors' and retain a popularity rating of 40 percent among the presumably non-alcoholic population?  Denying to the press that he sexually harassed (by making cunnilungus comments) a female staffer by reporting he has an all-you-can-eat buffet already at home?  After being fired as football coach, losing his weekly radio show, being surveilled by police getting drunk in a van on high school property and peeing in the bushes, getting stripped of all his powers by city council, stuck in his home country and unable to travel, why, he said, should he resign?  No, why would any politician resign after that string of successes, momentarily making his city world-famous and late-night-comic ubiquitous?  After all, Marion Barry was caught smoking crack and went to jail, and was re-elected! 

But long after the furor dies down those poor Torontonians will still behold their mayor on their epidermis like a shingles rash, painful, ugly, and impossible to be rid of with topical emollients -- like so many other politicians out there in the world today parasitizing their poor quarter-unemployed populace with autocratic self-absorption and rapacious appetites under the eternal guise of a demagogue's ineffectual promise of cutting bureaucracies and taxes, like those flies who lay eggs in crickets and whose larvae feed on the insides of the insects starting with the least essential organs first such as the nervous system until every part is eaten and they break out of a dead and all-consumed shell of a cricket to find another prey...

Not my rip.  Some info can be found here.  Tom H. of course has already given it a well-deserved priority 2.  His review, unlike Rob Ford and so many other politicians in your respective home countries, is right on the money:

"A very crazy, and creative, horn rock band with a strong jazzy progressive feel. Some great wah wah fuzz guitar and fuzz bass which plays well against the trumpet/flugelhorn and saxophone. Some weird narration and flute passages. Much more complex than your average horn rock band - in the McLuhan and Probe 10 higher echelon of the genre. There's a couple of missteps like the country rock song and the final narrative piece, but overall this one is a winner and would love to see on CD."

Just a little minor adjustment to what he said in my own terms.  I don't think it's fair to call it a horn rock band because this recalls BST or Chicago, in fact, this is mostly instrumental music like Tony Campo's masterpiece Garuda, it's like the funkiest library record you can imagine being launched into an outer space of progressiveness (thanks to a billionaire internet titan's private rocket launch perhaps) with the craziest horn riffs you've ever heard on the backs of wah-wah guitar 7th chords plus flatted 10ths, such as here on the title track, Goodbye Brains, courtesy internet archive (which is, like sex with unknown females, as free as it is unattractive):




A highly enjoyable album altogether, and very much recommended. How did those guys back then write such fantastic music? I do enjoy the prose poem track about the old lady who urinates on herself while walking down the street-- OK it's not Gaspard de la nuit by Aloysius Bertrand, but have a listen to it and appreciate the literary value. The kind of track you will never hear on a CD made today.

Requested: The Cosmology of the United States ca. 1977

I remember like it was yesterday when I saw this record in New York City's Greenwich Village.  In those days before universal computer file sharing you could find a beautiful promising vinyl like this and on listening in the store the palpitations and muscle-tightening excitement you felt at discovering a lost and unknown gem was indescribable, particularly if like me you were relatively new at this game, unlike the old-timers (like Tom Hayes or Mauro M.) who had been collecting lost 70s gems since the eighties, or back when it still was then and the past was still the present.  And how many hours did I spend back then in those stores with my nose in a bunch of cardboard boxes, trying hard but failing to act as cool as the young deejays with their long hair and scruffy faces...

Nonetheless I was disappointed when I got home and found this to be relatively unprogressive, but beautiful on its own terms as a group soul-jazz album along the lines of US Matrix (the ones who did Matrix IX and Wizard I mean, not the one that d phillips called a masterpiece by Jack Grassel (lol).  These days with the facility of digital music-trading we get several gems every week and the excitement of finding a lost album is much less, and because we're scraping the bottom of the barrel, the really excellent albums are fewer and far between, though I believe they are still out there, based on what I've heard in the last year or more.  I often wish I could go back to those early days when it was so new and beautiful to find the lost progressive gems and hear them for the first time, wondering at the incredible imagination and creativity required to assemble a coherent rock album out of jazz, pop, classical, all these disparate elements, creating brand-new never before heard chord changes or riffs that are almost dissonant but still sound wonderful to these tired old ears.

The cover is a time capsule in itself, with singer Dawn Thompson in then-fashionable Cleopatra haircut, who wrote lyrics and contributed to the songwriting, holding a magic globe that no doubt brought her special mystical pyramid powers while the guy on her left with the super-long sideburns pairs a polyester earth-toned shirt open to his navel with string-tied linen earth-toned indian-styled baggy pants-- groovy, man, far-out!  As the milky way swirls around them.

Here is some more info.  Notice that Colin Walcott guests on sitar, congas, and percussion. For a limited time only (one week) a lossless will also be available.

The best track is Out From the Kiva (which is by John D'earth).  Thanks to Tristan Stefan for suggesting internet archive which is free but doesn't look as fancy predictably.





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