Daevid Allen - Dividedalienplaybax80 (1982)

After the one-off reunion of classic Gong in 1977, Daevid Allen briefly moved to New York and formed New York Gong with the band who would go on to become Material.  The sessions for their sole LP, About Time, were subsequently plundered by Allen to create tape loops that became the basis for this nice little oddity, with new music added on top.  Allen also performed 28 solo shows in 1980, integrating the loop material into a multimedia spectacle.

Starting with a spoken introduction, album opener When develops into a minimal, post-punkish jam for eight minutes, after which eight tracks follow in quick succession at an average of barely two minutes.  Some are purely instrumental, some with just one or two vocal interjections, some fully sung.  Then there's the jerky Fastfather, probably closest to the funk-punk sound exploding all over NYC in this era, and then another lengthy jam to close.  A fascinating album in Allen's many-faceted career, this stripped-down, minimalist sound gets a definite recommendation from me.

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Philip Glass - Two Pages, Contrary Motion, Music In Fifths, Music In Similar Motion (1994 compilation)

More early Philip Glass, as promised last Monday.  Following the 1971 release of the Changing Parts double-LP, the next additions to the composer's embryonic discography were Music In Similar Motion/Music In Fifths (rel. 1973, again on his own Chatham Square imprint), and Solo Music (rel. 1975 on the French label Shandar).  This Nonesuch CD reissue takes these four sides of vinyl and presents them in reverse order - presumably a programmatic decision to let the listener experience the gradually developing complexity of the music and addition of extra instruments.

So taking them in this order, first up is Two Pages (written 1967/8, rec. 1975), one of the earliest expressions of Glass' MO of expanding and contracting little units of composition, inspired by Indian music and in particular meetings with Ravi Shankar.  With subtle assistance from Michael Riesman on piano, Two Pages isn't actually solo music in the strictest sense, but the following Contrary Motion (written '74, rec.'75) definitely is, and has more harmonic complexity in its theoretically endless 'open form' experiment in Bach-like counterpoint.

On to the two ensemble pieces then, which actually featured in solo organ form on this blog a while back, as interpreted by Steffen Schleiermacher.  Music In Fifths (written '69, rec. '73) as presented here doesn't in fact feature the full Philip Glass Ensemble, just two saxophones alongside the composer's organ, but they fill out its tight structure quite nicely.  The full ensemble then arrive for the finale of Music In Similar Motion (written '69, rec. 71), which has the most eventful structure of all the four pieces here, as the different instrumental voices gradually introduce themselves and shape the changes in the piece.

Music In Similar Motion/Music In Fifths, original LP cover 1973

Contrary Motion/Two Pages, original LP cover 1975

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Sigi Schwab, Chris Hinze, Jasper Van't Hof - Total Musik (1982)

One-off collaboration led by flautist Chris Hinze, his fellow Dutchman Jasper Van't Hof on keyboards, and German guitarist Sigi Schwab.  Their brief sleevenotes to this album talk excitedly about what the 'Total Musik' concept means to them in terms of creative liberation - suppose this makes sense in context as Hinze's and to an extent Schwab's careers thus far seemed to have been dominated by classical interpretation.  Van't Hof did have a more experimental jazz fusion background, including a 1980 album with Markus Stockhausen that badly needs reissuing.

The Schwab-penned opener Sphinx shows plenty of promise, with some electronic effects and subtle synth work from Van't Hof.  The remainder of the album is taken up by two lengthy suites written by Hinze, in which the trio set aside sonic exploration in favour of showcasing their considerable talents as group players and soloists.  Schwab lets rip many a good flurry on his Ovation acoustic, making me think of John McLaughlin circa the trio with DeLucia/DiMeola.  Hinze switches between piccolo and flutes, occasionally treating the latter with an understated digital delay, and Van't Hof stretches out on piano, almost channeling Köln-era Jarrett at the end of Children Suite Pt. 1.  Great early 80s chamber jazz with strong classical influences... hmm, wonder what three-letter record label this would've been a perfect fit for?

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Henryk Górecki - Kleines Requiem / Lerchenmusik (1995)

In the aftermath of Henryk Górecki's sudden fame in the early 90s, when his re-recorded Third Symphony went global, the quiet and retiring composer just got on with the day job.  A commission for the Holland Festival became Kleines Requiem für eine Polka, and this first recording slotted neatly into the short series for Philips of Schönberg/DeLeeuw recordings that also produced Ustvolskaya's Compositions (a Nonesuch recording of Kleines Requiem also appeared in 1995). 

Despite the solemn introduction, it's not as funereal as the title might suggest, and the sudden contrasts in dynamics and tempo in the upbeat passages led the composer to muse on its premiere "God, what have I made now? Such circus music!".  There's definitely light-hearted fun to be had at times here, making the subsequent solemn themes all the more deeply touching.

Kleines Requiem drew comparisons to Messiaen, who Górecki openly admired, and even stronger links were noticed in an earlier commission for Denmark's Lerchenborg Castle annual music festival.  Lerchenmusik, completed in 1985, had very similar instrumentation to Quatour pour la Fin de Temps, and the slowly developing introduction was also a homage to Messiaen.  This work also has its share of contrasts, particularly in its strident, folkish middle movement, before finishing with quieter influences from plainchant and a quote from Beethoven.  This is a great recording of two really interesting works from Górecki's mature period, that just get more wonderful every time I listen to them.

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Philip Glass - Music With Changing Parts (1971)

Before there was Einstein On The Beach, before there were any parts of Music In Twelve Parts; before, in fact, there were any other recordings of Philip Glass' music available, there was the 1971 double-LP pictured below (later reissued as the uninterrupted hour-long CD pictured above).

This 1970 composition had been doing the rounds of NYC lofts and other art spaces on tour with an embryonic version of the Philip Glass Ensemble, sometimes running over two hours, when it was recorded for the composer's debut release on his own label.  The gradually expanding and contracting cells of composition that would become tightly controlled were noticeably looser at this stage, with no overall score, but simply 'unassigned lines' distributed among the ensemble.  Glass would control the major section changes from the organ, with a nod to the other musicians.  They were free to - not improvise per se, as Glass disliked that, but to bolster any new harmonic shapes that were emerging from the melting pot as they saw fit.

This gives Music With Changing Parts an organic feel closer to Terry Riley than anything Glass would go on to become world-renowned for.  The sound is rougher in texture too, not just in the occasionally audible limitations of the 1971 master recording, but in the grungy cheap electric organ hammering away, and the lack of finesse in the ensemble playing relative to how they'd sound just a few years later at the outset of Twelve Parts.  This is the Glass Ensemble at its most primitive and thrilling, creating a hypnotic hour of constantly-shifting music that contains all the seeds from which the composer's mature work would grow.  More next Monday, in a compilation of two more early LPs.

Original double-LP cover

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Nurse With Wound - Paranoia In Hi-Fi: Earworms 1978-2008 (2009 compilation)

As a 30th anniversary celebration, NWW issued this 78-minute single-track (some pressings did have apparently meaningless track divisions) career-spanning mix.  In tribute to the Faust Tapes, it was to be a special low-priced one-off, and it was indeed 99p that I paid for the CD (the green tray edition) in early 2009.

The track begins with a radio introduction from which Stapleton extracted the slogan "Think jazz, think punk attitude", before going into Coolorta Moon, I Don't Want To Have Easy Listening Nightmares, bits of Sylvie & Babs... in other words, some of Stapleton's most zany, colourful creations to draw the listener in.  Some more recent NWW material (plus bits of 1982's Astral Dustbin Dirge) follows, then bits of Spiral Insana, bits of Rock & Roll Station, and much much more, before ending on a more ambient stretch including Salt Marie Celeste and some Lilith drones.  If you want to spend an hour plus reveling in the brain-frying majesty of NWW's first thirty years, this is way to do it.

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Ibrahim Maalouf - Wind (2012)

Wind is the fourth album by French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, and came to my attention when release reviews compared it to Miles Davis' Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud soundtrack.  That cool noirish atmosphere is present and correct, but far from pastiche Maalouf creates a highly original tribute to modal-era Miles.  Most interesting is his use of a quarter-tone trumpet, allowing for the microtonal scales of his Middle Eastern heritage.

Over the hour-long Wind, originally conceived as a soundtrack to the 1927 silent film La Proie Du Vent, there's a good mix of uptempo tracks alongside the expected cool slowburners.  My favourite thing here is one of the latter - Surprises, with its great hook played by German pianist Frank Woeste.  The other band members are all Americans (the album was also recorded in NYC), with Larry Grenadier on bass, Clarence Penn on drums and Mark Turner on sax.  Perfect for blustery days.

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Various Artists - A Brief History Of Ambient, Volume 1 (1993 compilation)

First charity shop rummage of the new year turned up this double-CD mix released by Virgin Records, which as the title suggests ran to a short series.  I vaguely remember these coming out, but despite my curiosity they'd have been too heavy an investment for me at the time: this one that I've just paid two quid for still has its Tower Records price sticker of £15.49, and that's pretty reasonable for a double set of 70+ minute discs back then, IIRC!

Everything here is naturally from artists licensed to Virgin, which gives a handy reminder of what canny risk-takers Branson & co were back in the 70s through to mid-80s.  Even into the 90s to an extent - oddly, Hillage/System 7 are conspicuous by their absence for whatever reason (of course, the Point 3 albums hadn't been released yet in '93).  Just take a look at the artist list in the labels below - and I couldn't fit them all in, ran out of space.

Good track choices too (can never say no to a good chunk of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra); full tracklist is here, along with info on an early mispress that led to the mastering cues for Disc 1 being inadvertently used again for Disc 2, the latter ending up with its track divisions all over the shop.  The copy I've just bought is actually one of those - I've re-sequenced Disc 2 now.  So here's a brief history of (Virgin) ambient, with some inevitable classics, and a few (for me) new surprises: loved the remix of early Killing Joke that sounds like an update of the first two Neu! albums, to name just one.

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Disc 1
Disc 2
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extra Phaedra...

As a postscript, for anyone who doesn't have Tangerine Dream's 1974 debut for Virgin that catapulted them to stardom with an interstellar, gaseous mix of Moog, Mellotron and flute - grab the full album below.  Was nice to see it featured in the recent Black Mirror episode, along with a faithful recreation of the WH Smith shopfronts that I remember from my childhood.

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Ralph Towner, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Slava Grigoryan - Travel Guide (2013)

Played this album daily for months when it came out, soundtracking that whole autumn and winter of 2013-4 with its gorgeous guitar trio sound, so it's been well due a fresh rediscovery by me and a posting here.  Ralph Towner had already made a trio album in 2008 with Austrian Muthspiel and Armenian-Australian Grigoryan as MGT, which I really ought to have picked up ages ago, but keep getting distracted by other things.  Anyway, here's their ECM debut, recorded in Lugano in August 2012.

Half the tracks are composed by Towner and half by Muthspiel, and all are beautiful interminglings of the latter's smooth, fluid electric tone and the various acoustics of the other two guitarists.  My absolute favourites are Amarone Trio and the slowly unfolding opener The Henrysons, but the whole album is absolutely beautiful stuff.  Highest recommendation.

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Van Morrison - Beautiful Vision (1982)

A late December-early January favourite of mine, and Van Morrison's most accessible album of his 1980-87 period that we've dug into in recent months.  Musically and structurally, Beautiful Vision was an obvious step back from the epic meanderings of Common One, and gifted Morrison's live repertoire with some of its most enduring classics.  While live versions would lift up the tempo on some of these (go seek out Glastonbury 1987 for a turbocharged Northern Muse and many other wonders), they're equally good here as sedate/midtempo Caledonia Soul healers.

In the lyrics, Morrison celebrates life with his Danish girlfriend of the time (Vanlose Stairway), delves into the occult writings of Alice Bailey (Dweller On The Threshold), and not for the first or last time looks back to his formative salad days (Cleaning Windows).  Several instrumentals were recorded for Beautiful Vision, but all bar one were held over for future albums.  The one that deservingly made the cut was the sublime Scandinavia, which closes the record with Van on piano and Mark Isham on synths.


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Previously posted at SGTG:
Saint Dominic's Preview
Common One
Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart
No Guru, No Method, No Teacher

Franco Battiato - M.elle Le "Gladiator" (1975)

To follow on from Sulle Corde Di Aries a few weeks back, here's the album that Battiato released on the other side of Clic.  With the release of M.elle Le "Gladiator", the final traces of Battiato's early 70s prog era vanished, and he forged ahead with the most avant-garde music of his career.

The first side of this half-hour long album is taken up by Goutez Et Comparez, in which eight minutes of relentless collage eventually settle down into a couple of minutes of synth patterns, sounding as if recorded on a wonky tape machine.  After a fadeout, the track ends with a three-minute church organ blast (of which there's much more to come in the remainder of the album) and manipulated voice.

Canto Fermo is next, with six minutes of organ stabs and smears that prefigure Keith Jarrett's notorious Hymns/Spheres from the following year.  After that comes to a relatively melodic end, the 12-minute Orient Effects cranks up the organ drones for an epic finale - albeit one that keeps deliberately derailing itself with odd fadeouts before fading back in.  This occurs two minutes in, eight minutes in, then a hell of a lot in the closing minutes, becoming a strange but effective experiment in contrasting maximal drone and pregnant silence.  A memorable end to a fascinating album.

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Richard Pinhas - Iceland (1979)

Third solo album from the founder of Heldon, with less focus on the echo-guitar ferocity that he'd brought to the band in favour of icy electronic washes and sequences.  The title suite builds up with an ominous pulse and samples of eerie, garbled speech, before it's interrupted by the machine rhythms of The Last King of Thule, Pt. 1.  The Iceland suite then concludes sans rhythms, letting the strange voices come to the fore over slightly ill-sounding synth.

After a short signal-burst announces the album's second half, Pinhas brings the guitar to the fore for the second part of' 'Thule'.  Layers of that wonderful contemporaneous-with-Fripp sound build up, then suddenly cut out to let the chugging rhythm play out for the final minute.  There's a 'Short Transition' (yep, that's what it's called) of sped-up rhythm before the closing Greenland ties together all the album's elements in a wonderful 9-minute finale.  With its more melodic focus, the track comes across like a relieved arrival at an outpost destination after enduring the harsh elements.

Added to all the CD editions of Iceland is a bonus track well worthy of inclusion and repeat listens.  If I was to listen blind to the 25-minute Wintermusic, my first thought would be that it was some great lost Fripp & Eno track.  A very enjoyable postscript to a highly recommended album.

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Klaus Dinger + Japandorf (2013) / Pre-Japandorf - 2000! (rel. 2017)

Happy New Year everyone!  Thanks again for all your comments and support, especially through the, well, slightly trying times of last November.  Got so many helpful suggestions after (repeatedly) losing tons of files that hopefully this blog is now better protected from any further meltdowns.  In terms of the future, I'm hoping that SGTG will last another full year of three posts per week - may have to scale back before that though, but will keep you lovely folk in the loop as to my plans.

For now, here's the final appearance of an SGTG tradition - starting the new year with a Klaus Dinger post.  This'll be its final appearance as I've now posted his entire post-Neu! catalogue - but who knows, we might get more from the archives someday.  Today though, here's the last two releases to date from the fascinating career of a unique artist.  Following Dinger's death in March 2008, his partner Miki Yui began finalising the recordings that she and Dinger, plus Japanese-German musicians Masaki Nakao, Satoshi Okamoto and Kazuyuki Onouchi had been recording in 2007-8.  The album, Klaus Dinger + Japandorf, was released in March 2013.

What emerged on the album was a strong set of material that tempered Dinger's improvisational instincts with succinct, upbeat Japanese pop.  Dinger still stretched out, on the two 'Sketch' tracks, with a garagey fuzztone that resulted in his most vital and exciting music in years, and the obligatory Cha Cha 2000 was more of a psychedelic remix than another straight play-through.  The shorter songs had the strongest Japanese influence, whether in a funky electric piano-led ode to cooking Udon broth or almost unbearably poignant in Spacemelo, which became Miki Yui's farewell to Dinger when she added her vocals after his death.  The album as a whole was a more than worthy tribute to Dinger, but it only told part of the Japandorf story...

...which began in 1998 immediately after the final la! NEU? concert.  After playing, Dinger was approached by Nakao, who then introduced him to Onouchi (who helped prepare the la! NEU? gig recording for release), and so on.  Having acquired a new group, as well as briefly retaining Andreas and Viktoria from la! NEU?, Dinger held recording sessions in 1999 and 2000, the latter of which were eventually featured on this 2017 release, credited to Pre-Japandorf.

This collection might be only 38 minutes long, but it still fills in an important link in Dinger history.  The sound of these tracks is a loose hybrid of the sound of la! NEU? (there's even a fresh interpretation of Mayday) and pointers towards that of Japandorf on their album.  Although slight on running time, the tracks here are a great insight into the spontaneity of the sessions with this short-lived lineup.  Viktoria Wehrmeister is particularly good fronting the tracks Pure Energy and Talk, and the improvisations in the album's second half are enjoyable too, especially the scalding fuzz guitar that Dinger unleashes at the end of Midsummer.  Thank You All is pretty much the perfect endnote to Dinger's career - gives me a bit of a lump in my throat sometimes.

Japandorf link
Pre-Japandorf link
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