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Showing posts from August, 2022

Tubular!

     Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells is an album for any Progressive Rock lover. It has a nice neoclassical sound alongside nice intricate guitar work, and good usage of organ and synthesizer. If you like your music short and simple, you may not like Tubular Bells, but I would suggest listening anyway, because it is good to broaden horizons, and challenge the ideas one has regarding music.      The record starts out with some interesting and intricate piano lines. It is later joined by a doubling synthesizer. This helps solidify this melody. I think the repetitiveness of this line helps make a complex piece like this catchy. It boggles the mind that a complex melody could be catchy, or an odd rhythm could be groovy, but progressive rock shows us that this is all possible, just listen to the album.      There is a great moment on this album where synth and (I assume) acoustic guitar come together and then there is a crescendo then electric guitar. Normally I would comment on the di

1001 Centigrades by Magma

     Magma does not write music for the casual listener. Magma does not write normal music for normal people. They writer serious, abnormal music for abnormal people. The powerful jazz rock of Magma is in direct contrast to the easy-going jazz fusion of Weather Report. If you like your music heavy and energetic instead of languid and mellow, then you will like Magma. Though their ensemble on this album only consists of 8 players (more of a chamber ensemble than a symphonic orchestra) they make up for that by playing with a sort of symphonic heaviness, that is slow, loud, and emphatic.      1001 Centigrades was released in April 1971 by Phillips Studio. It is Magma’s 2 nd album. The first track on this album is 21 minutes (again, this isn’t for the casual music listener) and is written by Christian Vander . The second track is 11 minutes and is written by Teddy Lasry. T he third track is 8 minutes and is written by Francois Cahen . Although this band is based in France, the album