"Improvisation is not an excuse for musical laziness" - Fred Frith
"[...] things that we never dreamed of doing in Crimson or in any band that I've been in," - Tony Levin speaking of SGM
I would say that for many this would represent their `Tago Mago' era peak. Yes it's rough, but the energy and relentlessness are a joy to watch....not so much a concert as a happening :-) The post Damo stuff from 1973 onwards was all a little of a downhill slide, and live they became a `jam band' without their focal point. there's a lot nmore to what Damo does than meets the eye, and they were never the same without him :-(
I would definitely agree that for my tastes, anything post-Damo doesn't match what they did with him.
Steve F.
www.waysidemusic.com
www.cuneiformrecords.com
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“Remember, if it doesn't say "Cuneiform," it's not prog!” - THE Jed Levin
Any time any one speaks to me about any musical project, the one absolute given is "it will not make big money". [tip of the hat to HK]
"Death to false 'support the scene' prog!"
please add 'imo' wherever you like, to avoid offending those easily offended.
I would say that Kraans bassplayer is something else!
The name Kraan was invented by Hellmut Hattler, just because 'it sounded good', no meaning at all.
In Dutch Kraan means - faucet, crane or crackerjack
Can of beans.
12 minutes in that documentary, 1971 footage describing the music as "progressive"-it didn't become "Prog" proper unti the Can Feauting John Payne period.
"The wind is slowly tearing her apart"
Sad Rain
Anekdoten
A Kraan clarification?
http://www.danbbs.dk/~m-bohn/kraan/not_kraan.html (some links needs updating)
Are these the Beat Club shows or something different? Judging from the examples I've seen, it seems that Beat Club would videotape the bands performing whatever amount of material, then edit that down to usually under 10 minutes. The Grateful Dead actually played for over an hour (doing Playin' In The Band twice), King Crimson played for something like 40 minutes, I think Soft Machine also did a relatively long set, but in each instance, the material that was actually broadcast at the time was way shorter.
You gotta hand it to the menschen at WDR. Unlike virtually everyone else on the planet, they appear to have had the good sense to save all the cool stuff that they committed to videotape.
I suppose a lot of people feel that way, but I rather like Saw Delight and Landed. Yeah, they're very different records from what came before, but I like the things they did on those two records. And yeah, Don't Say No is a re-write of Moonshake, but I still like it. I also like Rebop Kwaku Baah's percussion on Saw Delight, which I thought brought the band a sort of Afro-pop vibe to the music.
Flow Motion, on the other hand, I thought wasn't too good. I Want More I don't think is a very good song, and they compound the offense by including ...And More, which is just the band riffing over a tape loop of the "more and more and more..." refrain from the other song. And I don't remember anything else on that album being very good either. I never did get either of the last two albums, I think the only thing I ever heard from either is the Offenbach thing.
But did they actually make some cash? I cannot find any evidence anywhere that they made anything substantial from that album (or any, for that matter; if any record made money i would think In a Glass House which, despite having no American distribution, sold something like 100,000 copies as a British import - I seem to recall...and age may have weathered that number). If anything, Civilian was the death knell because, AFAIK, Derek Shulman wanted a hit record and, after their last album flopped, that was that.
While absolutely contemporary, I'd say Van der Graaf has managed to retain all the things that made it great in the day while still acknowledging the passage of time and evolution of music. I think each successive studio album since they regrouped in 2005 has been better than the last, with A Grounding in Numbers, for me, as good as anything they did back in the day. Yes, shorter tunes but as I was discussing, this very day, with a friend over coffee, they somehow don't feel shorter as the whole album feels so cohesive as a whole.
Yoko Ono on vocals?
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