Of Mellotrons, Sturgeon’s Law
and Prog That Isn’t Prog
Michael
A. Gardiner
Something there is in a mellotron that does not love the rain.
In fact, mellotrons don’t like the rain at all. They are too big to fit in an anorak,
too dense to float and they just don’t swim. Ethereal chorus? Yes. Backstroke? No.
Nonetheless there we were, Brad Barker and me, carrying a
mellotron through the rain. We were a little more than T minus two days from Nick
D’Virgilio performing Kevin Gilbert’s The Shaming of the True and the
debut of the new Spock’s Beard at the ProgWest festival in Claremont California. We,
however, were over 100 miles south of the venue in San Diego trying to load the ‘tron
into the back of a brand spanking new Jeep Cherokee as the wrath of the Gods was being
graphically demonstrated to us in liquid form.
“Maybe we should take a pass on the ‘tron, Brad,” I said.
“Nonesense,” Brad replied. “Ryo needs a mellotron of his own.
He’s the master practitioner of the arcane art. Ryo not owning a ‘tron is like Monet
without a paintbrush.”
Whether or not that was so really didn’t strike me as close to
the point. “He could always paint perfectly rectangular white lines on an endless
desert highway,” I muttered under my breath.
“What,” asked Brad.
“Oh nothing,” I said. “Its just that I can’t really see that a
wet ‘tron will be of much use to Ryo. They’re notoriously fickle at the best of
times, right?”
“We’ll get it there just fine,” he said, grunting as we hefted
the machine. Brad, the Advertising Director of
ProgRadio.com was determined to
make Spock’s Beard’s Ryo Okumoto the first ProgRadio.com-sponsored artist by donating
the ‘tron to him come hell or high water – and the later seemed distinctly likely.
“Besides, Brad…he might miss a spot.”
And yet, there was something very appropriate about
driving to a prog festival with a ‘tron stuffed into the back of the SUV. Even the
thought of the ‘tron made me all atwitter for the weekend. It would be nonstop
‘trons. ‘Trons, ‘trons and more ‘trons. After all, what else could a prog festival
be?
But did we have really have to bring Ryo his new ‘tron in the
pouring rain?
There’s no substitute for good contingency planning. ProgWest 2002 was scheduled to
take place in the Seeley Mudd Auditorium on the campus of the Claremont School of
Theology. Good planning? That depends. Seeley Mudd was, quite thankfully, located
on the campus’ equivalent of Temple Mount. Had it been located elsewhere it might
have been a flood-out. Good planning. The flip side, of course, is that Johnny
Virgil’s agent’s video idea, while perhaps not pissing off “everyone in the whole
fucking world” was uniquely situated to anger a whole panoply of deities.
After ascending Temple Mount we found a terrific little theater
featuring 400 plush seats – about double the size of the previous year’s venue –
arrayed in a fan pattern stemming from a proscenium arch stage, crammed into a a
classic contemporary style structure. The gentle angle of the theater seating boded
well for both the sightlines and sound.
Soundcheck for the festival held more than the usual dose of
anarchy. In the hours before the show Daemonia finally got to check their sound. As
the disembodied thunder of the base drum echoed throughout the nearly empty auditorium
pews, keyboardist Clauido Simonetti announced that he’d located the hall’s grand piano
by extemporizing around a selection from the Baroque Top 40.
All the while the festival’s circled me as I sat in the second
row. There were techs to the left of me. There were techs to the right. All of them
were moving and waiving their arms up, down and sideways to the orders of as troup of
refuges from the local Dungeons & Dragons convention. And make no mistake Prog
Festival audiences – not to mention those that bring the festivals to those audiences
– are, by and large, a fugly lot. Perhaps more to the point they are a fugly MALE
lot. But they love their melotrons.
After a few delays Bob
Rosenthal, one of the festival’s organizers, took to stage right to bring the curtain
open on the festival. The first band was Avant Garden, a Sacremento-based outfit in
existence since 1993. Employing a quartet format featuring guitar, bass drums as well
as sax/flutes, Steve Roach joined them onstage at ProgWest for one song on didjeridoo/general
ambience.
Avant Garden sound is dominantly heavy but also mixes hints of
Return to Forever with the strong King Crimson influence. Their performance at
ProgWest was hot and tight, but also left copious room for them to jam. Live, the
focus of the band is frontman Flamp Sorvari on sax and flutes. His flute playing
alternated between Ian Anderson-style texturalism and Peter Gabriel’s lyricism. At
least at ProgWest, however, Sorvari spent more time on sax than flute.
And while just about any band featuring a saxophone will
inevitably invite jazz references – and the
instrumental nature of the bands music absolutely guarantees such comparisons – in
reality Avant Garden is very firmly rooted in the rock realm. One reason for this is
the strong guitar work of Brian Gould. While he clearly has the chops to burn – and
burn he does – he also has a strong coloristic sensibility.
My one criticism of the band – one that is even more evident on
their albums – is that their sound is a bit busy at times and lacks dynamics. Avant
Garden came on stage and quickly found a high level of intensity…and never really left
it. Of course I did have one more minor gripe about Avant Garden: no ‘tron. How
could it be really good if there was no ‘tron? And yet somehow, it was.
Maudlin Of the Well is prog
meets death metal ... at an intersection ... at 75 miles per hour. It wasn't pretty.
It wasn't professional. Every two songs the band would stop and spend several minutes
tuning up. On at least two instances I could hear people turning to their mates and
asking the operative question: 'how can you tell the difference?'
By midway through their set I felt the lure of Greg Walker's Syn-phonic
vendor table winning out over my duty to review the music. When I made it upstairs
only to find the vendor room closed I didn't have the heart to go back and listen. I
decided to get an early jump on the dinner hour at Viva Madrid, a Spanish restaurant
in Claremont Village. If you would like a review of that meal please drop me an email
at
MAGARDINER@aol.com and I would be
happy to oblige.
Besides, of course Maudlin was no good. After all, they didn’t
have a ‘tron! In reality, of course, the absence of a melotron had less to do with
Maudlin’s performance than Sturgeon’s Law. Named for famed science fiction editor,
Theodore Sturgeon, who was asked how many of the stories submitted to his magazine
were good, Sturgeon’s Law holds that “90 percent of science fiction is crap. Then
again, 90 percent of everything is crap”) Maudlin was a living-breathing testament to
Sturgeon’s Law.
When next I
saw Ryo’s new ‘tron it was in the middle of what can only be called surgery. There it
stood outside the backstage door, a forlorn figure, naked with guts exposed for the
world to see. Alas poor ‘tron I knew thee well. Where is your ethereal chorus now?
Where your awesome strings?
In fact, most of them were hanging out all over the place – not
the strings, exactly, but the tapes on which they were recorded (the mellotron was, of
course, the world’s first sampling keyboard). It was not a pretty sight. What it
was, however, was Ryo’s new progradio.com melotron getting a last once-over before
tomorrow’s Showtime at the hands of Gene, Southern California’s very own Tron Doc.
Daemonia: wow! If Maudlin of the Well was the consensus bust of the festival then
Daemonia was the pleasant surprise. Doubtless few had heard of Daemonia before the
festival word of mouth will inevitably bring their name to more ears now. While few
had heard of Daemonia many of them were probably at least passingly familiar with some
of the music they played. Daemonia features Clauido Simonetti, the former keyboardist
for the classic Italian prog act Goblin known best for their soundtracks to Italian
horror-flickmeister Dario Argento. Most of Daemonia’s set consisted of Goblin’s
classic soundtracks.
If movie soundtracks sound boring to you then you are not alone.
Virtually no one came to ProgWest anxiously breathlessly awaiting the Daemonia set
(with the possible exception of the bandmembers themselves). But there may have been
no more eye-opening performance at the festival than Daemonia’s. They breathed life
into those old soundtracks. They performed with great energy and great enthusiasm.
They brought the house down.
But, while Claudio Simonetti is a classic prog keyboardist with
bona fide First Wave credentials, there was one problem with his
and Daemonia’s performance: no ‘tronDaemonia’s brand of gothic metal prog made me
completely forget the absence of a ‘tron. Sacrilegious as it may be, the ‘tron
was not missed.
Q: How
do you know when you’re at a Prog Festival?
And then came the
crowning moment of the festival for all veteran ‘tron watchers: a band on stage with
two, count them – TWO! – mellotrons. Now that is doubling down on
the prog!
But Radio Massacre International’s sound defies categorization;
it is more magical then musical. It is all about texture and rhythm and barely at all
about harmony. Even melody takes a back seat to the majestic walls of sound and
interlacing sequences that define the band. RMI arose to prominence – or at least
public awareness – out of the same Northern English music scene that produced the
lion’s share of England’s Trance, House, Techno and Electronic acts. And yet while
there is little superficially to connect them to that scene – and perhaps upon closer
examination even less than initially meets the eye – there are some important
connections.
RMI’s music comes at you in waves. Most of RMI’s pieces start
with texture. One of the keyboards announces the piece’s baseline feel and then the
other keyboards and guitar build from
there. They might start with a single note manipulated in real time or it might start
with a plaintive, mournful figure in the lower registers. All that is for certain is
that it will not stay the same for long. Dancing in and out, over and under that
figure or texture will be other figures, other sequences and other texture, sometimes
generated by Gary Houghton’s guitar, more often by other rich, full analog keyboards
and sometimes even drums. As each section of a piece evolves it too will function as
a new baseline over which still newer sequences, figures and textures will dance.
Indeed, despite its history, the obvious musical reference point
for RMI is not trance or techno but rather Tangerine Dream. Take a cross-section of
nearly any random moment on any random RMI album and you could be forgiven for
mistaking it for having come off of Tangram, Stratosfear or any other Tangerine
Dream classic. The juxtaposition of the distinctly rock guitar and the intertwined
keyboard sequences, the deep majesty of the analog keyboard sounds, that strike a
familiar and comforting note.
And yet there are important differences. RMI’s music is, first
and foremost, improvisational. It is loose in structure but also searching. RMI is all
about generating the happy accidents that occur at the ever-changing intersection of
multiple moving bodies. When two sequences converge fascinating things happen opening
rhythmic and textural options that just moments before were closed to view. It is the
creation and exploration of those options that dominates what RMI does in its music.
There was only one negative to RMI’s performance. First and
foremost they may well have been the wrong band to close a day of a festival that
featured four separate bands. It was a long day of listening and RMI’s music is the
sort of subtle stuff that requires close attention. It is not flashy. The band also
did not exactly do much to rectify the situation. They set up their equipment at the
back left corner of the large stage and Keyboardists Steve Dinsdale and Duncan Goddard
essentially stayed put. While guitarist, Houghton, did venture forth to the front and
center of the stage on one occasion he did so with his back and backside prominently
displayed to the assembled masses. Dynamic performers they are not.
But that truly was the only negative of a good show by good
musicians who stretch the boundaries of numerous genres every time they make a tune.
Besides, how could a band not be great when they walk onto stage and play two
‘trons!
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The
morning after the night before I was brought back to the land of the living by the
sounds of Daemonia’s “Suspira” coming through the walls of the hotel from the next
room. At first it was just the soundtrack to my dream. Then, as the song progressed I
slowly awakened….only to have the neighbors snap the music off just as it arrived at
the verge of the big conclusion.
There was only one thing to do. I sprung out of bed,
demonstrating remarkable agility and athleticism for one who had not gotten to sleep
until 1:30 the prior night, and dashed to the wall, pounding on it and shouting: “TURN
THAT GOD DAMNED MUSIC BACK ON!”
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