Mike Oldfield - Viareggio 9/5/84 (Discovery Tour) (DVD)
Oldfield was a MAJOR influence on my musical journey, in fact if I remember my history right I actually heard Ommadawn before just about anything else in the same field and it remains a permanent favorite even if I only have to play it every few years. But what strikes me now is how unaffected I am by just about everything else in his catalog. I enjoy parts of the rest of his albums up through Incantations (and the live album Exposed) but his string of 80s album causes me some discomfort and Discovery could very well be the least impressive of all of them. This early 80s stretch intrigued me at one time with suites like “Taurus” (and iirc some of that’s here as is some of Ommadawn - unless I’m confusing a number of Olfield things I saw over the last couple weeks), but I can’t say the vocals or approach of Maggie Reilly do anything for me and in just about everything Oldfield’s done since Incantations, there’s a lot of weird pogoing and ponderous 4/4 pounding that bores the socks off of me. I really wish I got to see this stuff twenty years ago when I would have appreciated it more.
Klaus Schulze - Cyborg (deluxe edition)
Is Cyborg Schulze’s strangest and most bleak album? In many ways it seems to point to his later work starting with Dig It in that it evinces a rather chilly and industrial sort of sound that was a lot different than what he did for the rest of the 70s. It’s an album that works better for me when I’m not fully concentrating on it. When I am it sounds like his organ with effects is barely hanging on for dear life, very lo-fi sounding and definitely a home studio recording. Sometimes, though, the whole thing renders itself transparent and the reverb twitters and whatever he’s using as a timer become what he was to imagine later on albums like Picture Music and Timewind and the whole thing sounds glorious. While it’s strange to add a bonus track from several years later, it’s so good, by the time you get there it doesn’t matter. An 11? Sometimes more.
Behold…The Arctopus - Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning
Behold…The Acrtopus - Arctopaylpse Now … Warmageddon Later (EP)
I almost hate talking about albums like this because it takes so long to type out these titles, almost as long as it takes to listen to the rather short EPs. I’m working from the Relapse (I think) reissue which starts with the more recent, um, Cyborg and then pops back to the original EP before going through some live renditions of the same material, which may or may not have come as MP3s on the original EP. Anyway all of this is as thorny and elaborate as their music which is intense and very complicated metal riffing with what sound like Warr guitars or something similar - that is, lots of tapping and such. Like anything of this sort I try leaping ahead to what I might think after absorbing the compositions, half the time I think they might have something memorable while the other half makes me thing of a string of challenging exercises. There’s still something a bit underproduced about the band that I like, as any artists approaching complex keep it a bit rough. I will complain about the booklet and the tiny font and typing, though, sometimes style and outlay overwhelms the content and this is definitely the case.