PROGRESSIVE ELECTRONIC

This text aims to shed light on albums from a more advanced phase of Tangerine Dream's discography, after the 90s when Jerome Froese, son of Edgar Froese, joined the band. Let's go to the text:

Although I had known about their existence since the late 70s, it was only in the mid-2000s that I started listening to Tangerine Dream, thanks to an unconditional fan of the band. The first album I enjoyed the most was the masterpiece "Stratosfear". I quickly became familiar with other unquestionable masterpieces such as "Phaedra", "Rubycon", "Ricochet", among many others of musical excellence. After understanding the lineup and sound changes of the group throughout the first two decades of its existence, it was natural to choose to move on to subsequent albums, and there were four that received a lot of attention: "Turn Of The Tides", "Tyranny Of Beauty", "Goblin's Club", and "Mars Polaris". And this is exactly my order of preferences among these works.

The band now revolves around Edgar and Jerome, supported by a series of guest musicians. Among them, the highlight goes to Linda Spa and her saxophone, without which rich moments would not have existed. In addition to the presence of a wind instrument, the band now relies heavily on the drums of both Edgar and Jerome, as well as their guitars and those of other guests. Personally, I don't quite understand this need for guest guitarists, the work Edgar did on "Ricochet", for example, is very beautiful. Well, in addition to the presence of winds, orchestrations, and an intensification in the use of guitars, there has been a noticeable reduction in the participation of synthesizers.

And what about the music itself? Well, "Turn Of The Tides" exceeds in beauty. The opening, a re-recording of Mussorgsky's "Pictures At Exhibition", needs no comments, and the three tracks that follow, "Firetongues", "Galley Slave's Horizon", and "Death Of A Nightingale", are nothing short of formidable. In the first two, the prominence is on the guitars, including acoustic, of a guest named Zlatko Perica, while in the third, Linda Spa's saxophone shines. The brilliance of these tracks is repeated in "Jungle Journey" and "Midwinter Night". On the other hand, "Twighlight Brigade" seems to me to be just an average song, while the weak point of the album is the disco beat of the title track.

And the other albums? In "Tyranny of Beauty", the brilliance of Linda Spa's saxophone is repeated, but not so much in the guitars, and there are more average songs like "Twighlight Brigade". In "Goblin's Club", the limitations are amplified, and it's biggest problem lies in the absence of excellent compositions. Finally, "Mars Polaris" does not feature guest musicians, and perhaps because of this, the compositions no longer have the same appeal, I couldn't "get into" this album.

3.5 stars, rounded to 4. I would give 3 to "Tyranny Of Beauty", 2.5 to "Goblin's Club", and 2 to "Mars Polaris".

I SINCOPATICI are a trio from Italy who are dedicated to the rediscovery of silent film masterpieces with live musical accompaniment. They are led by keyboardist Francesca Badalini who composes the music she feels is suitable for each film. This trio have been collaborating with Cineteca Italiana since 1999, and they have done about ten of these live performances, which are audio and visual events. So ten silent films so far and these are all pretty much films from the 1910s and 20s. So of course asking Claudio Milano to be part of this just seemed so obvious, as he is an actor and vocalist extraordinaire, already doing stuff similar to this.

I SINCOPATICI also includes bass player Andrea Grumelli who adds electronics and soundscapes, as well as drummer Luca Casiraghi. Francesca also adds synths besides piano for the most part. I really like that there are pictures in the liner notes of this event with Claudio standing close to the big screen that the film is being shown on. This event happened at the Milan Conservatory in front of an audience. There is a QR code so I can actually watch this video which is very cool. We get over 66 minutes of music spread over 26 tracks that are often blending into one another.

The film itself is called "L'Inferno" from 1911, and it consisted of five reels of film, with fifty four scenes totalling around 73 minutes. The music here combines classical and rock with plenty of electronics and experimental soundscapes. Of course Claudio takes this soundtrack to further heights with his theatrical vocals. He puts on a show. This truly is theatre for the mind. Think ART ZOYD and the many silent films they have done soundtracks for and you get a pretty good idea of the sound here. In fact these Italians have taken up where ART ZOYD left off, and we are in very good hands folks.

When I spun this for the first time I was taken to another place, I was so fascinated with it that I spun it again, right away. Music for the Underworld I guess you could say. Headphones are a must. There is a lot of powerful music on here. This is like the period of ART ZOYD where they started to let electronics dominate their sound. I was actually moved when the cd ends and the crowd starts to clap and clap and clap with passion. They just experienced something that they probably will never experience again.

Italian voice artist Claudio Milano's most current release is collaborative album with trio "I Sincopatici", an imaginary live soundtrack to classic silent movie "L'Inferno" of 1911. Milano's music was always very theatrical, here it is very cinematic. Starting from Italian Neorealismo movies, country developed strong tradition of soundtrack music well known around the world. Combination of deep classical roots, strong music education, rich orchestration and soulful and tuneful themes build a strong reputation for this genre.

Being an obvious leftfield work, "Decimo Cerchio" successfully combines dramatic melodic-ism and deep rich theatrical sound of old Italian soundtrack school with operatic vocals, minimalist electronics, loops, broken songs' structures and rhythms, amorphous sound and radical vocalize in Diamanda Galas key. Rock music of 70s influence is obvious in a moments as well.

The album is fulfilled with lyrics, all in Italian, and even if there are English translations added, it is obviously great to understand Italian for stronger impression. Still, as in classic Italian operas, one can perfectly accept whole action without understanding of lyrics. Full of emotions, very dramatic and dynamic, musical action attracts enough attention itself.

For newcomers to Milano's music it's important to note that, as on almost very his work, Claudio is an experimenting artist, so be ready to hear lot of unusual and even in-expecting things here.

Having emerged as France's answer to Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, Richard Pinhas began his HELDON project in 1974 with his debut "Electronique Guerilla" which found his inspiration of the strange world of experimental electronic music equally matched by the experimental guitar work of Robert Fripp's collaborative efforts with Brian Eno. While the debut was a somewhat of a cult hit and sold quite a few albums, his followup "Allez Téla" stumbled by venturing into unsure footing that incorporated as much psychedelic folk with acoustic guitars as it did enter the twilight zone in the world of progressive electronic inspirations from the German scene.

On his third album, second of 1975, THIRD (IT'S ALWAYS ROCK AND ROLL) found Pinhas engaging in a new lease on life and delivers a whopping double album of avant-garde electronic enchantment. This album follows more in the vein of the debut album and employs the backup support of a new cast of guest musicians. The album's diverse journey into drones, freaky cyclical loops and sonic excursions into the unknown finds Georges Grünblatt offering moments of mellotron and a further expansion into the world o Frippian guitar expansiveness that Fripp began on the "Pussyfooting" album but seemed to abandon as he continued to evolve King Crimson throughout the early 70s.

Patrick Gauthier applies his ARP synthesizer skills and delivers some of the strangest ethereal sounds that the technology was capable of producing. The album also finds a few extra moments that include the Indian Harmonium by Ariel Kalma on the track "Aurore" which also features wordless vocal contributions by a vocalist named Aurore. While the title of the album may seem misleading for a predominantly experimental electronic album, the spirit of good old fashioned ROCK AND ROLL does shine through particularly on the track "Zind Destruction" which offers the combo effect of a bluesy rock guitar dominance in conjunct with rock drumming in cahoots with all the electronic backing for the proper lysergic effects.

The album begins with the primarily electronic track "ICS Machniqaue" which announces that PInhas is back on track with the freaky electronic soundscapes that put him on the map in the first place but immediately the album also showcases a sense of rhythmic flow and plucky altered melodic touches that give the track a sense of purpose yet remain firmly outside of the established norm. The second track "Cotes de cachalot à la psylocybine" introduces a more darkened approach with deep keyboard grooves accompanied by the now established Frippian guitar moves that had become a staple of the HELDON sound. As the track oozes on and hypnotizes you into a pure pacification, the guitar continues to offer subdued licks under the mix while subtle electronic pitches offer an undertone that keeps the track from sounding monotonous in terms of the electronic aspects.

While the shortest tracks "Méchamment rock" and "Ocean Boogi" don't deliver the intensity of the rest of the album due to the fact they simply sound as if they're just coasting on autopilot, other like "Cocaine Blues" offering exhilarating electronic wizardry where layers of cyclical loops pile on top of each other and mesmerize the senses for a near 10 minute run. Both the tracks "Aurore" and "Doctor Bloodmoney" originally swallowed up entire sides each of the original vinyl pressing with both nearing the 17 minute playing time and beyond. "Aurore" features a sprawling drone with incrementally changing electronic patterns that offer subtle variations while the closing "Doctor Bloodmoney" showcases a more hyperactive side of HELDON with frenetic keyboard loops drifting on in perpetuity with a preponderance of varying elements that spice it up along the way. The track ends with a powerful drumming performance that puts the ROCK AND ROLL back into the album thus somewhat justifying the choice of the album title.

Before the grand finale though "Virgin Swedish Blues" offers some cleaner guitar moments and results in a nice interlude that escapes the freakazoid electronic bizarro show and crafts a melodic orchestrated effect with the clean guitar tones arpeggiated and accompanied by a bass guitar that offers a taste of traditional musical delivery with discernible and easy to digest melodic touches. The biggest highlight surely has to be the intrepid excursion into rock guitar on "Zind Destruction" which resurrects the heavy psych moments of Pinhas' early years under the name Schizo and showcases extremely echoey guitar chords accompanied by a second guitarist that mixes the Frippian influences with a more blues based melodic construct. As the album closes with the final drum soloing sequence on the extra trippy electronic piling up of intensity, the album ends in an irreverent state of resolution.

It took me a while to warm up to this third HELDON album since a double album's worth of this outsider weirdo electronica indeed requires a commitment to invest into the interpretation of the artist's intent but there are no rules that say you have to digest all of this eclectic madness in one sitting after all. This is the type of music you have to be in the mood for first of all and really it's all about chilling out and simply going along for the ride and appreciate sprawling electronically infused soundscapes that require the proper amount of incremental repetition to build certain effects. Although the album delivered some of the most cutting edge progressive electronic sounds to be heard in 1975, Pinhas' inclusion of the guitar and occasional percussive moments seem to spice it all up in a way that keeps it from spiraling out into the cosmos. This album has grown on me substantially and when i'm in the right mood totally hits the spot.

HELDON would continue to evolve his sound until his fan favorite finale "Stand By' which took everything to an entirely new level but for one of his earlier albums that was still finding Pinhas fine-tuning his craft, THIRD (IT'S ALWAYS ROCK AND ROLL) delivered a fascinating blend of the progressive electronic exoticness that HELDON debuted on "Electronique Guerrilla" and took it to the next level. Sure i could live without the two shorter tracks and in all honesty the longest tracks "Aurore" and "Doctor Bloodmoney" didn't need to be as long as taking up an entire side of vinyl but overall this is a very satisfying album that delivers what it sets out to accomplish that being a wild ride excursion into the ethereal world of HELDON's darkest electronic playground which offers an oddball mix of moments of transcendental meditation and reviving the world of rock music scattered throughout. All in all, this is a really cool album that took me longer than normal to appreciate but it finally won me over.

One of the most experimental electronic artists to haunt the 1980s and 1990s, the British experimentalists that made up COIL were relentless in their constant pursuit of innovating the strangest and most alienating sounds that were possible to eke out of as many unexplored avenues as humanly possible. The results added up to a huge expansive canon of some of the most bizarre and unorthodox musical statements that blurred the distinctions between what music properly is considered and what many would consider to be nothing more than random noisy gibberish. By the 1990s the eccentric team of John Balance, Peter Christopherson and Drew McDowell seemed utterly limitless in how many directions it could pursue the experiments with one album after another delivering a sonic experience that stood apart from virtually anything else ever laid down to recording. Everything COIL released was utterly unlike what came before and a testament to the fertile minds that tapped into strange worlds where no one else dared tread.

By the mid-90s COIL was also adopting strange pseudonyms for various projects with names like ELpH, Time Machines, Sickness of Snakes and The Eskaton popping up randomly throughout the band's run. Yet another one-off moniker was BLACK LIGHT DISTRICT under which the COIL team released this sole album A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM. Characterized by the group's love of dark ambient bleakness and electronic free form texture building, this release showcased a new approach to the COIL playbook by offering a series of rhythmic underpinnings accompanied by a litany of overlapping electronic textures, sound effects, vocal samples and the occasional lyrical output halfway sung and halfway spoken as well as simple poetic prose. The album which featured 11 tracks was a bit on the long side well exceeding an hour's playing time at nearly 73 minutes but provided a stream of consciousness continuity which allowed the tracks to slowly ooze into one another all the while providing a diverse palette of experimentation to keep the album from resembling the more more monotonous undertakings such as performed as Time Machines.

The album begins with the short "Unprepared Piano" which is a tribute to John Cage and establishes a precarious balance between the chaos and order approach that COIL made all their own. While utterly inaccessible from a traditional popular music point of view, the avant-garde approach allows the album to proceed in a similar manner which finds the electronic-oriented tracks like the following "Red Skeletons" creating a consistent rhythmic flow of sound courtesy of strange loops, sonic patterns, scattered sequences and sound effects that seemed to have been sampled primarily from industrial soundscapes and processed through the arsenal of sound-altering devices that COIL had amassed during its career. The entire album flows accordingly with different rhythmic jingles, blurbs, pulsations, beats, bangs, freaky loops or whatever the band could cleverly conjure up in the midst of whatever they did to channel such strange and hypnotic flows of consciousness. The difference between A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM and other COIL releases is the fact that group really put a lot of effort in crafting a diverse roster of tracks that implemented a wide array of sonic textures, timbres, dynamics and unorthodoxies as humanly possible.

Overall this is one of the most playful COIL releases that offered surprises at every juncture with stranger than life sonic textures, beyond bizarre effects, delicately designed rhythms and other musical elements including the occasional melodic touches to interact in some of the most peculiar unconventional methodologies imaginable. Tracks like "Blue Rats" even harken back to the group's more industrial dance days from albums like "Scatology" and "Horse Rotorvator." As BLACK LIGHT DISTRICT i have to say that COIL crafted one of its most diverse sounding albums of its beyond eclectic career and is somewhat comparable to the "Unnatural History" compilations which featured a similar continuity yet scattered with unbridled creative prowess. This is certainly the kind of music only electronic avant-gardists crave and will be completely unintelligible to those who have not conditioned themselves to the COIL universe. This has always been one of my favorite COIL releases but as i listen again currently paying attention with an intense scrutiny like never before i have to conclude that this album displays the perfect balance of detachment, engagement, melodic interplay, human connections, bouts of chaos and atonal freakery. A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM is without a doubt the perfect display of an avant-garde electronica masterpiece.

The English experimental electronic act COIL was so very, very innovative and always thinking outside of the box with seemingly every album they released. While woefully misunderstood and beyond the the comprehension of most listeners of established musical genres, COIL continued to dabble with new equipment, new concepts and new musical expressions that were hitherto never associated with certain concepts and yet the creative triumvirate of Peter Christopherson, John Balance and Drew McDowall never ceased to meld music and electronic timbres with esoteric concepts such as philosophy, theology and spiritual practices.

1998 was a very productive year with not only the "Moon's Milk (In Four Phases)" set of four EPs each representing one part of each season (equinoxes and solstices) but also found the band conjuring up yet another pseudonym, this time the moniker TIME MACHINES. This one-off released an album of the same name and featured four psychedelic drone pieces each named after a hallucinogenic drug. The titles were presented with a partiality of their scientific organic chemical name thus the opening track "Methoxy-β-Carboline: (Telepathine)" was basically a truncated form of the preferred IUPAC name 7-Methoxy-1-methyl-9H-pyrido[3,4-b]indole but given that the fanbase most likely weren't trained organic chemists, it's doubtful anyone really cared.

The album of 73 1/2 minutes playing time featured four lengthy tracks, the first and last well over 23 minutes in length with the second over 13 and the third only slightly over 10. The album mixed long drones with binaural beats and psychedelic electronic embellishments. The idea of the album was to create temporal slips which were known to occur while ingesting the chemical compounds referred to in the track titles. The inspiration actually stemmed from the hypnotic states created in Tibetan spiritual music only presented in more of a shamanic rainforest leader's way of ingesting psilocybin mushrooms or DMT and telpathine which are both components of ayahuasca. The album was intended to be a 5-disc box set but that idea was scrapped as was another plan to release a 2-disc version later on. A "Time Machines II" has been released archivally only as a Peter Christopherson solo release.

Musically the drone is the primary element but the release also uses binaural beats which refers to the auditory illusion perceived as the listener hears two separate frequencies in each ear leading one to interpret the difference between the the frequencies as one tone thus more effective on headphones. This alone is purported to affect brain waves and in some cases has been promoted as a healing mechanism by various record labels. Psychedelic sounds were created with modular synthesizers and above a consistent tone of a drone, oscillating electronic sounds pulsate like a heartbeat or other rhythmic flow. There are no traces of melody or orthodox compositional musical structures here whatsoever. This is purely experimental electronica designed to alter consciousness through hypnotic trance inducing waves and monotonous tones.

The album was actually performed live at London's Royal Festil Hall in a show called "Time Machines From The Heart Of Darkness" in the year 2000. The positive feedback found the band continuing such performances until COIL's demise in 2004 after the death of John Balance. Overall anyone adverse to non-melodic drone albums will not enjoy this one bit and while such minimalistic music isn't my primary passion, when done correctly it can be mesmerizing and indeed transcendental and the requirement of ingesting the chemical compounds is not a prerequisite in the least. COIL just had a knack for making seemingly boring concepts pulsate with life although one has to meet it halfway and accept it on its own terms. TIME MACHINES has gained a loyal cult following and although not every release in the COIL playbook is a doozy, for some reason this really does resonate on that energetic and subliminal level in a way i can neither comprehend or explain. All i can say is that when i'm in the mood for an effective drone album, TIME MACHINES really does deliver what it promises.

This is certainly one album i got the right introduction to. In fact i can't think of a better way to become acquainted with one of COIL's most mind-blowing and alienating freakfests of its entire career. Back in my party days i let my naughty friends influence me into the occasional night of overindulgence where i didn't hold back and went for it with all the youthful nonchalance and gleeful intoxication that one would expect from someone in their early 20s. One fateful night my friend who prided himself on trying and turning everyone on to his favorite new intoxicant of choice gathered his friends for a drunken drug-fueled night of excess. Oh yeah! Those were the days :D

Having always been a lightweight in the drug and alcohol department i ended up passing out on the couch with the party still in tact only to wake up after most guests either puked their guts and and passed out elsewhere or just went home. Upon waking up in the pitch dark only with the music still playing, bizarre sounds were oozing out of the hi-fi speakers and exposing me to one of the absolute strangest sound journeys i had ever encountered at that period. This was the music of a friend who introduced me to the vast array of electronic music that i was rather clueless about at the time being a metalhead primarily at that age. To make it even more transcendental my buddy who worked at a hi-fi music store in the San Francisco Bay Area had one of the best sound systems that existed in the early 2000s.

Upon awakening my mind was blown into a million pieces as i sat there and listened to the most uncategorizable musical sound clips which in the morning i discovered was coming from the album WORSHIP THE GLITCH under the moniker ELPH VS COIL. Laying there soaking in the album in my state of mind with nowhere to escape i merely became one with the music that was specifically designed to showcase an unthinkable array of sound effects that can only be heard on the absolute best recording systems. While no album sounds as good on a YouTube video or regular stereo system, this was on a whole other level with an entire spectrum of sound effects that could only be detected on a hi-fi sound system that offered a wider spectrum of sound than the average.

Of course this experience affected me profoundly and although i had already known of COIL, nothing sounded like this one except perhaps a few early tracks that were compiled onto the first compilation of "Unnatural History." The ELPH VS COIL in reality refers to COIL itself given that ELPH was a pseudonym that John Balance, Peter Christopherson and Drew McDowall used for two releases that utilized computer mistakes from their own equipment and used as the sound effects that were organized into creepy, ethereal and eerie melodies that excelled at taking your mind on the wildest journey possible in the context of experimental glitch electronica. Following in the footsteps of the 1994 EP "Born Again Pagans" which itself was released under the moniker COIL VS ELPH rather than ELPH VS COIL, WORSHIP THE GLITCH polished the imperfections of that production into a serious gem of mind [%*!#]ery.

By mixing the sounds of computer glitches and forging them into bizarre samples and instrumental rhythms, the album is almost exclusively instrumental except for the rare vocal samplings of Aleister Crowley's wife Leah HIrsig which adds an even more bizarre sense of esoteric abstruseness to the mix. These guys even managed to include the track "Mono" which is a highly processed and unrecognizable cover of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down." Esoteric references lurk around every corner but nothing is really more relevant than the music itself which represented some of the most creative expression of sound mistakes ever recorded and taken to such extremes. The holographic cover art pretty much symbolizes what you get as the bizarre worlds of dark ambient and glitch mix and meander with sound collages and electroacoustic psychedelia. Easily the most influential glitch album to spawn the genre that followed.

While it may be tempting to conclude that the album is only good under the conditions of my first exposure, i have often revisted this one over the years to see how it holds up on its own without the ample use of a drug high experienced in the dark on the best stereo system of the day. I'm happy to say that the ingenuity alone guarantees that for anyone seeking the most wildly experimental and creative fertile soundscapes conceivable, WORSHIP THE GLITCH more than holds up under the scrutiny of my now completely sober brain primarily judging its qualities on intellect rather than emotional impact. For me it works on multiple levels and although this is hardly the place for COIL newbies to begin their journey, for those well indoctrinated into the COIL cult who crave their most wild and unapologetic visions of true sound freedom, this will surely please them immensely if they take the time to really examine this beyond the initial alienation effect. Personally this one ranks very high in the mighty COIL's canon and although a bit too abstract to pull out on a regular basis, totally hits the spot like no other when such musical excess is needed.

After getting his feet wet in the world of recording with his 1970 debut "Logos," IGOR WAKHÉVITCH returned a year later with his second offering DOCTEUR FAUST which took all the eccentricities even further with a wild display of unorthodoxies around every corner. This too would be the soundtrack for yet another Norbert Schucki ballet titled "Ergonia" which premiered at the Festival D'Avignon in 1971. The mysterious album offers no clues to credits regarding the large number of performers obviously on board but rumors that Magma's Jannick Top were among some of the primo talent to offer their services on this eerily surreal crossroads of modern classical, progressive electronic, psychedelic rock and sound collage effects seem to be the word.

A short running album of only 30 minutes and hosting seven distinct tracks, DOCTEUR FAUST still packs quite the punch with an incessant flow of varying styles that come and go with nary a reason why the music engages in a fully orchestrated classical symphony one minute and a hypnotic wild array of electronica and spoken word poetic prose the next. Obviously experiencing the music in context to the ballet itself would make most of this more apparent but given the relative obscurity of IGOR WAKHÉVITCH in the modern world it's not so easy to track down a physical copy of the album much less witness performances of the ballet that was in the upper echelons of the avant-garde even during the freewheeling 1970s. Perhaps some footage exists at ballet colleges in France or on tapes tucked away in some archives.

This is a much more varied album than its predecessor with moments of dramatic classical music ceding into the kaleidoscope effect of stoned out psychedelic rock and mystical trance inducing progressive electronic with strange tape manipulations, bizarre chanting and thumping bass grooves. The instrumentation varies significantly with a multitude of drumming techniques ranging from military marches to frenzied rock modernities while Hendrix-Inspired guitar riffs in conjunct with bizarre wordless vocal utterances. The album doesn't let up for its short duration right up to the last delirious avant-rock freakouts of the closing "Sang Poupree." The album defies any true categorization and despite the word "ballet" being associated with it, DOCTEUR FAUST evokes no sense of the word as it is the strangest musical piece of work that the experimental world of the early 1970s could've conjured up thus making more than a qualified candidate to appear on the outsider weirdos Bible of freakery - The Nurse With Wound List.

This is definitely one of those tripper's paradise sort of experiences but not just for those who like to get blitzed out of their gourd and listen to repetitive patterns. This is a highly intellectual style of psychedelic which is as complex as it is unorthodox. WAKHÉVITCH was a master of marrying the eccentricities of the world of classical with the most far out expressions that were emerging in the worlds of both the rock world and the newly gestating fertile grounds of electronic music. This is a wild ride unlike any other and the perfect score to evoke the real life antics of Johann Georg Faust, the German itinerant alchemist, astrologer and magician who haunted the German Renaissance and apparently continues to find his spirit evoked for strange works centuries later. The story will probably make more sense to French speakers but personally i feel the music speaks for itself. For a short 30 minute display of musical freakery, you really couldn't ask for a more diverse of array of excellent genre bending under one roof. Utterly brilliant but not quite as perfect as the debut for my ears.

— First review of this album —

P'cock was an excellent german progressive electronic/rock band from early '80s. Formed by drummer Tommy Betzler in 1975 and releasing 3 albums in the '80s before disbanding in 1988.

First two albums The prophet from 1980 and In'cognito from 1981 are among the most intresting electronic meets prog rock albums ever.

The prophet issued in 1980 offers a journey of mutitude of rich sounds, specially from the top notch keyboard player Peter Herrmann who sadly passed away last year. What a fenomenal keyboard player was. Pieces like The Actors Fun, instrumental N 1.4, Fly Your Kite or the beautiful spacy La mer. Overall a sublime effort from this unknown german band who was under the wing of Klaus Schulze and his IC (Innovative Communication) label. Imagine a combination of Eloy same period, Anyone's Daugher, Klaus Schulze, Tangerime Dream all melted in a unique manner. The album is highly melodic but not dull or mellow, is very well composed , played by all members involved, very nice druming and vocal passages. So, definetly a winner in my book , recommended for sure and 4.5 stars easy. Very nice little record for all prog electronic and prog rock listners.

The second album In'cognito issued in 1981 at same label IC aswell with Schulze under command in producing and mixing the album and another gold record from them. Exploring further more the sound of prog electronic music toying even with some neo prog passages here and there as on previous album. Forte pieces the opening lenghty House In The Storm nearly 11 min of pure joy, the keyboards passages are such intelligent made, superb, another worthy tunes are Funtime Sorrow and Ban'cock. Again 4.5 stars

All in all MIG label issued both albums in 2023, worth every second of it, this compilation of their best albums, first two, the issue containing their history and some nice pictures from that period. I was really impressed by both albums. Simply put two of the best amd most intresting albums I've heared from early '80s from prog electronic/prog rock scene, unfairly unnoticed.

It is strange to think that Pierre Salkazanov was one of the pioneers of electronic music in France, releasing three albums before stopping in 1983 because he was too busy. It took more than 30 years before he revisited the music he had been working on for his fourth album, but after he purchased an Arturia Origin synthesiser in 2014 he started playing again, and this is his fourth work since then. I came across him with the release of his last album, 'Chaos Islands', which I thoroughly enjoyed, so I was pleased when I came across this one, which was released towards the end of last year.

This is music which has been heavily influenced by Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, and Jean Michel Jarre and in some ways is quite dated because of that yet somehow also feels very modern. Unlike some performers working in this field there is always a sense of purpose and drive, and little of the meandering use of effects which some seem to rely on. This is not dance music, it is electronic which sometimes has a symphonic edge, and is something which can be readily enjoyed the first time it is played yet there are numerous threads which keep building the layers so there is always more to discover within. I don't listen to too much of this style of music and I was somewhat surprised to see how easily I fell into his world. This is where he explores the idea of being immersed in the future, suggesting a sense of adventure, uncertainty, and the enigmatic nature of what lies ahead, and is the perfect accompaniment to any science fiction book you may currently be reading. Zanov was working on his latest album when he was 76 so one can only wonder how many more we will be getting from him, but this is a delight and a great place to start investigating his music.