Category Progressive
A KIND OF 2015 LIST
Biggest crush What does it mean when you go, in a mere few months, from never having heard of an artist to buying four albums new? Probably that you have too much time on your hands and money in your pocket. Nevertheless, I became very taken with the lively retro-electronica of Zombi. They combine elements […]
REAL GONE 2015 [PART 1]
CHRIS SQUIRE (4 Mar 1948 — 27 Jun 2015) The death of the co-founder and energetic mainspring of Yes was reported in the mainstream media. For some, that might be telling indictment of how mainstream the progressive music of the band became, but I’d beg to differ. Squire was an outstanding bass player and his […]
THANKS FOR DROPPING BY
For some blogs, fifty-five thousand page views is an average week. For Vinyl Connection it is the culmination of over two-and-a-half years of posts. That’s OK; a mass audience was neither the goal nor expectation. Still, it is a little milestone worth marking, so I dipped into the VC catalogue and pulled out spreadsheet entries […]
A NEW COLLABORATOR AND A NEW SOUND
In 2001 David Bowie released what is without doubt the oddest compilation of his career. Which is saying something, there having been over 40 collections of his music across five decades. This one was called All Saints, with the subtitle telling you exactly what you were getting: Collected Instrumentals 1977 – 1999. The story goes that […]
LUCKY MAN
From the woozy fanfare opening ‘The Barbarian’ to the final swooping moog solo panning between the speakers at the end of ‘Lucky Man’, via the stroked grand piano strings of ‘Take a Pebble’ and the dystopian drama of ‘Knife Edge’, I know the first Emerson Lake and Palmer album very well indeed. But it wasn’t […]
LISTENER’S DIGEST #2: YOUNG, FOCUS, SEA AND CAKE, TPOTUSA, SCHOENBERG
Having been doing the single parent thing for well over a day now, our appreciation of Ms Connection’s contribution to the good life at chez Vinyl Connection is shooting up the charts with a bullet. Amongst the chores, errands, boy-wrangling and general infrastructure maintenance there has, nevertheless, been space for spinning a few discs. Here are […]
EARTH AND MOON
Sometimes reading blogs can be expensive: you read, you like, you must have… the purchase is a direct result of reading a particular post. Other times, I’ve noted indirect references to an artist rated highly by the writer and somehow added a pencil note to the old cerebral cortex. An example is the band Earth, alluded […]
MINIMAL RAINBOW
From an imagined podcast… It is generally agreed that ‘minimal music’ appeared in the mid-60s, arising out of the US avant-garde scene in which John Cage was a principal figure. Most writers and commentators, Sitsky for example, list La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass as the key composers. A study of […]
LISTENER’S DIGEST #1: BJH, JT, MUTTON BIRDS, BLOSS & SCHULZE
While we love celebrating album cover art here at Vinyl Connection, it’s worth remembering that those sleeves contain records (or, ahem, CDs). So for this first edition of (yet another) occasional feature called “Listener’s Digest” I have chosen four albums that appeared in Album Cover posts over recent months. Variety being the ear-spice of musical life, […]
ART ON YOUR SLEEVE #3 – JETHRO TULL
An occasional series featuring LPs boasting ‘fine art’ on their covers, with commentary on the music and something about the art. #3 JETHRO TULL – Minstrel in the Gallery [1975] THE MUSIC After the patchy but commercially successful Warchild (#2 in the US), Jethro Tull’s eighth album was an energetic and consistently excellent return to form. Combining […]
FOUR MOMENTS IN POOLE
“I’ll be in meetings all day but you can take the car and go exploring.” My friend Jo was zooming down the M3 from London towards the coast, expertly nipping in and out of traffic and dodging belching lorries as I sat in the passenger seat feeling very much on the other side of the […]
TORN SKY
I’ve just woken from a fitful doze, 34,000 feet above the Caspian Sea. Not that it is visible as we hurtle through an orange-pink upper altitude cloud carpet at 578 mph, but it’s down there somewhere below the crumpled sheets of puffy stuff. That is what the animated map tells me, anyway. What a clever little […]
vinylconnection.com.au 