Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Penguin Cafe Orchestra

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Dada, Fusion, Music review, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Simon Jeffes

Happiness Is A Warm Penguin!

Well what can one say. Penguin Café Orchestra are a musical smile! Taking repetition, minimalism and excellent musicianship out of the high reflective, internalised experience of, for example, Philip Glass, this places such music under a warm sun, a beach umbrella, a brightly coloured fruit and punch cocktail in hand, where the days are filled with splendour and playful happiness. The musicians who comprised the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra cohered around composer and musician Simon Jeffes. Since Jeffes death the music still goes on

How can you not smile at music with such absurd titles as `Pythagoras’ Trousers’ and `The Ecstasy of Dancing Fleas’ ? This isn’t the sort of music that I normally fill my days with, preferring deep intense reflective musical journeys, but sometimes one just has to get one’s face out of the numinous and giggle at musical high spirits!

Difficult to categorise this music – Amazon have it filed under Rock, I’ve also seen it categorised as New Age – 2 genres which would seem to be diametrically opposed really!

IMO it is neither; perhaps a new category Musical DaDa Or Music of The Absurd, to steal categories from Art and Theatre. This music is deliciously silly, a stream of bubbles and celebratory balloons

Telephone and Rubber Band and Cutting Branches For a Temporary Shelter are particularly broad smile inducing! Numbers 1-4 is the closest the Penguins come to `blue’ – sweet and lyrical – like watching the sun set while you know that as soon as that happens someone is going to light a fire and start waving sparklers to announce a mellow party. And those dancing fleas are pretty laid back!

I’m looking at the humble rubber band with a new respect, and bow down to the masterful rubber band virtuoso of Penguin Café Orchestra. Begone pale violin and cello. Classical pieces will henceforth be scored for rubber band.

Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Penguin Cafe Orchestra Amazon UK

Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Penguin Cafe Orchestra Amazon USA

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Philip Glass – Songs From Liquid Days

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Douglas Perry, Janice Pendarvis, Kronos Quartet, Linda Ronstadt, Philip Glass, Songs From Liquid Days, The Roches

And The Music Spins Dynamically Round And Round

I love Philip Glass’s edgy, insistent, questing rhythms and arising melodies. The inexorable, subtly building and changing repetitions remind me curiously of Wagner – much cooler, much more cerebral, less viscerally overpowering, but as wonderfully getting under the skin.

This particular venture, quite old now, was a collaboration between Glass and respected, interesting lyricists – Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson  are some of that number

For me the tracks which particularly stand out are:

Lightning (lyrics by Suzanne Vega) sternly sung by Janice Pendarvis, for the brilliant, almost hurtfully quicksilvery use of brass and beat – as electrically charged and unsettling as the storm it describes, and the releasing gentleness of the strings once the storm has passed – only to start up again as the next storm burst happens again. Great stuff

Open the Kingdom, lyrics by David Byrne, has the liquid indeed vocal line sung by Douglas Perry rising and flowing exultantly over Glass’s rich orchestral textures, the whole like the experience of watching a bird in flight across the endless, eternal sea.

And then there’s the beautiful combination of Linda Ronstadt‘s voice with Glass’s music, played by the Kronos Quartet – plangent, soulful, tender on, firstly, Vega’s lyrics on ‘Freezing’ –

 If you had no name, if you had no history…..if it were only you naked, on the grass

and finally the love song in reflection, as the man who can’t sleep thinks of the women in his life and what they brought….a beautiful recounting of human qualities, in Laurie Anderson’s lyrics on ‘Forgetting’ enunciated over and over again by the Roches

bravery, honesty, generosity, compassion…………..love

over music which has a climactic, swinging, rocking to and fro movement. Yes its sexy!

Philip Glass – Songs From Liquid Days Amazon UK
Philip Glass – Songs From Liquid Days Amazon USA