I really hadn’t listened to any music for weeks so I thought it would be a good idea to put some on while I was fiddling about with the layout of this site some time ago. I ended up having a mellow afternoon of casually listening to obscure, and mostly very awful indeed, prog records. It cleanses the soul, listening to very awful prog records, though it won’t necessary do it in a pleasant way. I have a folder on my computer called “Silly Ancient Prog Records” where I put stuff I used to download from a prog hub in DC++ and there’s all kinds of weak and pretentious albums in there, mostly of the kind people over at Prog Archives claim to be “a lost masterpiece”. Some of those “masterpieces” are examples of the curious kind of masterpiecery that manifests itself in an aural form of almost complete unlistenability. This kind of records are among the most sought after when one needs to cleanse ones’ soul thoroughly and according to regulations, and this kind of records are very rarely made these days. Fortunately variously confused musical virtuosos indiscriminately churned them out by bucketloads back in the golden Seventies. Maybe Sinisthra will do one too, one day. On my more loose moments I fantasise about putting together an albums’ worth of music of such absurd drivel sprinkled with utter choruslessness that everyone who liked Sinisthra in the past will be enormously disappointed. On my less loose moments I understand that we might need to release one or two albums with more coherent and rationally structured songs before that. And on my moments of minimum mental looseness I wonder will we get to release anything at all, coherent or not.

But back to those crappish old prog albums. Apart from the forgettable ones I used to listen to as a teenager and had almost completely forgotten about, like “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield, “Valentyne Suite” by Colosseum, “Journey To The Center Of The Earth” by Rick Wakeman (this album truly escapes definition), “A Tab In The Ocean” by Nektar (which wasn’t all that bad) and the debut album of Nine Days’ Wonder (which is really quite good) I treated my ears to the utter horribleness of “the Sentinel” by Pallas (which I used to think was quite good but clearly wasn’t), “The Wake” by IQ and something by Solstice and Pendragon I already forgot about. There was a reason why Marillion was the most successful of the so-called neo-prog bands of the early 80’s and the reason is most of the others were cheesy and not very good at all. Prog albums from this period of time are the most horrible ones of them all.

So, compared to 80’s prog, back in the 70’s they did it with marginally better taste, probably the best possible available at the time. Regrettably it often wasn’t enough, even though there’s bands like Neuschwanstein, Mirthrandir, Babylon, Cathedral and England, who all seem to have emulated the sound made famous by Yes and/or Genesis, released only one album respectively and then vanished. Depending on my mood of the moment, these either sound halfway decent but seriously lacking of original musical ideas, or carefully thought out and orchestrated compositions that require repeated listens to fully bloom and reward the listener. I hadn’t heard of any of these until very recently and will delve deeper into their albums as time permits. If I still happen to feel like it. The Neuschwanstein album, called “Battlement” and released on the not-very-prog-friendly year of 1979, sounds particularly promising, probably because the singer reminds me very much of young Peter Gabriel and the compositions aren’t very far removed from Genesis, either.

Which reminds me of my recent (and still active) favourite, The Watch from Italy. In their four albums they’ve ripped off old Genesis so shamelessly that a band of lesser talent or nerve would never have pulled it off in the first place. Check out the video below. They look absolutely non-cool and ridiculous on it but the music they make is just fantastic.



THIS WEEKS’ BOOKS OF CHOICE:
I’ve been wading through Tim Powers’ “Three Days To Never” for over a month now and it’s finally starting to reach its conclusion. Although it contains numerous very original ideas and situations that are characteristic of his writing (like a blind woman who can see and function by “hijacking” the sight of anyone who comes close enough) it’s still not up there among his best books in my opinion. Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin are among the people who dabble inexpertly with time travel, unaware of its’ consequences and then all kinds of things take place, like people being erased to the point of never having existed at all, and a reader getting incredibly bored with it all.

As a bedside book I have “The Encyclopedia of Stupidity” by Matthijs van Boxsel. So far I haven’t been able to understand anything contained within its’ pages but the cover has a nice picture of a sheep.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
I just noticed, half horrified and half amused, that I’ve bought six bottles of wine during this past week. Which doesn’t sound very healthy, even though most of them were not consumed on the spot but went into the drinks cabinet for later use. I’m not planning to keep up this buying pace in the future though, it’s just there are so many wines I’d like to taste and seemingly so little time to do so. Most of the wines are kind of so-so but occasionally there comes along a bottle that lines everything with silver and elegantly crowns the moment.
Canaletto Montepulciano d'Abruzzo from Italy and Talus Pinot Noir from United States are not wines of that kind, although there’s nothing wrong with them either. Both of them produced that warm fuzzy feeling in my chest area I was expecting red wine to produce. Both of them whispered funny ideas to the tongue, lips and other necessary-for-speech-making components of my body, causing me to momentarily become slightly more talkative than usual. Both of them left a nice overall impression and both of them are now checked out and will not be further checked out in the future.

Avesso from Portugal was very disappointing. It wasn’t the kind of semi-sparkling vinho verde I was expecting at all. Maybe my misguided expectations caused me to judge it too harshly but all I can say is it was a very average white wine that turned quite pungent after warming up in the glass for a while and didn’t perform very well with the batatas in the dinner.

The Bernard-Massard Auxerrois from Luxemburg was quite the opposite. This wine took the food containing batatas and chicken gently in its’s arms and gave it a good loving cuddle. Clearly one of the best experiences I’ve had of the food and wine perfectly complimenting each other. This was at lunchtime before going to a rock festival nearby. Doubtful as I am, I had a very late supper of the same combination after returning from the festival and it was just as great again. So this dinner before and after was probably the best thing in the whole Ankkarock festival. Otherwise it was mostly standing bored in various non-moving queues, first to get inside somewhere, then to get a horrible-tasting drink of artificial “cider”, then to the toilet and then to get out of that somewhere. All this surrounded by approx. billions of people repeating the same behavioural cycle. All the bands I might have felt like checking out were playing at a different stage than the one I was located near to. Therefore my live music experience was limited to a bit of watching Tomi growl and make faces on the screen and listening to the distant boom of Amorphis playing. So this auxerrois rescued the day and made it somewhat worthwhile. And it still tasted great the next day, without the food and served not-so-cold. I definitely need to buy this wine again, and I definitely need to put more effort on pronouncing the grapes’ name successfully.