Three undergound/Prog compilations with TEB's tracks in.

Three compilations that was pubblished in the last years have TEB's tracks in. 

The first one, published in UK in 2019, is titled "Beautiful Freaks" (TAD Records TAD2CD) and among original tunes by Allen Ginsberg, Fugs, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Gong and Hawkwind, offers TEB's "Earth" from the second album.

The concept here is to celebrate an age (1966-1970) when the 'popular music' was mainly counter-culture, with a strong political impact to the mainstream. There are two editions available: one on CD, the other one in a 2LPs set.

The second anthology, titled "The Psychedelic Rock Box" (Music Brokers MBB7253), published in 2018 in Mexico, is a 6CDs compilation with 66 tracks from the Sixties to the Eighties, documenting some original USA and UK bands (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, The Deviants, John's Children, Spencer Davis Group...) and more recent ones (Plasticland, Fuzztones, Sun Dial, Monochrome Set...).

Even if the concept of "psychedelic music" is always quite vague and few definite, and this compilation suffers of too much omissions, Our Holy Band is here included with "Behind The Pyramids".

 

The third one, in my opinion the best, it's titled "Lullabies for Catatonics: A Journey Through the British Avant-Pop/Art Rock Scene 1967-1974" (Grapefruit Records CRSEGBOX056), compiled and annoted by David Wells. 

It's a 3CDs box edited in 2019 including some of my favourite bands/musicians of the era: Soft Machine, Matching Mole, Nirvana, Ron Geesin, Giles, Giles & Fripp, The Strawbs...). On the CD titled "The Spontaneous Underground", the Third Ear Band plays "Druid One".

 

 

After the passage of copyrights to Cherry Red Records, some tracks from the original Harvest catalogue are re-emerging on compilations. An important way for letting people to know the Thirds and maybe explore their amazing story...

  

no©2021 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first).

A very interesting quotation of the TEB and my book on a blog.

A very intriguing quotation of my book was posted in May on a blog titled "On An Overgrown Path" at https://www.overgrownpath.com/2021/05/how-mahler-became-sound-upholstery.html

Titled "How Mahler became sound upholstery", it's a very sharp reflection about the nature of TEB's music, starting with its objective relationships with the academy. This below is the full text:

"Two members of the original Third Ear Band were classically trained, Paul Minns on oboe and recorder, and Richard Coff violin and viola. With founding force Glen Sweeney on hand drums and tabla, and Mel Davis on cello they cut the bands first two legendary all-acoustic albums Alchemy and Elements in 1969 and 1970. For their equally legendary1972 soundtrack for Roma Polanski's Macbeth, Richard Coff was replaced by another violinist from a classical background Simon House, and Royal College of Music cello graduate Paul Buckmaster joined the band*. This classical connection was reflected in the venues where the Third Ear Band played, which included the Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Festival Hall - where they appeared with musique concrète exponent Bernard Parmegiani - and the Royal Albert Hall.

All three albums were released on EMI's newly-formed Harvest label aimed at the emerging progressive rock market. However the Third Ear Band's iconoclastic style did not sit comfortably with EMI's culture. So the band's refusal to allow the 'must haves' of reverberation and phasing added to their master tapes resulted in a stand-off with EMI's Abbey Road engineers. While back at head office the Harvest label managers were sparing with promotional support due to the perceived occult sub-agenda of the Alchemy album, a perception not helped by the band's involvement with Druids. Despite this the Third Ear Band attracted a cult following with their early albums, largely due to advocacy by influential BBC DJ John Peel who also played jew's harp on one track of Alchemy. In fairness however, the failure of these albums to crack the mass market is not surprising. Because, masterpieces as they undoubtedly are, on first hearing they can sound like a cross between the music of David Munrow and Cornelius Cardew.

In his sleeve note for Alchemy Glen Sweeney described the Third Ear Band as creating "music of its time, of course but not bound by it - still with new things to tell us". That uncanny ability to tell us new things is developed by the band's biographer Luca Chino Ferrari in Glen Sweeney's Book of Alchemies: the Life and Times of the Third Ear Band, 1967-1973.

"I'm not persuaded that the sound of a certain historical period in a certain society forecast the times and the social models to come, as the French writer Lacques Attali claimed in his landmark essay Noise: the political economy of music in 1977 (English translation 1985).
The immersion of sounds or noises we are submitted to these days seems to reflect the times - of triviality, superficiality - we live in; actually it seems to describe them perfectly - speaking of the deep social and cultural crisis into which Western countries have fallen, and the strong negative impact technology and the record industry have had on the music created and used by people.
The anonymous non-places (this suggestive expression was coined by the ethnology researcher Marc Augé) in which music is casually used as a simple sound upholstery - keeping company with consumption - suggests the idea that the re-production of sounds and the hidden possibilities of listening to music everywhere, have made the listening experience less the product of an active and conscious process and more the result of a passive and unconscious behavior.
Advertisers have understood this process and use music to persuade us "in a pleasant way" to buy, revealing our presumed needs to us.
The music that goes deep into our daily life has turned into a non-place itself; , deprived of any identity, history or relation with the time and the place of living, it becomes a sort of undefined and virtual phenomenon."

Luca Chino Ferrari originally wrote that in 1996 before technology changed the music industry for ever, and how prescient he was. Mobile technologies and streaming have moved music into non-places, where it now simply fulfils the role of sound upholstery. Music is now listened to passively and unconsciously everywhere. Great music that goes deep into our daily life has become sound upholstery in non-places - listening to Mahler while jogging is an example. But upholstery and furniture are just one component of a living environment. An even more important component is the space around the upholstery. And since the Third Ear Band was around, the sound upholstery has become bigger and bigger, which means the vital space where it is possible to push the creative envelope has become smaller and smaller.

* Roman Polanksi's Macbeth is available on Amazon Prime Video. It is well worth watching as a reminder of how fifty years on visual upholstery, lile sound upholstery, has eroded creative space.

 no©2021 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first).