Conform To Deform is a must-have history for those of us who bought the records and saw those bands live at the time; but hopefully it will also inspire others to check out the label’s incredible back catalogue, even if sadly many items are now out of print. There will never be another label like Some Bizzare and thankfully Wesley Doyle has finally told its story.
Gary Parsons
259 posts
London 5 November 2022 The UK 2022: it’s Saturday and it’s raining; not in a Blade Runner kind of way, with neon lights and futuristic vistas, but in a drab way that only the UK knows how to do with aplomb.
SPV It’s a strange feeling to be reviewing the last-ever Klaus Schulze album. Since 1981, I have been a follower of his work after after reading that he was connected to Tangerine Dream, who I was a massive fan of at the time. From that first listen I understood that Klaus’s music shared many elements with TD, but were very much distinctly Klaus as well. The album I […]
Wedge I saw one of Tinariwen’s earliest London shows. It was an exotic mixture of West African sounds and almost Jimi Hendrix guitar motifs blended together to cast a spell over the audience that sat there that night. So here I am, twenty years later, discussing some of the bands earliest recordings and reacquainting myself with that dizzying memory from all that time ago. These recordings are now […]
Play Loud! The Buchla 100 series is a modular synthesizer designed by Don Buchla in the 1960s. The instrument was championed by Suzanne Ciani, whose name, among many others, became synonymous with the instrument and what looked like a complex way you had to programme it.
London 22 March 2022 The original Penguin Café Orchestra was formed in 1972 by guitarist Simon Jeffes and cellist Helen Liebmann. They released their first album in 1976, produced by Brian Eno and released on his Obscure Records series of recordings, and the band gave its first major concert in 1976 supporting Kraftwerk at The Roundhouse.
Sulatron Dave Schmidt AKA Sula Bassana invites us yet again into his personal cosmic world with his very own inventions for electric guitar. This album was recorded over three nights and expands Sula’s ever shifting psychedelic sound, using only a very basic setup of instruments to keep the mind focussed on the universal otherness.
Sulatron This is a live set by Electric Moon and Portuguese band Talea Jacta, recorded at a club in Lisbon pre-pandemic on 20 September 2019, when these kind of things were a lot easier to arrange. In that respect it is a document of a freer time when music flowed without boundaries or isolation.
All Saints Laraaji was discovered by Brian Eno in 1979 while he was playing in Washington Square Park. At this point Eno had moved to the US and was in the process of working on his Ambient series of albums and label that had started with Music For Airports. Laraaji’s release would be Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance and was be released in 1980; it is the only […]
London 13 November 2021 It feels very strange returning (and especially reviewing) live music again after nearly a two-year absence. Some things have changed, but much was the same as before. The big thing was the crowd reaction; and starved of live music for so long, people seemed hungry to see their favourite bands again. Maybe we won’t take live music for granted and support many of the […]
Spheric Music Robert Schroeder began making albums in 1979, being one of the artists on Klaus Schulze’s Innovative Communication label. He produced six wonderful albums for IC, including the mesmeric Galaxie Cygnus-A. He has produced a large body of electronic music over the last forty-two years, always pushing boundaries using a wide array of sounds from his various synthesizer set-ups, including some older analogue instruments that give him […]
Bureau B Conrad Schnitzler is one of Krautrock’s founding fathers; he was part of the original line up of Tangerine Dream along with Klaus Schulze and he was an original member of Kluster, who renamed themselves Cluster after his departure. Schnitzler’s work straddles the line between avant-garde pieces to cosmic electronica, all with a sense of darkness imbued within his sweeping epics. The pieces presented on Paracon are […]
Sulatron Before I discuss the music, I have to say what an incredibly beautiful re-release this is from Sulatron Records. Not only does Mind Control: The Ultimate Edition look wonderful in its yellow and black splatter 180-gramme vinyl, but it sounds fantastic as well (also available on two CDs with bonus tracks as well). Its gatefold sleeve just adds to the overall feel of a wonderfully put-together quality […]
Eastgate Music and Art In the past couple of years, us Tangerine Dream fans have been rather spoilt by the amount of high-quality historical pieces and releases that have come our way. First of all we had the beautiful edition of Edgar Froese’s biography, Force Majeure, a mammoth book that was obviously lovingly put together and was a must-have item. This was followed by Margarete Kreuzer’s wonderful documentary […]
Eastgate / Cupdisc In the past couple of years or so, Tangerine Dream, featuring Thorsten Quaeschning, Ulrich Schnauss and Hoshiko Yamane, have released five improvised albums dedicated to TD founder Edgar Froese. These have been primarily live recordings made in 2018 during the band’s tour and have had more in common soundwise with the classic 1970s era of Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann. These sessions have had […]
Munster This is the first vinyl reissue of Tim Blake’s debut solo album in over forty years, and Munster has given Tim’s work the respect it deserves. The records are beautifully pressed on 180 gramme vinyl, and not only do you get the original album in all its glory, but also a second LP full of rarities from the same era; plus you get an insert with an […]
Opal Compilations can be rather odd releases, especially ones that cover a large period of time. Normally tracks jar against each other as the artist refines their music and even change styles. This is not the case with Film Music 1976-2020, where Brian Eno’s work seamlessly melds together to give the album the feel that you are listening to a cohesive piece of work especially composed for this […]
Virgin After 2019’s monumental In Search Of Hades boxed set covering Tangerine Dream’s ’70s output, it’s fantastic that Virgin decided to finish the story by releasing the bands ’80s records on the label. This period is sometimes seen as a regroup and reform period for the band. During the 1970s, their popularity had grown so much that they could put on large stage shows using lasers (actually the […]