Good morning friend, open your eyes and awake into a world where all sounds have been mashed together into a nutritious drone that makes the plants grow tall so they can tingle the magenta sun with their powerful sentient limbs, and endows three out of every four children with a wide array of psychic powers, the rest die, but don’t be sad, they always come back. It wasn’t always like this, in the old days before the Big Splatter sounds used to be discrete things that had to be carefully arranged into specific shapes to achieve the desired effects.

But the Big Splatter put an end to this unfortunate situation, you know, there’s nothing like a good surge of Zenta Rays to change the physical conditions of our environment, alleviating the constraints that kept us from achieving our full potential. Ever since then, sound has become a glowing pool of primeval liquid floating above, around and through us. Thus substance we can manipulate, stretch and mold with extreme facility. The first generation had to use their hands, their kids did it with their minds, their grandkids did it subsconsciously, their grand-grandkids do it genetically.

We do in any case hold in great esteem those pre-splatter masters who through their sheer adventurousness, zen-like focus and, our reministorians suspect, fledging parapsychic capabilities, manipulated sounds using the mechanical instruments at hand to produce mighty vistas which, in their heart-rending grandiosity challenge the cathedrals of music under whose domes we transition right now, and which our children built. You should tell me more about them, this Vangelis, we choose to bring you here to tell us of him, we want to hear more, what, blinding lights and the birth of a dragon you say? And your ears bled as you approached the mountain of light which was all sacred hum and glorious thunder? Tell us more, tell us more, we want to know everything, so that our children can learn how they did it in the old days.

Vangelis- The Dragon

This Byzantine Banger is included in ‘Who Killed the Dragon’, where Finder Keepers have compiled the until-now-only-available-as-bootleg outputs of Vangelis/Alpha Beta’s legendary BYG sessions.

Imagine yourself an alien in a far away galaxy, tracking down the sounds of mankind through  the ethereal footprint of its sonic projections into the atmosphere, sound waves and utterances you can’t understand but nevertheless feel in your bizarrely configured guts.

Imagine having to make sense of the creative explosion that was what the good dudes at Soul Jazz have decided to refer to as ‘Deutsche Elektronische Musik’ in their last double double vinyl compilation, without an awareness of the context where it took place, that is, imagine you had an n-dimensional graph of sounds evolving in Germany throughout the 20th Century, suddenly a blip like a bull supernova in the enlightenment market, how would you explain this if you didn’t know of the horrors of a war before, the madness and pain, the revolt against forgetfulness and repression, the availability of cheap technology and the development of new social forms, communes and free universities, the miscegenation and cross-pollination across outfits, and the drugs?

Wouldn’t you think there had been some sort of collective awakening produced by a cosmic outburst in one of the galaxies closest to the Solar System which had endowed young men and women across this little tract of land with special powers whose exertions we feel to this day? Sure you would, sure you would. Like it once happened to your race.

Gila- This Morning

Deutsche Elektronische Musik does a good job taking into account how difficult it is to, in the case of this scene, disentangle songs from the (usually) conceptual albums where they were embedded. It’s got a bunch of classics in it which your good 20jazzfunkgreatsters had just about managed to wear off in their original records, and as such it offers a great replacement to play out and such. In doing so, it will work as a great introduction to the canon for those novices out there. But additionally, and as it happens, there are also a few gems in it that we had never heard. Perhaps the biggest surprise was ‘This Morning’ by Gila, an euphoric prog anthem which simmers with the same timeless hippie vibes as Aphrodite’s Child best output. Do get it, and rock out.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with Cosmic prog