Various Artists – "Voice Of The Wolf" (Gump – GUMP 7) 1975

As mentioned by fountain of all knowledge prog, Ian......sorry, no other form of identification is available or needed.,as if in a biblical tense therein.

It has been rightly pointed out,in the comments section that the Swedish groups that tagged along with the Rock In Opposition lot were actually part of their own scene.Manifesting itself around the time that ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest; called "The Movement" or the much more specific "Progg" ,with two gee's.

The "Progg" "Movement" encompassed many different musical genres from Sound Poetry to Avant Prog
The political progg movement,mainly self-righteous communism with music, culminated around the 1975 Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Stockholm after ABBAs victory in Brighton the year before. It was expressed that "music can't be a contest",everyone is equal kinds stuff, and an "alternative festival",rather like the Rock In opposition festival a couple of years later, was held in protest.

In theory 'Samla Mammas Manna' might well be the only group to have played both?.Due to this debate,and part 2 of the eurovision trivia trail, Sweden did not participate in the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest,rather surprisingly....leaving the door open for The Brotherhood of Man to claim the top prize with the dreadful "Save Your Kisses For Me",and that little dance they did while we screamed in unfathomable pain!

It was as if these awful townie torturers were dancing at the impending death throes of the Progg movement that they, and many others,including myself,never knew existed.But, by the time Abba were divorcing each other,Progg killed itself in a sea of pinko posturing and the Swedish predilection towards hard rock and punk rock,being one of the few places that the Pistols actually played in.

The book of Ian, also mentioned an impossibly rare Swedish human called Carsten Regild....who had an impossibly rare single released on Gump Records i am told;but, No i don't have it, but this funny fella Carsten Regilid appears a couple of times on this Progg compilation from the year of ABBA's arrival...there is no suggestion that any member of ABBA was in a Progg band,as far as I an aware.

Carsten's contributions err more on the side of Sound Poetry,with an ironic early Rock leaning.This guy is Kerrrazzzy!

Most of my knowledge of Sweden during this mixed up epoch is of the Tone Poem, Sound Poetry,tape collage scene which was, and still is firmly sellotaped to their cultural identity. The Great Sten Hansen is the sound engineer on this to the mysterious Carsten Regilid's role as Producer.....as well as being valuable contributors.

So don't expect any lost Gentle Giant copyist numbers on here...these guys are really nutz!...but that's how we like it innit?

(*wolfie Smith : much loved joke commie character on UK Tv in the 1970's)

Tracklist:

1 Bengt Nordström– Natural Music 2:36
2 Pugh Rogefeldt– I En Annan Värld 2:26
3 Åke Hodell– Ur Mr. Smith In Rhodesia 3:29
4 Happy Cousins, Rolf Börjlind And Carsten Regild– Nya Tider - Nya Änglar 2:00
5 Sten Hanson– How Are You 1:59
6 Sergeant Honolulu Dubble Fucking Five, Hans Tiberg, Rolf Börjlind, Rolf Heyman, Lars Göran Reijner– Juanita 0:48
7 Leo Nilson– Päls 0:23
8 Carsten Regild– Home To My Baby 1:33
9 Joakim Skogsberg– Offer-Rota 1:26
10 Carsten Regild– Typografi 2:25
11 Sten Bergman– Sorti 2:27
12 J.O. Mallander– Extended Play 2:15
13.Hans Anton Knall– Merde 23:35

DOWNLOAD the voice of wolfie smith* HERE!

Henry Cow – "A Cow Cabinet Of Curiosities" (ReR Megacorp – HC1000) 2009

All you lot already have all the Henry Cow albums right?...bit of a shit band name really innit?

Never liked portrayals of socks either.

Just the name 'enry cow invokes within me the whiff of patchouli oil joss sticks and ethnic art objects;not because 'Enry were a bunch of smelly hippies,quite the opposite...almost.....the basement shop that i first encountered album sleeves with unpleasant reimaginings of socks aboard was situated underneath the most unashamedly Hippie apothecary in post-punk Leicester....the "Very Bazaar"...geddit?....Underneath the whiffy smokey atmosphere of street level Very Bazaar,lay the only place in Leicester you could buy Whitehouse records,Recommended Records, Half Japanese, reggae Dub 10 inchers,The Residents  ,and Henry Cow!?.... When i got my first Dole Giro, to the value of 32 quid...I cashed it in, got on my Bike and went to the subterranean Very Bazaar record shop,with its matt black painted brick decor and homemade record racks.(the upstairs bit still exists!?)A bit as i imagine a gift shop run by Crass would have looked. The record bit was ran by an amiable mustachioed chap called Steve,and Lydon's mate ,Jock MacDonald's brother Martin,who loved Lynard Skynard previously, before he encountered johnny Rotten in the Pub next door to the shop (the Globe),then suddenly he became a Punk Rocker overnight.The record shop also became a one room Bollock Brothers tribute ,as brother Jock was a member.Last i heard of Martin he was wanted in Greece for drug offences,and was running away to hideout in Ireland.

Anyway, I digress;on giro(my benefits cheque) day,I came away with, the Cravats In Toytown, This Heat's Deceit, Metabolist "Hansten Klork","Whitehouse's Dedicated to Peter Kurten in yellow vinyl, and Henry Cow's "In Praise Of Learning". I think there may have been a Pink Military 12inch in there too.....ah blood and lipstick.And i still had two quid left for a lemon split bun and an ice cream soda,how punk rock is that(?) from Brucciani's....RIP!

So,as you lot have already got everything by 'Enry, here's that limited edition bonus disc from the 50th anniversary box set thingy, which you've already got of course. If you haven't i might upload the box set with an iTunes style bit rate of 192k,'cus it's massive and i'm running out of storage space.

Here's a 1972 style review of the album to finish:

"Track one sounds like Soft Machine,but the rest doesn't."

Notes:

Tracks 1 & 2: recorded in our rehearsal place probably in 1972
Tracks 3, 4, 5 & 6: extracted from a forgotten tape I gave to Steve Feigenbaum in 1978. The original recordings were presumably made on cassettes run from the mixing desk.
Track 7: out-take from "In Praise Of Learning" mixed by Tim Hodgkinson at Cold Storage in 1984.
Tracks 8, 9 & 10: recorded at a public concert for NDR Jazz Workshop, Hamburg on 26th March, 1976
Track 11: recorded at a public concert at the Sendesaal, Studio F, Radio Bremen, on 22nd of March, 1978, for New Jazz Live.
Track 12: extract from an Unrest out-take mixed by Tim Hodgkinson at Cold Storage in 1984.

Tracklist:

1 Pre Virgin Demo 1 3:55
2 Pre Virgin Demo 2 1:02
3 Unidentified Improvisation 1 1:30
4 Unidentified Improvisation 2 5:37
5 Unidentified Late Composition 2:04
6 Exploded Amygdala / Teen Introduction 3:37
7 Lovers Of Gold 6:29
8 Hamburg 6 5:33
9 Ruins Extract 8:24
10 Hamburg 7 9:44
11 Half The Sky 5:03
12 Extract From The Glove 2:19

DOWNLOAD and hear this crazy moozic straight from the cow's mouth HERE!

Univers Zero – "Univers Zéro" (Eric Faes – EF 1313) 1977

Another tenuous Rock In Opposition moment beckons:

Never one to stoop to revealing the bleeding obvious, my hand has been forced to introduce everyone to the band they've always known about....yep...It's Univers Zero....but have you listened to them all the way to the end of side B? If you have then you're either pretentious or narcissistic loner...luckily i'm both,and i've listened to this and the 2nd album all the way through,and felt like an emptied bowel afterwards. 

They're kinda an Electric Light Orchestra for failed music students who wish they were in a Doom Metal band....which apart from Black Sabbath,didn't exist until the late 80's.

When a bunch of angry young doom-mongers find each other in the Conservatoire during lunch hour, and one, if not more, toys with the idea of merging Stravinsky with Czechoslovakian folk and.....the PROG word.Some unaccredited wag you wouldn't want to be in the same town as said this...."Like Sorabji's symphonies gone wrong"(I bet he's a barrel of Laughs)....for fucks sake, does anyone know who Sorabji was/is...please don't answer that, I can google too,but prefer not.

Don't you just love it when some bright spark thinks a progressive idea is to merge lots of different genres and hopefully come up with something 'new'? So unadmirably eclectic isn't it? 

Genre-wise they managed it, and no mention of Peter Gabriel or David Byrne in earshot..."Chamber Rock" some idiot called it.....not much rocking here though, it's all a bit Jive Bunny plays Bartok with Bill Bruford on drums instead of a TR909. When someone whips out an Oboe or a Basson, you know you're in trouble, they're either showing off or desperate.

Of course I'm being willfully facetious here ,that's the role of this character i have reinvented myself as innit?

This record festers on your turntable like a portal into the dark European soul that us anglo-saxons are so distrustful of...the sound of Putin's mind. It's almost that frightening.

This was Chamber Rock's "Smell The Glove" moment, a black cover that you could see yourself reflected in both sides. Human kind's black heart as released in the Punk Rock breakthrough year of 1977.....only in Belgium would....could, this happen. They would have been arrested in most Iron Curtain countries for spreading fake news about the human soul, or lack thereof on planet Earth in 1977. And the anglo-american rock fraternity just pointed and laughed.

Like that other Oboe brandishing 'rock' group , Roxy Music, they inadvisedly reformed after splitting up for a decade.Losing the magic as did Roxy,slideing down the alippery slope in Armani suits and white tuxedo's as if in a Glam Rock "Jeux Sans Frontiers"*....Somehow I'd quite like to see Univers Zero performing in White Tuxedo's on "It's a Knockout".(Only on this blog can you see references to 'Its a Knockout*,Stravinsky and Sorabji on the same page).Now, that's Irony?In some ways British TV could effortlessly churn out endless amounts of surreal TV art in the 1970's,that was probably even weirder than Univers Zero could ever hope for.....who needs Salvador Dali when you have convicted Pedophile Stuart Hall ably assisted by Eddie "it's an Up and Under" Waring in Ely 1973? (in Syd Barratt Country)

There was an equally sour listening experience awaiting in the second album.....party music this ain't,unless you're a contemporary dancer?...Which is the only form of Prog Comedy that i can really laugh at! Who says these crazy Belgians take themselves too seriously?...everyone.

PS..this was later called "1313",which was the catalog number, to avoid any confusion.....but didn't Lydia Lunch have an album called that too?......oooh i dunno, everything's been done innit? At least twice in these over-exposed days has it not?

* kind of an early version of the European Union...if it stayed like this there would have been no Brexit.

Tracklist:

1.Ronde 14:45
2.Carabosse 3:40
3.Docteur Petiot 7:25
4.Malaise 7:42
5.Complainte 3:18

DOWNLOAD to feel down HERE!

Samla Mammas Manna - "Måltid" (Silence – SRS 4621) 1973

In a glaring attempt to pick something not Obvious from the groups who performed at the genre defining original Rock In Opposition Featival back in yee olde days of 1978. I give you a Swedish band who ,(A), aren't Abba, (B) contain no future ABBA collaborators or Members, and thirdly, (C), are certainly NOT Swedish Punk,or on a Killed by death compilation. All this blatant non-alignment with Swedish musical cliché,without even mentioning IKEA or Volvo, suggests a record of great promise.

As it turns out ,they are basically Canterbury Prog emulators with some rather annoying vocal bits that suggest a.....sharp intake of breath!.....sense of humour!? Prog Humour is never something to boast about,and is even more frown defining than even Psychedelic Humour. Comedy music is seldom recommended,99% of which ends in disaster and polite embarrassed applause. Especially if you're making serious music,and add a spot of  funny stuff to show that you don't take yourselves seriously,when you most obviously do.

I spotted this cover from afar,and thought it was a unhalfbricking style photograph of a pair of elderly types having a Gravelax sandwich....disappointingly it turns out to be a semi-photorealist painting,that, again may suggest prog humour!?

I'll tell you what definitely is NOT funny about this record,is that god-awful high-pitched, falsetto i think they call it, vocalizing.

You know that feeling you get when you trip over a crack in the paving,or are passed by an over revving Moped in first gear; that you momentarily wanna kill some fucker!?....that's how i feel when these Swedes from Canterbury make their silly hi-pitched noises.

Other than that it's okay.

It would be five years before the inauguration of Rock In Opppostion,so maybe they sacked off the vocals by 1978?

I've never been brave enough to try and find out.

I understand that the Turkish objections to Sweden joining NATO were based around having heard this record. Now NATO are considering using it to counteract all that state approved prog on the old Soviet official record label that Putin has been secretly hoarding alongside the Novichok;.. Melodija(its spelt several different ways smartarses!).

Tracklisting:

1 Dundrets Fröjder 10:43
2 Oförutsedd Förlossning 3:10
3 Den Återupplivade Låten 5:53
4 Folkvisa I Morse 2:07
5 Syster System 2:27
6 Tärningen 3:33
7 Svackorpoängen 3:11
8 Minareten 8:21
9 Værelseds Tilbud 2:26
10 Minareten II 4:40
11 Circus Apparatha 6:02
12 Probably The Probably 3:54

DOWNLOAD some flatpack canterbury prog via sweden HERE!

Les Batteries – "Noisy Champs" (AYAA – DT 0486) 1986

This Heat's influence,or,connections with the French underground seems to be somewhat larger then expected,as here we find The Heats erstwhile drummer and singer, Mr Charles Hayward, hooking up with another couple of  other drummer boys,....namely French 'rock in opposition' bloke Guigou Chenevier, and some geezer called Rick Brown.....yes THEE Rick Brown.......nah! I haven't heard of him either! But Rick probably hasn't heard of us too so we're quits!?

Three Drummers Drumming,as it doesn't say in the famed Christmas carol, but three,yes,THREE,drummers does indeed apply here! Can you imagine the creative arguments in a band with three drummers? As Gary Glitter and Adam Ant can testify, two drummers max in a band, or there's gonna be trouble. In fact it was Drummer trouble that ended Adam and The Ants and burdened the world with Adam's much maligned Solo career. With Glitter, the obvious problem was,funnily enough, actually Glitter himself(a fine example of a singer that hangs out with musicians).

Drummers are famously the guys who do hang around with musicians.The guys who die mysteriously,choke 'ON' vomit,aren't needed outside of touring, and are forever trying to impose their daft ideas on the rest of the group; like John Bonham's 'Moby Dick', or Rat Scabies' "Stab yor Back", as if trying,accidentally of course, to move that hilarious joke well into the realms of observational comedy.

Y'see, Drummers actually do think they are musicians,and like the stupid son of the family, are always trying to make the audience look at them and see what they're doing.This usually involves hitting the drums as loud as possible,and taking copious amounts of drugs....as in, more than you....look maw I'm Dancin' !

However much the average drummer harbors sparkling  thoughts of their own genius within their considerable ego's ;one has to concede that all this drummer hate certainly does NOT apply to the great Charles Haywood, or his vocal sound-a-like Bobby Wyatt,who are indeed the granddaddies of the Rock In Opposition fad of the late seventies, otherwise known as Prog Rock under any other name.

So, what we expect are three drummers busting their balls trying to Out-paradiddle each other,and to impress each other with their rudimentary talents on 'other' instruments.

It's kinda Punk without the Punk, and This Heat without the Heat, which leaves us with.... 'This'?

Haywoods vocals are as vulnerable and Wyatt-esque as This Heat and Camberwell Now, which adds much needed identity to the dreary Drum-Off. So when Haywood didn't turn up for the follow up albums,they just ended up sounding like Camberwell Now but without the tunes.

An obvious, but bold Idea, balancing precariously on the round shoulders of the limited tonal range of a well tuned drum kit.

Tracklist:

1.Noisy Champs
2.Sunday And Dimanche
3.Identity Parade
4.Polar
5.Post-Polar
6.Dernier Solo Avant L'Autoroute
7.White Elegance
8.The Letter
9.Dernier Rendez-Vous Au Gord
10.Flintstone
11.Maksymenko
12.3 Hommes Et Un Mouchoir

TELECHARGE this assault on les batteries ICI!

N.Æ. (Niemen Aerolit). ‎– "Katharsis" ( Polskie Nagrania Muza ‎– SX 1262) 1976

Czeslaw Niemen is hardly obscure in his native Poland,unlike anywhere else outside of the soviet bloc. In fact he's a star there. Actually I should be saying "was" since he kicked the proverbial 'bucket' and left to sing with the choir invisible in 2004. There's even a bust of him in a park somewhere in Poland and even Czeslaw Niemen commemorative coins were minted....a rare honour indeed.

N.Æ. was mainly his fusion-oriented project, but this second release under that moniker,also on the Polish State label, was essentially a Czeslaw Niemen solo album with no outside help.Now he could really indulge himself with his own genius without other musicians muddying the waters.Mike Oldfield Style, but without the tunes or dubious humour. This one veers much dangerously closer to the avant garde rocks. Lots of spacy Minimoog and EMS Synthi A.Plus some of the more raw, in your face, Mellotron ever commited to low grade communist era plastic.

Its always a sign,especially in the seventies when we didn't know any better, that a 'Rock Star' is begining to believe his own godlike status, when they quote 19th century romantic poetry on the rear of the jacket.You know you're in even deeper trouble when every track has sub-titles in brackets,to show how much more intelligent our new God is than you are.

Never seen without a hat,I wonder if his Soul really did 'Return To The Regions Of The Central Galaxy', as the sub-title of the title track suggests it was tearning for?

Tracklist:

A1 Discovery Of A New Galaxy (A Triumphal Dream)
A2 The Milky Way (Travel To The Confines Of Infinity)
A3 The Planet Earth (Gravity, A Gate In The Clouds, Landing, A Terrestrial Landscape, Enchantment, Annunciation)
A4 Fate (The Immutable Law Of Trasience)
A5 The Seal (Biological Reproduction, The Struggle For Survival, The Vanity And Euphoria Of The Privileged)
B1 From A Letter To M
B2 An Attempt To Escape (A Hope In Outer-Space Communication)
B3 Katharsis (The Eternal Yearning Of The Soul - Return To The Regions Of The Central Galaxy)
B4 An Epitaph/In Memory Of Piotr

DOWNLOAD some katharsis for pretentious intelligentsia HERE!

The Noyes Brothers ‎– "Sheep From Goats" (Object Music ‎– OBJ 009/010) 1980

The Two Stevens, or The Two Ronnies (any excuse to sdd a link to the Fork Handles sketch), of DIY-Garde in Manchester, were Steve Solamar, of The Spherical Objects, and Steve Miro, without his 'Eyes' this time(as in Steve Miro and the Eyes right?). Collectively they called themselves The Noyes Brothers.
As previously featured as side two of the "Do The Maru"compilation,The Noyes Brothers project extended to four sides of vinyl, called "Sheep From Goats".
'Experimental'is the genre this stuff is usually filed under in yer iTunes collection.....not quite experimental enough to earn the golden moniker of 'other' however.

Here's the Brothers, ticking both the 'Good Looking' and 'Youthful' Boxes.

Tracklist:

OBJ 009
A1 Impending Doom
A2 Away We Go
A3 Repercussion
A4 Bo Scat Um I.D.
A5 Marlene
A6 Night Sky Vision
A7 Byte To Beat
B1 Why Did It Fade
B2 I Am You
B3 On The outside
B4 Dream
B5 Archetypal Memory
B6 It Must Be Vibration
B7 Pointless
B8 The Mutant
B9 Ingmar The Dog
B10 Some Times

OBJ 010
C1 Outnuendo
C2 Decision Time
C3 Pnumonia Bridge
C4 Resurrection In Chaos Minor
C5 Do End New Out
D It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time

DOWNLOAD here sheeple!

Camberwell Now - "Live Basel, Kulturwerkstatt Kaserne 16/06/1984" (Bootleg)

A great, crystal clear, radio performance recording from Basel in Switzerland, in front of a small but ,eventually, enthusiastic audience. Lots of amusing stage banter, and a great set from this ignored This Heat spin off;.......as has been said, its more of a Matching Mole/Soft Machine relationship to their former band, than an actual continuation. There's also an interesting interview tacked on, which gives a overview of Stephen Rickard's 'Machine', which was basically a cassette version of the Mellotron,and a precursor to the sampler.

Kulturwerkstatt Kaserne
16 June 1984

Charles Hayward - voice, drums, keyboards etc.
Trefor Goronway - voice, bass, percussion etc.
Stephan Rickard - recordings, tapes etc.

1-9 (aud.) with sony TCS-310 Walkman/built-in microphone
10 from FM radio

Tracklist:

1. Tuning
2. Working Nights
3. Daddy Needs A Throne
4. Speculative fiction
5. Sitcom
6. Wheat Futures
7. Green Lantern
8. The Ghost trade
9. The End
10 Interview Radio DRS III june 1984.

DOWNLOAD camberwell now right now HERE!

Metabolist - "Live at Actionspace, London, 20/07/1978" (Bootleg)

As fate would have it, a group who were contempories of and trod on similar territory as This Heat, were also recorded at Actionspace in 1978.
Metabolist were unashamedly influenced by Krautrock,and Zeuhl ,but absorbed just enough 'Punk' not to be dismissed as a prog-hangover......although nothing wrong with that in my book.
Although labelled as "A Poor Mans This Heat" by some sections of the UK music press,their album "Hansten Klork" is now widely regarded as a post-punk classic;which indeed it certainly is.

More Metabolist HERE!

Tracklist:

1. Curly Wall
2. Pinstripe
3. Rainy Day Sunshine Girl
4. Slaves
5. (I Can't) Identify (part 1)
6. (I Can't) Identify (part 2)
7. Unknown
8. Eulam's Beat
9. I Don't Want To
10. The Big One.

DOWNLOAD at a high metabolic rate HERE!

This Heat - "Live at the Prince Of Wales Conference Centre,London, 20/101979" (Bootleg)

Continuing the theme of post-punk-avant-prog, brings forth the kings of said made-up sub-genre;....That's right, more live This Heat, with a decent quality bootleg recording of a gig sometime in 1979, including a rare capturing of obscure Heat number ., "The Rough and the Smooth".....worth it for that alone.Despite some irreverent audience members chit-chatting in the presence of art history, its a rather good recording for 1979.
No doubt that the truly awful Prince Of Wales would think its all a pile of totale shite.
Apart from that I have nothing more to add....its 'This Heat' innit?

Tracklist:

1. Triumph
2. Testcard
3. paper hats
4. Twilight Furniture
5. Rough and The Smooth
6. Makeshift Swahili

DOWNLOAD with prince charles' disapproval HERE!

Fraser ‎– "Archaeology" (Anti Hero Records ‎– AH 008) 1989

The lost album from the Unrest,Work and Play archives wot I found on the interweb in an atrociously low bit-rate, but its still not too bad compared to some of the cassettes that are on here.
Its basically a solo album by Chris Fraser of UWP, but sounds exactly like said group.
If you don't know what 'said group' sounds like click here.
In words, disjointed Avant-Prog songs sung in a post-psychedelic style that was quite typical of the groups on Recommended Records.So don't expect melodies that have predictable sequences, or conform to 4/4 verse chorus verse standards.
Seems that Chris disappeared after this obscure magnum opus.

Tracklist:

A1 Archaeology
A2 Everything Looks Different
A3 Steep Descent
A4 Customs
A5 Clear
B1 Pointless
B2 Where And When
B3 0119
B4 Cellarman
B5 Misconstrued

DOWNLOAD from the avant-prog archaeological dig HERE!