Sunday, September 15, 2024

from Easter Island (1979)

One good thing about CD reissues of old prog LPs is that they sometimes break down into different tracks those overwrought suites, wherein a few snippets of good music would sometimes get shackled with a lot of ludicrous stuff, and which you couldn't get to without suffering through all the fantasy moog schlock in which they were encased, just to satisfy another one of the many equivocal assumptions associated with the genre - that the longer the compositions, the more progressive they are (which eventually led to the consecration of side-long album tracks as the rite of passage for the automatic cultural classification of an act as supposedly 'progressive'). Case in point? "Telesterion", once an instrumental section of "The Alchemist's Suite" (which practically (oh, so close...) filled the B-side of this US prog album), that was finally allowed to shake its compositional multi-part bondage, and can now, with its spacey synths and tribal drumming, experience a free and autonomous aesthetic existence as just a nice slice of mood prog; one that wants nothing to do with all that chrysopoeia shtick.

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