Trollheart

Album title: Faust
Artist: Faust
Nationality: German
Label: Polydor
Chronology: Debut
Grade: B
The Trollheart Factor: 1
Tracklisting: Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?/ Meadow Meal/ Miss Fortune
Comments: Krautrock and I have a fractious relationship, to say the least. It’s not quite the same as the one I have with Yes - I love some of their stuff but am unmoved by a lot of it - or indeed Zeuhl - hate that pretty much - but it’s definitely not my genre of choice. I think I recall listening to a Faust album - possibly Faust IV - but I can’t remember what I thought of it. This is their debut and has, as you can see, only three tracks, but as you might expect, they’re all long ones. In fairness, not epics: one is eight minutes, one is nine and one is sixteen, so only just over the half-hour in total. A half-hour that will flow by quickly or one that will seem like four hours? Let’s see.

The opener, the oddly-titled “Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?” comes in slowly but then bursts into a cloud of feedback and sound effects, kind of sounds like someone tuning a radio for a minute or so. Then a soft piano takes over, turning into a kind of ragtime piece for a moment, joined then by a synth line and some military-style drums. Odd vocal effects take over completely now as the music drops out entirely (unless the vox are made on a synth, which they could be) and now back it comes, dragging a sax with it this time. Has a strange kind of almost chanting feel about it, and then there’s a sort of choir going, some more effects - it’s krautrock, ya know? Them crazy Germans, how funny they are. Spacey music and effects is followed by what sounds like people speaking in low voices.

The second, and already penultimate, track is called “Meadow Meal” and also fades in slowly with a whole lot of sounds and effects and trickery, puts me in mind of standing at the dockside watching cargo ships being offloaded - no more meadow than the surface of the moon to be honest, but on we go. Discordant piano coming in withs some sort of echo, marching percussion, weird sounds on top of weird sounds, with an extra side of weird, then an acoustic guitar as someone talks, shouts, recites, does some damn thing and a ship’s foghorn sounds. Surprisingly, this appears to be in English, what little lyric there is of it. Bit of a boogie breakout now, and a nice church organ melody right at the end. Went in quickly enough for its length, but made about zero impression on me.

The longest, and final track, “Miss Fortune”, opens with a ringing bass I think and some percussion, again a lot of the idea of marching in the rhythm, and definitely a sense of slowly building up to something. I would definitely say this is the far more musical, so far anyway, of the three tracks, with some good warpy guitar and organ, and a nice bass line humming through it all. Of course, it’s sixteen minutes long, so I expect it will divert into the crazy soon. But it’s nice to hear until it does. Now we’re dropping back to just bass, then a single buzzing note, bass coming back in and rising before a buzzy synth joins in with a howl, one cymbal tapping, which is no doubt going to turn into a full… oh. No, it didn’t. In fact we have total silence for a few seconds until a soft plucked guitar and piano take the tune and now there are chanted vocals.

And basically on it goes, weirding here, weirding there, becoming less weird for a while, then weirding it up bigstyle. Some nice music when it settles down but as ever, not my particular cup of cyanide. Not sure I’ll ever really appreciate Krautrock. Probably just to remain nodding acquaintances for the foreseeable.

Favourite track(s): None
Least favourite track(s):
Personal Rating: 2.0
Legacy Rating: 4.0
Final Rating: 3.0

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Album title: Black Mass
Artist: Mort Garson (as Lucifer)
Nationality: Canadian
Label: Uni Reocrds
Chronology: Eighteenth
Grade: C
The Trollheart Factor: 0
Factsheet:
Tracklisting: Solomon’s Ring/ The Ride of Aida (Voodoo)/ Incubus/ Black Mass/ The Evil Eye/ Exorcism/ The Philosopher’s Stone/ Voices of the Dead (The Medium)/ Witch Trial/ ESP
Comments: A man who it seems was more known for his electronic music than progressive rock, and who, from what I can see, wrote albums based on every sign of the zodiac (as well as others), Mort Garson began his recording career back in 1967, when prog rock wasn’t even a thing. As you can see, by the time we reached even the nascent time of 1971 he had had seventeen albums, but this is the first - and possibly only - one which is considered in any way prog. It’s also supposed to be quite dark, and with a title like that, you wouldn’t wonder. I get the feeling it will be all instrumental, but we’ll see.

None of the tracks are long, nothing over four minutes, and the obvious comparisons with Vangelis surface for me as “Solomon’s Ring” opens, with a slightly Egyptian feel in the melody, bubbling synth and sort of didgeridoo-like sounds permeating the piece. Spacey sounds, which I suppose you would expect, and thick church-like organ, the “Ride of Aida (Voodoo)” does indeed have a tribal, native atmosphere to it, fast bongo-like drums and whirling synth with what sounds like a voice chanting, but may very well not be. “Incubus” is slower, and has hollow percussion and glass harp maybe? Weird and odd, as electronic music often is, but I’ve heard so far nothing I would consider dark. Well, we’re only three tracks in.

Right well here’s the title track, and “Black Mass” opens with the sound of choral voices in a sort of chant and a hollow ringing bell. I mean, it’s dark but it’s not scary or evil is it? Big thick organ (shut up) rising now (I said, shut up!) which is perhaps a little obvious, and “Evil Eye” tries to be big and scary too but it, well, isn’t. Unless this is meant to be a joke, a send-up, I definitely don’t get a sense of fear or loathing or dread or terror from it at all. Let’s see: “Exorcism.” Surely that will be creepy and… no, it’s a kind of fast-paced whine and the music does not at all evoke that sort of feeling, not in me anyway. I don’t know: this guy - unless I’m getting him wrong - seems to think that playing dark notes and swirly anthems and squelchy bass lines makes music scary. Well it doesn’t for me, I can tell you. It’s all right but it’s basically your standard electronic music, nothing more and nothing less.

Yeah it doesn’t, or wouldn’t, even qualify as horror music. It’s just not that scary, and whoever said it was dark and satanic, well, all I can say is he or she must have been listening to something else, because this is decent music but certainly not anything that evokes feelings of fear. It is, in fact, rather more than a little self-indulgent and gives the idea more of someone playing around with a new toy (the Moog) than seriously trying to write scary music. Meh.

Favourite track(s): I don’t hate anything, but there’s nothing that stands out here either.
Least favourite track(s):
Personal Rating: 2.0

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Album title: Brass Rock 1
Artist: Heaven
Nationality: English
Label: CBS
Chronology: Debut and only

Tracklisting: Things I Should’ve Been/ This Time Tomorrow/ Never Say Die /Come Back/ Song for Chaos/ Morning Coffee (A Theme from a Film)/ Number One (Last Request)/ Number Two (Down at the Mission)/ Dawning/ Got to Get Away
Comments: I wonder if there’s such a thing as progressive punk? Given how much punk rockers hated prog, it would be hilariously ironic if there was. Perhaps there is. Apparently anything can be progressive, as witness progressive brass. Yeah. These guys had only the one album, and to be honest it sounds like this could be more jazz or big band than prog, but there’s a genre tag of jazz fusion, so I guess fire up them trumpets boys: we’re goin’ in!

Kind of sounds like the theme to a seventies cop show, as I think I said somewhere else, but this really is, that is until the guitars bite into the tune and it takes on a more hard rock persona, but then the singer is pure blues, so find your prog here if you can, and you’ll be a better man than me. Don’t get me wrong: it’s great music, and very catchy, but I just don’t see the “p” word anywhere. “This Time Tomorrow” has a more, um, flutey opening and then settles down into a sort of softer vein with some nice sharp guitar coming through, reminds me of Santana (hey, gimme a break! I’m not well versed in jazz fusion artists) but I would say too much flute here for my tastes. Not a big fan of this. “Never Say Die” is better, rocks along with real purpose with a sort of semi-country vibe, good fiddle work and no god-damn flute.

I detect a kind of Mexican/Mariachi tone to “Come Back”, which I really like, while “Song for Chaos”, despite its interesting title, fails to keep my interest. Nice trumpet solo near the end I guess. “Morning Coffee (A Theme from a Film)” - and I don’t know if it actually is; well, I don’t care, has a nice relaxed vibe going for it and this is then blown away into the sky by “Number One (Last Request)” which, I have to say, if it were my last request this would not be it. Very chaotic and quite annoying. “Number Two (Down at the Mission)”, while I must force myself to avoid the obvious toilet reference, don’t do nothing for me neither. How’s that for a bunch of double negatives? You ain’t seen not nothing yet pal, you ain’t. Seriously, much better is “Dawning”, a slow almost folky song where for once the flute actually does not annoy me, in fact it enhances the song, and we end on the rather excellent and laid-back “Got to Get Away,” however although it would be unkind to say that’s what I’m thinking now, this album, while a decent one, still has not shown me any reason why it should be regarded prog rock of any stripe. Maybe guitars and fiddles and flutes mixed with brass makes it progressive brass, but I’m as wise now as I was when I began, which is not very,

Favourite track(s): Things I Should’ve Been, Never Say Die, Dawning, Got to Get Away
Least favourite track(s): This Time Tomorrow, Number One (Last Request)
Personal Rating: 2.0

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

(I know I know: it's shit but it's the best I could get after several attempts. It says "Voice(s) of the Future: The History of the Synthesiser")

Without doubt, there’s one instrument which has been and is identified with progressive rock, even though it has been used in other genres since. Prog rock, along with maybe space and psychedelia, was one of the first music genres to utilise the incredible power of the synthesiser, allowing all kinds of crazy effects and sounds to be made, and also allowing a prog rock band to introduce other instruments into their music (cello, sax, harmonica and so on) that they may not have had, needed players for or strictly speaking knew how to play. Once you could play a synth line that instrument could be reproduced, often so well that you would swear it was actually being played itself. Synthesisers allowed a prog band to really fill out their sound; whereas before you had the basics of guitar, bass, drums and maybe keyboards, now the keyboard, in the form of a synthesiser, could be almost any instrument required or desired. From grand piano to Jew’s harp and from violin to even percussion sounds like castanets, a good synthesiser could produce them all.

In later eras, of course, this led to the synthesiser, or “synth”, being accused of not being a real instrument, of creating everything - including, if required, guitar and bass - on its keyboard, and therefore only really mimicking the sounds of those other instruments. It allowed, however, one man or woman to become an entire band, and many have gone on to successful careers needing nobody else in their band but themselves. Obvious proponents of this kind of one-man-band using a synth would be Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis and the like, with less perhaps well-known but nevertheless successful artists in the field of black metal (Panopticon) and electronica (Solar Fields) .

But the world-famous synth had humble beginnings, and this is where I intend to trace them, from the very first electronic organs and up to analogue synthesisers, right up to the Korgs, Yamahas and Rolands stacked up like rows of rockets on an artillery truck that we see today.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Part I: Room for Improvement - Size Matters


You might, or might not, be surprised to find that the history of the synthesiser - or at least, the electric organ - goes back to the last years of the nineteenth century, when inventor Thaddeus Cahill (1867 - 1934) built what is widely regarded as the world’s first electronic instrument, which he called the telharmonium, or the dynamophone. It was not quite what you would call portable, weighing in at approximately seven tons for the “lite” model, going all the way up to 200 tons for the top of the range, nor was it easily affordable to probably anyone other than the president of the United States, with a price tag of $200,000, which was massive money for then, about $5.5 million today. Yeah. Not the kind of thing you asked Santa to bring you for Christmas!

It will however come as no surprise then that it was less than wildly successful, in fact only three models were ever built, and none sold. The telharmonium used telephone wires in order to transmit its music, and a primitive form of loudspeaker involving paper cones connected to telephone receivers. It was absolutely massive, taking up a whole room, and as vacuum tubes had yet to be invented, it relied on huge electric dynamos (hence its alternate name, one assumes) which consumed masses of power in order to generate the music. In addition, as no real thought seems to have been given to a way to isolate the telharmonium’s signal, its music often merged with the conversation of people on phone lines, making a strange mixture of voices and weird electronic music. No doubt some callers thought their telephones were haunted!

Perhaps it might come as a shock to discover that the telharmonium was a polyphonic instrument, which I personally think is pretty amazing, given that it was the first electronic one too. However it was not to be the trailblazer its inventor had intended it to be, and didn’t even retain interest as a curiosity, Cahill’s younger brother receiving precisely no responses to his ebay advert: “free to good home, the first telharmonium. Weighs 7 ton, will run on a charge of 671 kilowatts.” Heavy metal, indeed.

Whether the stupendous lack of success the telharmonium had was to blame and scared off other inventors from making forays into this arena, or for some other reason, but the world would have to wait another thirty years before anything even slightly similar came on the market. When two more or less made the same bid for glory at the same time, both inventors had learned lessons from Cahill’s massive white elephant, and their machines were much more manageable. And affordable. I’m not sure which came first, as both seem to have been invented in 1928, so I’ll just go alphabetically.


Maurice Martenot (1898 - 1980)

This time it was a musician who invented the thing. Maurice Martenot was a French cellist, but like Cahill had experience with radio, having been an operator in World War I. I see here that though he invented the ondes Martnot in 1928 he did not perfect it for another ten years, so that would probably put him behind our next candidate. Still, for now let’s stick with him. His invention, as I just said, was called the ondes Martenot, and this is it.

As you can see, it’s already far closer to what we would consider an organ, even a piano or harpsichord, than was the behemoth Cahill tried to unleash on the world. Sort of like, I guess, the personal computer following those huge room-filling monsters they had in the forties and fifties, with punched-cards and spinning reels of tape. Yes, much more like it. The name, apparently, means “Martenot waves”, though he did also call it the less grandiose ondes musicales, “musical waves”. As you can hear in the video below, it doesn’t however sound like any organ you’ve heard, not even the dreaded Bontempi or that crappy Casio you got for your sixth birthday. It makes sounds that recall scary movies and old sixties and seventies incomprehensible science fiction movies shown late on Channel 4, or episodes of Quatermass or something. Very, well, wibbly.

Oh wait I’m wrong there. Watching the video I see the ondonist, Cynthia Millar was only playing a specific piece, and that the keyboard can in fact reproduce normal instrument sounds. Interestingly, and I’ve never seen this before, it’s the left hand, as she says, that is the heart of the machine, as without its use absolutely nothing works on the keyboard, as you’ll see if you watch it. She demonstrates that by leaving the left untouched and playing with the right, there is no sound at all. So it’s a sort of control box on the left with a wooden pedal that regulates the volume and the pitch of the instrument. She also mentions - quite important I would think - that the ondes Martenot cannot mimic any other instrument, and is usually expected to act as a backup to the orchestra, so therefore, while a precursor to them, it couldn’t really be considered any real kind of synthesiser in itself.

The actual operation of the instrument is, I feel, a little hard to explain, especially when I’m neither a (real) musician or an engineer, so watching the video is the best thing if you want to learn about it, but basically it seems to use a sort of ribbon strip on the keyboard in conjunction with that keyboard and the left-hand electronic control. And speakers figure into it somewhere as well. Maurice Martenot took it on tour in 1930, so it was certainly known at this stage. I doubt it made the biggest splash though, being mostly as I said, according to Ms. Millar, an instrument that stays in the background. Its lack of popularity may also have been due to the inventor’s disinterest in mass-producing the instrument; he only made them to order, and they were and are known to be extremely delicate and easy to damage, which further discouraged people from buying one.

Not surprisingly, given the time frame, they have been used mostly in the classical music genre, though again given the weird sounds they make the ondes Martenot also features in such science fiction movies as Dr. Who and the Daleks (1964) and Mars Attacks! (1996), and you’ll also here it in the classic Laurence of Arabia (1962). More contemporary uses include its use on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, Tom Waits’s The Black Rider and Blur’s Damon Albarn's Monkey: Journey to the West.


Leon Theremin (1896 - 1993)

Nothing even close to an actual keyboard on the next effort, invented by a brilliant Russian physicist who was also responsible for the first proper television apparatus his home country had ever seen, and was technically one of the first real Russian spies, creating a listening device called “The Thing” in 1945, which was used to spy on American embassies as it was hidden inside a plaque given as a gift. Theremin certainly had an interesting life, being sent to the gulag in 1938, where it seems he worked with other top inventors and engineers, among them Andrei Tupolev, who would become one of the Soviet Union’s most successful aircraft designers, and fighting in both the First World War and the Russian Civil War. He also shocked polite Russian society by marrying outside his race, when he took a black woman as his wife.

Although he was released from the gulag in 1947 he voluntarily continued working for the KGB, and in 1967 he was banned from playing his theremin at the Moscow Conservatory of Music when the director put into words the Soviet Union’s attitude towards electronic music: "electricity is not good for music; electricity is to be used for electrocution". Lovely. His theremins were thrown out of the place. Theremins? Oh yeah. Those.

There it is. One of them anyway. Odd little thing. No keyboard, no keys. Chances are you may have seen one of these at some point. The idea is to manipulate sound waves by using your hand in a sort of waving, plucking motion, I guess similar to a harpist. Just, you know, without the harp. Interestingly, like many great inventions the theremin (which I suppose can’t really be called a great invention as it was never that popular, but still) came about by accident, when Theremin realised that while adapting the dielectric motion detector he called the “radio watchman” to produce an audio tone, the pitch changed when his hand moved about.

Once he had invented and perfect the theremin, he moved to America where he licensed it to RCA, who marketed it as the Thereminovox, and, with stunning either bad luck or lack of foresight, released it just as the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 hit. Unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to buy one, or could afford one, or were too busy jumping out of windows to their deaths to buy… well, you get the idea. It wasn’t a good time for frivolous purchases. Or any purchases. When men walked around with signs saying “Will work for food”, nobody was thinking about cool new gadgets to buy. It would in fact be the father of the modern synthesiser, Robert Moog, who we’ll meet later, who would reinvigorate public interest in the theremin, an interest which would lead to his own invention of the world’s first analogue synthesiser.

(Very interesting for us progheads, here’s someone playing Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” on one).

You could say the theremin is almost worked by magic, if you knew nothing about electronics. There is no human contact with the machine. Two antennae control volume and pitch, and the player stands at a distance from the instrument and waves his or her hands against either, controlling the flow. It’s a bit technical and I’m not the one to explain it properly but if you want to look it up you can do so here.

Most famously used on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (actually a similar instrument called an electro-theremin) the instrument was also employed by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and heavy metal band Tesla, as well as in science fiction movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World and Ed Wood. Oddly enough, and despite popular belief, it was not used on Forbidden Planet, nor in Doctor Who.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Synthgirl

Great writeup!

So many people don't know anything about the history of electronic music, or how far back it goes. I've seen people online who think Kraftwerk invented it in the 70s. I appreciate you diving into the origins.

Early electronic music is super fascinating. You can hear echoes of those early artists from nearly a century ago in lots of modern ambient, industrial and experimental electronic genres.

Trollheart

Yeah I was surprised too. It's amazing what you can find when you start researching. Mind you, finding a book on the history was not easy. No, I do NOT want to know how to play it! No, I do NOT want to know how to fix it! No I do NOT want engineering schematics for it. God damn it!

Think yer ma would have allowed you to have a telharmonium in your bedroom when you were a kid?

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Album title: Asylum
Artist: Cressida
Nationality: English
Label: Deram
Chronology: Second and final
Grade: C
The Trollheart Factor: 2
Factsheet: Second and final album from Cressida, who failed to impress me with their debut, which we did in the Over the Garden Wall section for 1970.
Tracklisting: Asylum/ Munich/ Goodbye, Post Office Tower, Goodbye/ Survivor/ Reprieved/ Lisa/ Summer Weekend of a Lifetime/ Let Them Come When They Will

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Album title: Arena
Artist: Marsupilami
Nationality: English
Label:
Chronology: Second and final
Grade: C
The Trollheart Factor: 2
Factsheet: Same thing: we did their first in the OTGW and I don’t recall being terribly interested in it. This was their second album, and their last. Looking at the track listing it seems it may have been a concept album based on ancient Rome and maybe the Gladiators? Don’t know, never will.
Tracklisting: Prelude to the Arena/ Peace of Rome/ The Arena/ Time Shadows/ Spring

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Album title: L’Uomo
Artist: Osanna
Nationality: Italian
Label: Fonit
Chronology: Debut
Grade: A
The Trollheart Factor: 0
Factsheet: Another RPI band, this was their debut. They went on to record nine albums, to date: their latest was in 2021. Oddly, as you can see from the track listing, some of their songs (at least on this album) are in Italian, some in English. Pick one, lads, for the love of the Virgin Mary huh?
Tracklisting: Introduzione / L'uomo /Mirror Train /Non sei vissuto mai /Vado verso una meta / In un vecchio cieco /L'amore vincerà di nuovo /Everybody's Gonna See You Die /Lady Power

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018