Train's Coo-coo out! (Germany 1977)

Dumb title, beautiful album, a new and improved formidable rip.  Of course, the usual German fusion like the preceding CCC but not as good.  The track called Permutation is the only acoustic number, but really gorgeous:





If in the mood for more energetic progressive fusion, consider Sputnik:






Info here.

Curt Cress Clan, CCC 1975 [limited time only]

Undoubtedly, a masterpiece of German fusion, with the highest energy, the most amazing ideas, enjoyable from beginning to end, on a par with the best German one-offs or almost one-offs such as Chameleon, Surgery, Virgin's Dream, Cyklus, Ex Ovo Pro, Zebulon, our very own Nimbus, etc., etc.  First of all notice that in addition to the drummer namer himself, the line-up for this one-off band from 1975 included Volker Kriegel and Ack van Rooyen, two very familiar artists.  In case you're curious as I was, the latter plays cornet on occasional tracks.  Most of the songwriting duty, which always interests me, is between Curt Cress and the bassist, American Dave King, who of course I've never heard of.  Some tracks by keyboardist Kristian Schultze.   Not surprisingly Kriegel stays out of the limelight here--his own albums of this period were absolutely chock-full of gems.

The Schultze-penned track called Fields sounds like one of the best library funk tracks of the 70s I've ever heard in my life:





I beg you, oh holy decade, to serve up to me more music like this, please please please...
Or like this:





No Answer, by Cress/King

Real Ax Band - Move your ass in time/Nicht Stehenbleiben, 1977, limited time only

Here's one that really knocked me off my feet (to quote from the great Stevie).

From discogs:

German ProgRock band, late 1970s.
A collection of Embryo affiliates venturing on to pastures new with a more accessible music than most Schneeball jazz-based bands, drawing on Latino, Afro and funk styles.

There's a wonderful energy that travels through the whole LP like a classic shiny new 1970s Concorde with its isosceles wings and pointed down snout, filled with acid, pot, groupies, colourful whiskeys and aperitifs, and the concomitant resulting happy vibes, racing across the Atlantic to some concert with half-naked women, who sing here and there too with the men, presumably, with all of the male members (I'm talking about the band here).  Funky electric guitar riffs smash through the instrumentals, original ideas and chords everywhere.  Similar German albums are Peter Wolbrandt's So Weit (1979), or Alto's great first album from 1978, or some passages in the previous Carsten Bohns.  Consider the fantastically titled track Women and Children First, and notice that the quite Zappaesque vocals start up after a few minutes of interesting hard riffing,





I mean there's so many great ideas in there.  First of all the echo effect of the electric guitar then electric keyboard playing the upgoing arpeggios.  The riff played with the third interval added, like Jimmy Page always loved to do (e.g. Black Dog).  The way it suddenly modulates after the 2nd riff, moving on to yet another, a third riff.  Then the shocking appearance, just before the vocals, of diminished chords played one after the other, like Beethoven loved to do.  Back in those symphony days, that were unfinished.  Then of course the aforementioned slowed-down basso chanting, like Zappa loved to do.  An incredible track.  That one, worth the price of admission to this concert for sure.  But believe me, there's plenty more good stuff in there, just like on those Air France Concordes the Ledded Zeppelin loved to fly on.
Just to finish up with the band, I believe they went on to make more albums, all of which I found disappointing.
Enjoy this one.

Carsten Bohn's Bandstand, 3 albums, limited time only

Look at that gorgeous artwork for Mother Goose Shoes!  My god, I miss those beautiful records...

He was in the 1975 Dennis Hypothalamus album well known to all prognoscenti, he was in Frumpy which for me was utterly forgettable krautrock of the most generic I-IV-V variety, in an experimental album in 1978, but for the most part his creative energy served him well in the trilogy of albums under the Carsten Bohn Bandstand moniker.

I love this music with all my heart, it's emotional, sexy, funky, and at the same time very interesting, never ordinary, stuffed with great hooks and pretty melodies.  I presume Carsten wrote all the music as it seems he performs not only on percussion but also on piano, guitar, and vocals.  Not sure why he even needed a band.  The late-seventies pop-rock or art rock sound recalls some of David Bowie's Young Americans-era music and luckily he doesn't sing like David with all that exaggerated 'emo' intonation, which was so direly and inexplicably copied later in the eighties and onwards.

The first album as you might expect is just filled to the brim with beautiful, warm songs.  The one called Now What I've always loved dearly, the baritone vocals with the sustained chords on the organ,and acoustic guitar just kill me:





The subsequent track Pretty Formal Normal Instrumental also indicates how progressively fusionary his thinking was at this time:





Track 4 from the middle 1979 album, Do Me No Paradise is such a lovely and sexy song, would've been a shame had it not been a radio hit in the era at least in Germany, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't:





Inevitably by the 1980 final album here with its homage to CB Radio-- does "Smokey and the Bandit" ring a bell?-- the inspiration has slacked somewhat, as per the LPDP (Law of Postseventies Declining Progressiveness), it even starts with the old atari-like video game digital sounds, the first track off the second side is the best I can muster:

Petites Annonces, France 1981 (by request)

Here's an album that was requested not so long ago which I dug up and then had to leave on the back burner due to the series of American posts followed by the Japanese ones and the great Masahiko Satoh.

As you can tell from the cover, perhaps very unfamiliar to anyone under the age of 30 (aka a so-called (oddly enough) millennial, the term petites annonces refers to the classified section of the newspaper.  This is where, unbelievably to the aforementioned 20-year-olds, people had to type and write up their own personal ad to send by mail to the newspaper to be published, which they had to wait weeks for, or even more astonishingly, they would call up the newspaper from their home phone and verbally describe (to another live human being! in real time! in real life!) what they wanted written-- for example, they would say, "I need someone to mow my lawn, preferably from the local neighbourhood" (uber didn't perform this service for you back then).  They would also leave a home phone number as a communication.  That's a phone that you don't carry around with you, in fact, it's physically stuck inside your house.  It doesn't move.  Doesn't leave the house.  Doesn't use Uber to go out.  Like grandma who has Parkinsons.  Incredible, right?  Btw, for the really young folks, a newspaper is a (physical) piece of paper with news on it you receive on your doorstep, and, believe it or not, this really happens-- sorry I meant this really happened, once upon a time.  (You get it on your doorstep, because it doesn't come via internet instantly.  Someone has to throw it onto your doorstep, usually at 6 AM, thereby waking you up, and the kids too, when they hit the front door.  It's not Uber.  It's a guy who drove around the neighbourhood, in a car, throwing newspapers at peoples' homes.  Not delivering food to them.  Just delivering the news.)  And furthermore, the news was reliably true.  It wasn't half fake information.  How did we know that?  Well, we didn't, but people tried really hard to make sure it was true.  Who were these people?  Well, they were called journalists.  They went around looking for things that happened, for real.  They didn't just make things up like you guys do in school, or look on wikipedia.org and copy and paste.  They had a job where they looked for things that really happened, not made-up things for amusement, or things that instagram, facebook, twitter, were paid to write.  We believed those newspapers.  Why? Well, because if you don't believe anything, you might as well be living in a fascist dystopian conspiracists' reality (which, today, we call Trumpworld) where the news is made by snapchat, Tiktok, and Whatsapp.  I guess you kids know that things are true on youtube because real people are doing really important, newsworthy things, like swallowing laundry detergent pods.  I mean, it must be so so hard for you younger folks to understand this.  It must be so weird.  Especially the part about information written on paper, that people trusted.  We didn't even rate them with stars, like Uber drivers.  Not even once in a while when we were bored.  We never did.  And then you actually had to turn the pages, to go from one story to another, and move your whole arm to do it, not just your thumb, right.  People had to turn their necks to read that stuff.  Btw, paper is this hard flat thing that was made from trees, it was white, and you put ink on it to read.  Can you believe it?  Yes, the ink is like those multiple tattoos on your body, you know how you had 20 of them by the time you were 20 years old and they say all these really deep things that you've never read?  You know, or like those pictures of Justin Bieber just after he vomited that you put on your butt?   Btw, trees are those big brown things with green leaves next to you, if you look to the right of your phone over there, not the ones with the electric wires, those are transmission poles.  They make the oxygen you breathe, not amazon.com and Jeff Bezos.  Although you can probably ship it through amazon, if you have a prime membership.  You can give oxygen a five star rating for keeping you alive.  (And give trees a 'like' too, they really need it, much more than Uber.)  Alive is like when you're looking at your phone, you know, like when you're taking selfies in the bathroom mirror to post instantly on instagram, and you're not a bot, or a robot.
Can you imagine????  omigod, you millenials...

Now for the older folks, the classifieds have disappeared of course and were at one time replaced by craigslist, which became taken over completely with ads for local prostitutes, thereby being replaced in turn by kijiji, which is now over-run by thieves and crooks who will do anything to steal what you are selling, the latest scam using fake certified checks-- you know those checks that in the old days were impossible to fake...   Yes, it's really quite amazing how technological progress has improved our society.  Just look at the evolution of porn, once an underground thing that was completely hidden from everyone, especially children, for example magazines were kept high up out of their lines of sight in corner stores, then it became mainstream in the mildest manner with Playboy, etc., which was replaced by videos, you had to rent those in a seedy store where kids were not allowed, which was replaced by pay per use sites where you had to have a credit card, presumably children didn't yet have those back then, which led today to completely free internet porn available to everyone, even 2-year olds.  In this way now a ten year old girl can easily watch the most sick and perverse intercourse, if she wanted to, with complete freedom, with zero restrictions, in her bedroom.

Yes, the progress of our society is truly a miracle.

Anyways, back to the music, which is 40 years old, way older than a millenial, thank god.  The opener is quite auspicious without a doubt, unlike what one would have said about the decade-starting year of 2010:





Its title means one measure, two tempos and three movements, obviously.  So it starts quite strong out of the gate.  We have progressive fusion ideas chock-full. Thereafter a track called Experimental really gives you an interesting sound, perhaps derived from library tracks like Teddy Lasry's, with an ostinato on piano plus bass and swirling spacey synths and an acoustic piano improvising about:





Unfortunately, side b is more in line with basic, simple jazz, and disappoints the further you go-- a bit like the way the old newspapers transformed into facebook's fake news and network tv became (nausea) youtube.

Information can be found here.  Note that the guitarist is Voindriot, who has appeared before on this blog, here and here.  The compositions are collective.  To my complete shock, a very familiar keyboardist appears on certain tracks, Cyrille Verdeaux.  Everyone should be familiar with his work.
At any rate, we have here a beautiful side one.  Enjoy it, along with your kijiji, 5-G or perhaps 8-G smartphone, and tiktok fake news.

(I know what tiktok is, that's just a joke. And apologies to anyone insulted by the above rant.)