[The following links are for mp3 d0wnlo4ds at a site called http://www.progarchives.com. Most of the site seems to be devoted to neo-prog, which is 3rd and 4th generation progressive rock bands lamely taking their names from classic prog tunes or the usual Tolkien characters. I had a lot of fun making these love/hate links to old-school (1970-75) prog songs, but I must have stumbled onto a mirror site or "members-only" area that eight hours later could no longer be accessed. Or it may just be bandwidth issues. In any case, if one link doesn't work probably none of them do. Sadly (for me at least), this post may not be here long.UPDATE: As of Jan. 14, the links are working again.
UPDATE 2: As of Feb. 2006, it appears the site no longer offers these .mp3s for download--ah, progress--so the links below don't work, but if you search the progarchives archive for the band names, you can stream the tracks.] Gentle Giant - Playing the Game. GG weren't the only British progressive group introducing madrigals, rounds, jigs, and other folk devices into a rock context in the '70s (as well as the expected tricky time signatures, contrapuntal riffs, constantly changing instruments, etc.) but they perhaps went furthest in integrating all of the above into a hybrid form. Very brainy group, apparently fought amongst themselves like cats and dogs. "Cogs in Cogs" and "No God's a Man" are better from this album, The Power and the Glory, but this one's plenty fine.
Gentle Giant - Free Hand. More lovely complex writing, marred slightly by Derek Shulman's over-demonstrative rock star vocals.
Area - La Mela di Odessa. Jazzy and noisy Italian outing, a bit Henry Cow-ish, with a great James Brown funk groove at the end of the track. Demetrios Stratos' Leon Thomas-style yodel may be too much for some.
Caravan - In the Land of Grey and Pink. Veddy British. This is the most folky track posted here; a bit twee, but David Sinclair's Lowrey organ solo is worth waiting for and nothing his cousin, vocalist/bassist Richard (Sinclair) does is ever wrong. He is God. "We'll pick our fill of punkweed/And smoke it till we bleed/That's all we'll need."
Van Der Graaf Generator - Killer. Histrionic but musically amazing. Black Sab meets King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man," with quirky, complicated instrumental passages that just beggar description. Organ, sax, and Peter Hammill's melodramatic vocals are the lead instruments. Full disclosure: this is a song about killer fish.
Van Der Graaf Generator - Man-Erg. A quiet song, also about killers, erupts into the weirdest instrumental break ever written--a kind of demonic horror-movie klezmer. Once you know it you sing it in your sleep, while being chased by monsters. "There stalking in my cloisters hang the acolytes of gloom." Proto-Goth but too passionate for that label, really.
Triumvirat - Triangle. The German Emerson Lake & Palmer. This instrumental track is recommended if you like ELP but not Greg Lake's vocals. The keyboards are as good.
Magma - Da Zeuhl Wortz Mekanik. Talk about high concept--all the Magma albums tell the story of an epic space opera, and they even invented their own language to sing it in. Orff's Carmina Burana and Philip Glass vocalese are big influences, sung over a jazzy background. Someone should put the soprano out of her misery, but this is probably the most sophisticated and least dated of the selections here.
King Crimson - Red. I take that back. This was from the King's heavy metal period, and it's absolutely fucking great.
Yes - Close to the Edge. All 18 minutes of it. We should be very grateful to Vincent Gallo for making Yes cool again, with his movie Buffalo 66. He used "Heart of the Sunrise" from Fragile but this is good also.
i dont think the links work.
Thanks, I added a cautionary note at the top of the post. Everything worked perfectly 8 hours ago. I may have stumbled onto some members only or mirror site that had active links. The songs I linked to all had "www2" rather than www in the URL. The www2 URLs are unavailable as of this writing. The mp3 links aren't visible on the www site.
I bought a Close to the Edge CD a year or so ago. It just sounds great. Even the silly lyrics. Nobody writes music like this anymore. Perfect balance between mass market cheese and high brow composition.
There's a melody near the beginning of the 18-minute suite where Steve Howe uses a volume pedal to dampen the attack on the notes that's just flippin' gorgeous. I'd completely forgotten it. Happy the Man used that sound, too. HTM got a lot from CttE and ran with it; I hadn't heard the Yes track in so long, I didn't realize how influential it was for them. Nothing like a few decades to make it clearer.
UPDATE: The "melody" I'm referring to is actually the main theme: Rick Wakeman plays it on the synthesizer right after the "church organ interlude."
brainticket!
14 prog albums to lose your indie cred over.
Just so it's clear, mine isn't a top ten list, but rather the "ten most interesting readily-available mp3s of old school prog on a site full of neo-prog whatever". The list you found contains a lot of neo-prog (post-'70s Crimson & Genesis spinoffs, Marillion) but also Krautrock (Tago Mago, which practically defines "indie cred" and has from the year of its release [1971]--John Lydon was a big fan back in the PIL days) and postpunk/new wave (Gabriel's 3rd solo was a warmup for his monkey-shocking period). David Sancious was a must to avoid back in the day.
His list (for reference):Genesis's Trick of the Tail/
King Crimson's B'Boom/
Trey Gunn's The Joy of Molybdenum/
Tony Levin's Pieces of the Sun/
Marillion's Afraid of Sunlight/
David Sylvian and Robert Fripp's Damage/
David Sancious's True Stories/
Can's Tago Mago/
Steve Howe's Not Necessarily Acoustic/
Peter Gabriel's Peter Gabriel (3)/
Steve Hackett's Darktown/
Tony Banks's A Curious Feeling/
Yes's Close to the Edge
|
[The following links are for mp3 d0wnlo4ds at a site called http://www.progarchives.com. Most of the site seems to be devoted to neo-prog, which is 3rd and 4th generation progressive rock bands lamely taking their names from classic prog tunes or the usual Tolkien characters. I had a lot of fun making these love/hate links to old-school (1970-75) prog songs, but I must have stumbled onto a mirror site or "members-only" area that eight hours later could no longer be accessed. Or it may just be bandwidth issues. In any case, if one link doesn't work probably none of them do. Sadly (for me at least), this post may not be here long.
UPDATE: As of Jan. 14, the links are working again.
UPDATE 2: As of Feb. 2006, it appears the site no longer offers these .mp3s for download--ah, progress--so the links below don't work, but if you search the progarchives archive for the band names, you can stream the tracks.]
Gentle Giant - Playing the Game. GG weren't the only British progressive group introducing madrigals, rounds, jigs, and other folk devices into a rock context in the '70s (as well as the expected tricky time signatures, contrapuntal riffs, constantly changing instruments, etc.) but they perhaps went furthest in integrating all of the above into a hybrid form. Very brainy group, apparently fought amongst themselves like cats and dogs. "Cogs in Cogs" and "No God's a Man" are better from this album, The Power and the Glory, but this one's plenty fine.
Gentle Giant - Free Hand. More lovely complex writing, marred slightly by Derek Shulman's over-demonstrative rock star vocals.
Area - La Mela di Odessa. Jazzy and noisy Italian outing, a bit Henry Cow-ish, with a great James Brown funk groove at the end of the track. Demetrios Stratos' Leon Thomas-style yodel may be too much for some.
Caravan - In the Land of Grey and Pink. Veddy British. This is the most folky track posted here; a bit twee, but David Sinclair's Lowrey organ solo is worth waiting for and nothing his cousin, vocalist/bassist Richard (Sinclair) does is ever wrong. He is God. "We'll pick our fill of punkweed/And smoke it till we bleed/That's all we'll need."
Van Der Graaf Generator - Killer. Histrionic but musically amazing. Black Sab meets King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man," with quirky, complicated instrumental passages that just beggar description. Organ, sax, and Peter Hammill's melodramatic vocals are the lead instruments. Full disclosure: this is a song about killer fish.
Van Der Graaf Generator - Man-Erg. A quiet song, also about killers, erupts into the weirdest instrumental break ever written--a kind of demonic horror-movie klezmer. Once you know it you sing it in your sleep, while being chased by monsters. "There stalking in my cloisters hang the acolytes of gloom." Proto-Goth but too passionate for that label, really.
Triumvirat - Triangle. The German Emerson Lake & Palmer. This instrumental track is recommended if you like ELP but not Greg Lake's vocals. The keyboards are as good.
Magma - Da Zeuhl Wortz Mekanik. Talk about high concept--all the Magma albums tell the story of an epic space opera, and they even invented their own language to sing it in. Orff's Carmina Burana and Philip Glass vocalese are big influences, sung over a jazzy background. Someone should put the soprano out of her misery, but this is probably the most sophisticated and least dated of the selections here.
King Crimson - Red. I take that back. This was from the King's heavy metal period, and it's absolutely fucking great.
Yes - Close to the Edge. All 18 minutes of it. We should be very grateful to Vincent Gallo for making Yes cool again, with his movie Buffalo 66. He used "Heart of the Sunrise" from Fragile but this is good also.
- tom moody 1-11-2004 9:06 am
i dont think the links work.
- dave 1-11-2004 4:15 pm
Thanks, I added a cautionary note at the top of the post. Everything worked perfectly 8 hours ago.
I may have stumbled onto some members only or mirror site that had active links. The songs I linked to all had "www2" rather than www in the URL. The www2 URLs are unavailable as of this writing. The mp3 links aren't visible on the www site.
- tom moody 1-11-2004 6:41 pm
I bought a Close to the Edge CD a year or so ago. It just sounds great. Even the silly lyrics. Nobody writes music like this anymore. Perfect balance between mass market cheese and high brow composition.
- brad (guest) 1-12-2004 6:59 pm
There's a melody near the beginning of the 18-minute suite where Steve Howe uses a volume pedal to dampen the attack on the notes that's just flippin' gorgeous. I'd completely forgotten it. Happy the Man used that sound, too. HTM got a lot from CttE and ran with it; I hadn't heard the Yes track in so long, I didn't realize how influential it was for them. Nothing like a few decades to make it clearer.
UPDATE: The "melody" I'm referring to is actually the main theme: Rick Wakeman plays it on the synthesizer right after the "church organ interlude."
- tom moody 1-12-2004 7:52 pm
brainticket!
- bill 1-14-2004 7:00 pm
14 prog albums to lose your indie cred over.
- dave 1-18-2004 6:11 pm
Just so it's clear, mine isn't a top ten list, but rather the "ten most interesting readily-available mp3s of old school prog on a site full of neo-prog whatever". The list you found contains a lot of neo-prog (post-'70s Crimson & Genesis spinoffs, Marillion) but also Krautrock (Tago Mago, which practically defines "indie cred" and has from the year of its release [1971]--John Lydon was a big fan back in the PIL days) and postpunk/new wave (Gabriel's 3rd solo was a warmup for his monkey-shocking period). David Sancious was a must to avoid back in the day.
His list (for reference):Genesis's Trick of the Tail/ King Crimson's B'Boom/ Trey Gunn's The Joy of Molybdenum/ Tony Levin's Pieces of the Sun/ Marillion's Afraid of Sunlight/ David Sylvian and Robert Fripp's Damage/ David Sancious's True Stories/ Can's Tago Mago/ Steve Howe's Not Necessarily Acoustic/ Peter Gabriel's Peter Gabriel (3)/ Steve Hackett's Darktown/ Tony Banks's A Curious Feeling/ Yes's Close to the Edge
- tom moody 1-18-2004 10:34 pm