Ghost (Japan) - Tune In, Turn On, Free Tibet (1999)

Steve:

Japanese psych/folk band Ghost captured my interest in the early 2010s. I had been a fan of another psychedelic Japanese band by the name of Boris, that specialized in drone and experimental psych/metal. I learned that guitarist Michio Kurihara, who frequently played with Boris on their live tours, was also a member of a band called Ghost. I was immediately drawn to Ghost's purity of vision and 60s spiritual orientation. Often, they were fully acoustic, coming across like a reincarnated Incredible String Band, and at other times went for more trippy electric vibes, reminding me of Gong.

If the Gong analogy holds, Masaki Batoh (acoustic guitar, vocals) is the Daevid Allen of Ghost - leading the band on a psychic trajectory that is fully his own creation, and which the band implicitly trust as they lend their instrumental talents in service of his vision. The band reportedly led a nomadic existence, busking in Tokyo train stations and living together in ancient ruins (their 1994 album Temple Stone, a favorite, was recorded in an ancient temple and sounds like it).

Ghost's 1999 album Tune In, Turn On, Free Tibet was released as a companion piece to another album released that same year, Snuffbox Immanence. It was also their final album before a 5-year hiatus, and it serves as a culmination of the first phase of Ghost's existence. It begins with a brief spoken word track, "We Insist", by a voice so distorted I cannot understand it, but I assume it concerns the Tibetan freedom movement, which had gained momentum in the western world and naturally was a hot issue in the east as well.

The next six tracks are all short acoustic-based folk songs enhanced with atmospheric production, wooden flutes, Kurihara's psychedelic electric guitars, and hand percussion. Tracks like these had populated Ghost's earlier albums, but rarely had they been so spare and personal. On previous albums such tracks often had the feel of communal celebrations or prayers; on Tune In, they sport the same melancholic beauty one might find on a Nick Drake album. The band acknowledges one of its influences by covering "Images of April", written by the 1960s folk/prog outfit Pearls Before Swine.

The title track, lasting half of the album at 33 minutes, abandons lyricism in favor of exploratory improvisation. Beginning acoustically with free-flowing guitar strums, vibes, cello, and quietly echoed electric guitar, its serenity is easy to get sucked into. It continues in this manner for at least 20 minutes (turning more rhythmic for a while), before turning weirder and darker. The psychedelic focus of the final 13 minutes or so resembles the extreme experiments of early Tangerine Dream or Cluster. It's a nightmarish turn that gets downright creepy by the end. Electronic effects and guitar feedback clash in a dark drone that is about as far into the avant-garde as Ghost ever got. Muffled tribal drums eventually enter, along with the distorted voice heard in the first track.

Overall, Tune In, Turn On, Free Tibet is a very affecting album that juxtaposes the serene beauty of the majority of the album with the unsettling finale. 

As a postscript, the reason I listed this band as Ghost (Japan) is because there is a more recently formed Swedish theatrical metal band of the same name that has become popular. Although I have not listened to the Swedish band, I am nonetheless slightly annoyed with them because whenever I mention the Japanese band, I have to qualify it as "not the Swedish band, the Japanese band" who were there first. Not their fault, I guess. Now that the Japanese Ghost is officially broken up, I wish the Swedish Ghost good luck.

Dan:

I relate to the 1960s vibe on Tune In, Turn On, Free Tibet, having experienced the music of the late 60s firsthand. The phrase "tune in and turn on" originated at that time among folk musicians who were usually the first to protest human rights violations and express anti-war sentiments. Amidst the Vietnam war, Richard Nixon's presidency, and the Civil Rights movement in the US, there were plenty of issues to protest. Japan, of course, had much to grieve after World War II, and Vietnam was a lot closer to Asian people's lives. Coupled with the rise of Communist China, and its controversial Tibetan policies, it's understandable why American protest music was influential in Japanese prog circa 1999.

The first seven songs on Tune In, do a nice job of translating 60s folk-rock and psychedelia into an Asian context. If anything, the translation is a little too literal and privileges the calmer, nonviolent aspect of protest. (Nothing close to The Electric Flag's "Another Country" is attempted by Ghost). Incidentally, the title "We Insist" is taken from jazz drummer Max Roach's album of the same name with the subtitle Freedom Now Suite, released in 1961.

Ghost's mild protest changes about one-third of the way into the long title track. A chugging beat presages a distorted vocal sung over an increasingly intense background of noise, which is suddenly interrupted by some free play amongst bells, drums and violin that morph into a charming melody. There's a bit of back-and-forth between freedom and discipline for the next few minutes, as shifting aural images are painted. The track then turns into the nightmarish avant-garde section that Steve writes about. Nothing here will frighten the horses, but it might provoke questions from family members worrying about your mental health. Fortunately, there's enough variety of sounds during the closing section to give the listener more to do than just survive the nightmare. 

The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin (1999)

Steve:

I first encountered The Flaming Lips in the late 80s while in college. At the time, they seemed to be just one of many spaced out garage psych/punk bands that populated the college radio airwaves. I was into their second album, Oh My Gawd!, mainly because of one track that was particularly brilliant and stood out from the pack: the verbosely titled "One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning". At over nine minutes, the song builds slowly from a quiet, spacy haze to a tense instrumental section that climaxes in roaring guitar riffs before settling back to the haze where it began. The band were still relatively unskilled musically and vocally at this time, but I've always loved a good multipart epic, and that tune delivered. Unfortunately, their next album, Telepathic Surgery, failed to excite me so I stopped following them for a while.

Fast forward 10 years to the release of The Soft Bulletin. I remember the album getting a lot of buzz in the press, and the hype sticker on the CD gushed praise calling it the "Album of the Decade" and the "Pet Sounds of the 1990s". I knew the band had grown and improved in the intervening years, but a Beach Boys comparison was still a surprise. The comparison is somewhat apt, as the album shies away from guitar-based arrangements in favor of orchestration. "Buggin'" in particular sounds Brian Wilson-ish with its playful "Wouldn't It Be Nice" inspired motifs and child-like lyrics that sing of summertime, the heat of the sun, mosquito bites and other imagistic remembrances.  

The key creative players in the Flaming Lips at this point are guitarist-vocalist Wayne Coyne (in the forefront of the photo) and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd (to his right), who joined the band in the early 90s. After Drozd joined, the band turned increasingly experimental, effectively making the band into the 90s standard bearers of the "what will they do next?" camp (a role that Pink Floyd had arguably played a generation before). 

The first major stunt the Flaming Lips revealed was Zaireeka (1997), released on four CDs designed to be played simultaneously. Since then, their (some might say gimmicky) advances have included: a six-hour long song ("I Found a Star on the Ground"); a 24-hour-long song ("6 Skies H3", a track I've listened to a couple of times and really enjoy bits of); a full-album reinterpretation of Dark Side of the Moon; a double album with Miley Cyrus (Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz (2017)); and other stuff I haven't looked into yet. As a result, The Flaming Lips have acquired a reputation in the modern music scene as the standard-bearers of experimentation and boundary-pushing. Understandably, there has been some backlash for self-indulgence particularly for the Cyrus collaboration, which was not received well by either fanbase. Despite their zany side projects, The Lips have taken the main body of their album discography seriously and continue to release interesting music to this day.

But back to The Soft Bulletin.... One endearing aspect of The Flaming Lips is their childlike view of the world - naive but passionate, and free of the filters and hangups that we acquire as we age and settle into social norms. Take "Race for the Prize", the album's opening track. It begins with a harp flourish and a bold Mellotron theme, setting up pensive lyrics that touchingly describe two scientists both working on a cure (for what, it doesn't say), emphasizing the very human aspects of competition, passion, determination, and dedication to family:

Two scientists were racing for the good of all mankind

Both of them side by side, so determined

Locked in heated battle for the cure that is their prize

But it's so dangerous, but they're determined

Theirs is to win if it kills them

They're just humans with wives and children

Closer to home, "The Spiderbite Song" describes the singer's true feelings about a real accident his bandmate had:

When you got that spiderbite on your hand

I thought we would have to break up the band

To lose your arm would surely upset your brain

The poison then could reach your heart from a vein

I was glad that it didn't destroy you

How sad that would be

Cos if it destroyed you

It would destroy me

The Flaming Lips have many fine albums to their name, but The Soft Bulletin, if not their best effort (debatable), draws a clear dividing line between their psychedelic guitar band phase and their experimental pop architect phase. The division is overly simplified, as they've always been experimental to a degree and they never completely abandoned guitars but, as Radiohead had done with OK Computer, they elevated their art to a level higher than bands of their generation had tried before. This greatly increased their stature among rock critics and expanded their fanbase to include listeners who might otherwise not have cared to check them out.  

Overall, The Soft Bulletin is not an album I play very often, and I tend to lose interest by the end of the album, but it's emblematic of a new sophistication in alternative rock that valued the production and conceptual ambitions drawn from progressive rock giants of years past.  

Dan:

The Soft Bulletin is surely one of the biggest surprises amongst the albums that Steve elected for the blog. With Steve flown from the family nest, I missed out on most of the under-the-radar rock albums while I concentrated on work and a career move that brought us to Atlanta in 1995. Coincidentally, Steve had already moved to Atlanta, so it was kind of a reunification of the family, along with Amy settling down later in Charlotte NC, a mere 4-hour drive away. But I digress. Coming to The Soft Bulletin fresh allows me to appreciate what I missed but now can include in the conceptual scaffolding where I store all my arcane musical knowledge. 

Steve mentioned The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds as a possible reference point for the Lips, and I can definitely hear that connection. Its childishness also reminds me of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour. Not many prog bands delve into such influences, and fewer pull it off as well as The Flaming Lips do, at least on The Soft Bulletin, which remains my only encounter with the band. I'm making mental notes to spend more time with this record just to feel the positive vibes emanating mainly from the instrumental arrangements but also from the few lyrics I could understand well enough without seeing them written out. I'm encouraged that there might be more overlooked gems out there to diversify my prog rock portfolio.

Further notes: I've read some pretty rave reviews of the 2-LP vinyl versions released in 2011 and 2019. I can imagine the enhanced soundstage for the orchestrations on LP, as the CD tends to put everything in the middle. Also, I notice that the CD has multiple versions of a couple of songs whereas the LP format omits them. Nice to have a choice, I suppose.

Sigur Rós - Ágætis Byrjun (1999)

Dan:

It's not often that I get gob smacked by any kind of music, but that's the trendy word I'd use to describe my first encounter with Sigur Rós and their album Ágætis Byrjun. As usual, Steve loaned it to me figuring I needed to expand my horizons a bit further. He's got a pretty good hit rate in finding things I like. But I was skeptical about an Icelandic band that sings in a language they invented (Hopelandic) and was described as "post rock," the first time I heard of that genre.

The opening track on Ágætis Byrjun is the 1:36 minute almost inaudible "Intro." "Svefn-g-engla" follows with a few pings from a keyboard and some rich chords from what sounds like an organ. Then a torrent of sound begins to state a melody that moves from one massive shape to another, pierced by a high-pitched falsetto voice singing words that actually don't need any translation to make their impact. Thus begins what has become one of the favorite tracks in my entire collection.

The singer is named Jón Þór "Jónsi" Birgisson, and he apparently has a huge fan base. His mates are Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson (drums), Georg Hólm (bass), and Kjartan Sveinsson (keyboards). It seems impossible that a quartet playing conventional rock instruments could produce such thunderous sounds behind one of the purest singing voices I've heard. (Perhaps the inability to understand the lyric leads me to focus on vocal quality?) Whatever the case, this band is unique and highly skilled at reaching a mass audience.

Some of the mystery surrounding the wall of sound (with apologies to the Grateful Dead) is Jónsi's use of a violin bow to play his guitar. I had never seen anyone do that until I saw the DVD of a live concert included with Inni (2011), a live album by Sigur Rós. Much of the DVD is filmed to convey a sense of mystery over the band, for example by blurring shots of the band and filming in black and white. That approach seems fitting to me. 

The rest of Ágætis Byrjun runs through a set of original songs played at different meters with wide dynamics. The variety makes for a great album program and sealed the band's reputation as a leading voice in the post-rock genre.

I eventually borrowed Steve's other Sigur Rós albums: Von (1997), ( ) (2002), Taak... (2005), Inni (2011), Valtari (2012), and Keivkur (2013). I also downloaded the 2-hour-and-28-minute Sigur Rós Presents Liminal Sleep, and most recently ÁTTA (2023). ÁTTA currently receives the most listening time and will be reviewed later in the blog. For the curious, I suggest beginning with Ágætis Byrjun and investigate as many others as you like, but not missing ( ) and Valtari. There's quite a bit of variety across albums, so it's normal to have favorites among them. 

I would add that Liminal Sleep is not actually a new album; it's literally music to put you to sleep and was assembled by reprocessing sounds from the band's earlier works. It's more interesting than the sound of a refrigerator motor or air conditioning fan, but not by much. 

Steve:

Along with Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sigur Rós were among the first bands I latched onto once I discovered the post-rock world in the late 2000s. Of the three, Sigur Rós have always been the most mysterious to me; it's often hard to believe the sounds are being produced by a four-piece rock band. Some of this unusual sound comes from the bowed guitar, as Dan points out, but the fragile textures are also the product of a light but nimble touch on the part of bass, drums, and keyboards.  

The 2002 album ( ) remains my favorite album of theirs, but I believe that Ágætis Byrjun is the best introduction to the band; indeed the title translates roughly as "A Good Start". Despite the lengthy nature of most of the tracks, each is easy to enjoy - provided you adjust your mindset to the "heavenly" position. Even the louder sections on this album show remarkable finesse and attention to sweet melodies. One of the more dynamic tracks to showcase their stylistic range is "Ný batterí" ("New Batteries"), built on a gentle bed of bass notes, gradually building to a spirited conclusion with an insistent drum pulse and horn accompaniment, with the horns eventually taking over the arrangement to the fadeout.

I am also very partial to "Olsen Olsen" (not about Mary-Kate and Ashley, to my knowledge, though that would be funny) for its rolling, optimistic 6/8 meter. Like "Ný batterí" it is propelled by a repeated bass line, and as the song develops it acquires a rich orchestral arrangement that is very impressive.  

A relaxed state of mind certainly helps when listening to this band. The experience is unlike that of most bands, even those in the post-rock world. It's deeply emotional music but it's not clear exactly what emotions are being conveyed. I've heard some describe this music as overwhelmingly sad, but others describe it as joyful, hopeful and uplifting. Listeners will definitely feel something; beauty in music, as in nature, comes in many forms.

Camel - Rajaz (1999)

Dan:

According to the liner notes in the CD booklet, "rajaz" refers to the movement of a camel and describes a metre used in classical Arabic poetry. The rhythm of the camel is the inspiration for a new set of songs in the Camel discography. Rajaz, the band's 13th album since their self-titled debut in 1973, is their best since Breathless. 

As we mention in several other posts about Camel, the band's history was marked by frequent personnel changes and disputes over content. Following The Single Factor (1982), Andrew Latimer and Susan Hoover appeared to avoid past conflicts within the band by creating albums around specific stories.

Nude (1981) laid the groundwork for themed future works. Nude was about a soldier who disappeared before his war ended and was found years later ("Tell me no lies, has peace arrived, or is this some kind of joke?"). The Single Factor (1982) went back to the "let's write some clever singles" approach, but Stationary Traveller (1984) resumed the storytelling with a romantic saga set in post-war Germany. From there, Dust and Dreams (1991) followed Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath narrative charting the western migration in America during the dust bowl years, and Harbour of Tears (1996) chronicled Irish emigration to America. Hoover's skilled songwriting with its "heart-on-sleeve" lyrics turned each of these albums into fan favorites, and no one bothered trying to write hit singles anymore.

Rajaz is the first album by Camel to exploit the allegory of life in the desert. The title track refers specifically to the nomadic experience:

The souls of heaven

Are stars at night

They will guide us on our way

Until we meet again

Another day

When the dawn has come

Sing the song

All day long

But most songs are about everyday struggles analogous to nomadic life. "Lost and Found" is about finding one's way; "The Final Encore" could be about the end of a journey or the end of a concert performance by the band:

And now

The final encore

A last farewell

The fantasy is over

The spirit

 flies away

Camel concerts often ended with "Lady Fantasy" as a finale or encore, but more generally the song refers to the end of anybody's day. 

"Shout" is a powerfully expressive song about wanting to help a friend in despair. "Straight to My Heart" is a touching reminiscence about Latimer's early engagement with music and the sound of his favorite red guitar which still "takes my breath away." The two instrumentals - the opening "Three Wishes" and "Sahara" - make Rajaz a perfect album, in my opinion. They're strategically placed to keep the wistful songs from dominating the album.

The final cut, "Lawrence," is a specific tribute to the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, who was "swallowed by the sand" but who continues to haunt the desert. "Lawrence" is the pièce de résistance of the album, stretching out almost 11 minutes and featuring one of Latimer's most heartfelt guitar solos (among many others). 

Steve:

In the early 1990s, nearly 10 years after Camel released what I assumed was their final album, Stationary Traveler, I was surprised by a new Camel album whilst CD shopping. That CD was Dust and Dreams, released on Camel's newly incorporated Camel Productions label, which initiated a new phase in the band's career. Although I failed to follow this next phase as closely as Dan has, revisiting their third album after this rebirth, Rajaz, has been a welcome reminder as to how potent the band's creativity remained at this point.

Andy Latimer's guitar playing seems especially inspired on this album, with the two instrumentals ("Three Wishes" and "Sahara") taking their usual roles on a Camel album, showcasing Latimer's most fanciful musical ideas while the vocal pieces generally follow a more narrative focus. Even on the vocal pieces, however, such as "The Final Encore", there are surprising musical turns. The first 3 minutes of this 8-minute number uses guitar effects and an E-bow (a device held near the guitar strings to vibrate them without being struck, giving a sound like that of a bowed string instrument) to create a distinctly "desert" atmosphere. Immediately following this captivating track, the title track spends its first few minutes in a fully acoustic mode, augmented by the return of Latimer's flute playing, making for a lovely musical passage.

True to Dan's word, "Lawrence" puts Latimer's best foot forward in terms of the emotional guitar soloing that he has always been known for. Being the longest track on an album full of lengthy tracks, and being the closing track to boot, raises expectations pretty high, and it does not disappoint. Many fans rank Rajaz as the finest Camel album post-1990, and often quite high overall, and I feel it deserves this high regard.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (1999)

Steve:

Around the late 2000s I spent a lot of time on the forum for ProgArchives.com. It was here that I first became aware of a genre known as "post-rock". As I understood it, post-rock was characterized by elongated song structures, but relatively static music. In this style, mood, texture, and the building and release of tension over otherwise simple music was paramount. It was analogous to soundtrack music, where the film in question was inside the listener's mind. 

I was surprised to learn that one of the formative albums often cited as giving rise to this genre was Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk, an album I had owned and loved for nearly 20 years by that time. So I was definitely curious to learn more. A forum post cited Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven as a key album in the post-rock genre. I had heard the name before but mistakenly assumed they were a dark metal band because of their name.  

Godspeed is a 9-piece band from Montréal featuring a large array of instruments. Each player is simply described as a "musician," not as a specialist on a particular instrument. The photo reveals violinist Sophie Trudeau, two bassists (electric and acoustic), a drummer, and a kneeling person. And that's less than half the band.

Lift Your Skinny Fists spans four vinyl sides, with one continuous program of music occupying each side. Each program consists of separately named movements, but the complete pieces are commonly known simply as "Storm", "Static", "Sleep", and "Antennas to Heaven". The two CDs are indexed as just four tracks. 

Godspeed's general strategy is to take simple ideas and develop them symphonically, gradually building tension to reach a deafening climax before breaking down and starting again. Often, as on the introduction to "Sleep", they use spoken word tapes to set the scene (in this case, an old man reminiscing about how people used to sleep on the beach in Coney Island, but not anymore). The voice recordings help to underscore the political undercurrents beneath the surface of their music.

The insert on the LP and CD offers a written diagram of how the band imagined each side progressing, giving some insight into the band's composition strategy. 

My first experience listening to Skinny Fists was quite memorable. I had just purchased the album on CD, and while driving back home, I heard the opening track, "Storm".  Somehow, my imagination merged with the music, and the uplifting opening theme (like a theme from an imaginary western, to borrow an idea from Jack Bruce) actually caused me to choke up and shed a tear or two on that drive. The other three sides are less immediately poignant, but also raise emotional peaks like those on "Storm". "Sleep" in particular builds gradually from quiet beginnings with a musical theme incorporating crying guitar notes akin to a musical saw or a theremin, eventually peaking in volume and intensity.  

As I recall, Dan was not particularly impressed with this album when I first thrust it upon him, but I nonetheless thought it important to include on this blog, both for its influence on the direction of my post-millennium prog interests as well as the album's stature within the progressive rock scene. For this blog entry, Dan was amenable to giving it a fresh listen to see what his reaction would be today. For me at least, this Godspeed album may not be an all-time favorite, but it helped introduce me to a new strain of progressive rock that continues to captivate me.

Dan:

Steve is correct about my first encounter with Lift Your Skinny Fists. In my defense, it was my practice at the time to audition new music on headphones while working out at the gym. I had a nice pair of headphones and a digital media player capable of playing lossless files. Even so, I remember struggling to hear the quiet passages of "Storm" and the other songs, only to have the crescendos blow out my eardrums. Lesson learned: don't play anything with a wide dynamic range in a noisy gym (or while driving a car). 

Another lesson learned through our blogging project is to listen carefully enough to new music so as to inform some intelligent remarks about the selected album. So I listened to all four suites again five months ago and once more before writing these comments. As I discovered with my jazz blog MORE FAVORITES: Reflections on Jazz in the 1980s (jazzinthe80s.blogspot.com), writing about music is a great way to become more intimate with records, both new music and those that I have owned for decades. In fairness to the performers, the details that distinguish the character of their music shouldn't be missed.

At home with my hi fi, many significant details of Lift Your Skinny Fists are revealed, from the prerecorded voiceovers to the burbling interplay during the quieter passages. The sad rant on "Static" and the Coney Island remembrance on "Sleep" leave the most lasting impressions, but all of the prerecorded voices shape the music in peculiar ways. 

I'm also getting more comfortable with the deafening climaxes; Godspeed know what they're doing so I prepare to embrace the climaxes as their artistic statement. (That's the same approach I take when listening to large jazz orchestras playing freely for extended minutes - e.g., von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity and Coltrane's Ascension). I also remind myself that loud music won't hurt me. That said, I feel that the climaxes on Skinny Fists are too long in duration to count as true climaxes, which normally are not sustained over long durations. I would call them uncomfortably long crescendos, with the understanding that discomfort is the artists' objective (as it was with von Schlippenbach and Coltrane).

As a result of my newly found intimacy with Lift Your Skinny Fists, I'm happy to reverse my previous blowoff. Godspeed are comparable in approach, if not intensity, to two other groups I like - Green Room and Zaum - which are marginally classifiable under jazz. Godspeed have a wider dynamic range due to the crescendos and consequently more diversity within the post-rock genre.