Author Archives: Randophonic

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About Randophonic

For now, I'm best thought of as a radio program. Sometimes it may seem I'm all the work of one person, other times many. What matters is the program.

44. The Solid Time Of Change

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Installment #44 of the Solid Time of Change aired on Saturday July-15-2017 (c/o CiTR.FM.101.9).

Podcast (Solid Time begins a few minutes in). Youtube playlist (not entirely accurate).

The Solid Time of Change is our overlong yet incomplete history of the so-called Prog Rock era – 661 selections from 1965 through 1979 with which we hope to do justice to a strange and ambitious time indeed, musically speaking.

solid-crop-44

Part Forty-Four of the journey went as follows:

  1. Alice Cooper – halo of flies
  2. David Bowie – sweet thing
  3. David Bowie – candidate
  4. David Bowie – sweet thing [reprise]
  5. Yes – Siberian Khatru
  6. Jethro Tull – Passion Play [edit]
  7. Emerson Lake + Palmer – Toccata [edit]
  8. Yes – starship trooper
  9. Robert Fripp – water music
  10. Robert Fripp [with Peter Gabriel] – here comes the flood

Fresh episodes typically air every Saturday night, starting 11 pm (Pacific time) c/o CiTR.FM.101.9. However, Randophonic will be taking a break from new programming for a while starting next week (July-29). Our Facebook page will stay active.

702. Buick MacKane

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“We were arguing recently. Motron and myself. What’s the essential T-Rex album? I was on the side of 1971’s Electric Warrior. He wasn’t budging from the next one, 1972’s Slider. My argument was simple enough. NOTHING could ever top Bang A Gong, heard by these ears a million times and they’re still not tired. He countered with Buick MacKane. ‘Heavy and wild, and a girl named Buick!?!  Did her parents call her that? Or was it a nick-name? And if so, where did it come from? I don’t want to know the real answer. The song is answer enough.’ We stopped arguing, drank more Scotch.” (Philip Random)

T-Rex-1972

 

 

703. Strasse Nach Asien

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It’s 1979. The 1960s are long gone. Get over it. Unless you’re Embryo (German hippies with hot musical chops), in which case, you pile into a bus with a film crew and a load of recording gear and go further, go east, across Persia, Afghanistan, down the sub-continent into India, mix it up with masters and untouchables, deliver the ancient news. There’s even a movie about it.

(image source)

704. reverse lion + downtown samba

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Two tracks that flow together as one in Philip Random‘s mind. “It always bugs me when people call Yello synth-pop. Yeah, they have synths and they’re not afraid to pop, but there’s so much more going on, with their first album Solid Pleasure a solid clue as what it was all about. It was about everything – from drones to sambas to just pure out there techno-pleasures. I had a drummer friend who’d throw side-one onto the turntable and just pound away to it. He said it was all there, everything he could ever want from music. Ten years later, he was a deadhead, but that’s another chapter.” (Philip Random)

yello-1980

705. mea culpa

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“In which David Byrne and Brian Eno step outside of the Talking Heads for a bit and end up changing music forever. No, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts didn’t invent sampling (Holger Czukay was already messing around with disembodied voices inside and out of Can), but it did rather open the floodgates, with Mea Culpa proving ideal for heroic doses of LSD, assuming you were up to it. Which I wasn’t at least once — a gloomy January dusk, a riverbank in the flight path of the local airport, with a church in the distance. I became convinced a plane was going to crash into it. I don’t remember the rest.” (Philip Random)

Eno+Byrne-tea

706. Icarus Ascending

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In which we are reminded that it wasn’t Peter Gabriel’s split from Genesis that condemned them (and us) to the various attainments and atrocities that would come to define them through the 1980s – it was Steve Hackett‘s. Look no further than Please Don’t Touch, Hackett’s first post-Genesis solo excursion (he was still in the band for 1975’s Voyage of the Acolyte), its epic conclusion in particular. And yes, that is Richie Havens (the hippie folk guy that saved the day at Woodstock) laying down the heavy vocal gravity.

steveHackett-1978