A LIVE

Well, 70's group reunion have become rather common in the 00's, and this proghead has seen some spectacularly good concerts and resulting albums, and unfortunately a lot of rather deceiving (to stay polite) pure-exploitation or retirement-fundraising projects. OK, maybe in the latter case, the involved parties enjoyed themselves, but I'm rather sure that a big part of the audience probably did nearly as much and most tried to make the best of it. I was a bit surprised back then to hear the PDP had reformed after about twenty years of inactivity, despite the excellent posthumous album from Cuneiform, which no doubt had revived memories from the band members. Was this reunion credible, especially that it was greatly achieved with the help of a much more modern group Yugen. I guess I should've explored PdP's latest Picnic studio release, but never got around to it. Despite the latter group's excellent musical aptitudes, this looked like a revival project and I hadn't tried to really investigate it, before laying my eyes on it. Anyway, with a rather uninviting (and ugly) electronic artwork and title, it took me a while (the full length of the RIO fest of '10 in Carmeaux) to risk buying it deafly (I couldn't say blindly in this case) directly from the AltRock stand.

Given my weariness of reunion projects, my main criteria was the presence of four tracks from their marvelous debut album and one from their less-accessible Abiamo album, and one from the Camere Cuneiform release, while the rest of the track list was unknown to me. And a paying gamble it was, because the track selection is simply excellent and so is the sound. Indeed, the Meria, Cocomelastico, Bolla and Napier tracks are simply as superb as their studio version, sticking fairly well to the original as well with the Yugen member bringing some brilliant support, but it doesn't affect the gentle Canterburyan ambiances of the tracks, except for maybe Cocomelastico, which seems a little more energetic and Napier's more eclectic moments. Where Yugen's contributions are better felt are in the Abbiamo album track Uccellin or Il Presidente or their latest Adriatico track that opens on chicken shack noises before echoing away, until a slightly Soft-Crimson-esque ambiance with some wild winds and a challenging vocal passage (courtesy of Area's Stratos frontman) in its finale, they all have a RIO feel and can be classified as Avant-prog.

I can't see from which album Off comes off though, but it's sonically closer to the atmospheric debut than the complexier Abbiamo, or the Camere release. As for the Lindbergh bonus track, they pretend it's from a cassette direct-transcript and dates from the Abbiamo sessions, and it would be an excellent mastering job then in terms of tape hiss but it takes away a bit from the Abbiamo sound, which might not be a bad thing, IMHO. I've seen some live footage of three tracks of that AltRock gig since, and I must say that the magic does kind of work on video too. Actually, to be honest I'd prefer having the full 60- mins set on DVD, rather than on CD, but two tracks wouldn't be on it (outside the Lindbregh bonus), since they come from a previous festival. Maybe one day.