Greaves, John / Peter Blegvad - Kew.Rhone CD
SKU
21-ReR QR1
Easily available again for the first time in many, many years.
John Greaves was the bassist for Henry Cow during their prime. He later went onto an interesting solo career featuring more "song oriented" material, and also some fine writing collaborations with Peter Blegvad.
This is the CLASSIC wordplay/musicplay first release by this brilliant duo; one of the artsong high marks of the 70s! Now on ReR where it always belonged, it comes in a digipack edition with the lyrics. An essential hear!
For decades this was a cult item. The songs are accessible, but difficult, the music - recorded at Carla Bley and Mike Mantler's studio back in the JCOA days - is eccentric, extremely complex, but still catchy. Bley, Mantler and the legendary Andrew Cyrille all appear on it in arrangements that are pretty off the wall. It's rock, it's jazz, it's a song cycle, it's a one-off hybrid with some traces of Henry Cow and Escalator Over the Hill, it's deep or indulgent, or both - but whichever line of approach you adopt, it's Art. After the Henry Cow/Slaphappy merger, Peter Blegvad left that band, and John Greaves followed him a year or so later. The two of them then concocted this highly ambitious project - a marriage of high literary ambition full of Ouliposeque anagrams, palindromes, missing letters and wordgames, and meticulous musical complexity rooted in show music, jazz and the fringes of experimental rock. The album design, text and musical content together embody a continuous, integrated, work: so the texts refer to the artwork (both are by Peter Blegvad) and vice versa; neither quite makes sense without the other. "A neglected masterpiece of surreal rock...a musical Finnegan's Wake" - Clive Bell. The Wire.
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