Spain's "God is Love" truly reminds you of the Third Ear Band?

In January 2019 Italian journalist Eddy Cilia, reviewing Spain's last album "Mandala Brush" (Dangerbirds Records), wrote about a track titled "God is Love" that the music recalls him Popul Vuh and the Third Ear Band (read his review in Italian here).

Listen to it and get an idea about: in my opinion this great music has a sort of 'kraut'/space-rock identity, it's more Popul Vuh than TEB; in fact, the music has a powerful rhythmic impact, it's focused on a widespread improvisation, with an electric/electronic core, but maybe all in all as their label says Spain's music is "indie pop slowcore Americana free jazz.”

                                                                                                

no©2019 Luca Chino Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

Italian composer ROBERTO MUSCI talks about the Third Ear Band!

Avant-garde composer, performer, saxophonist and guitar player ROBERTO MUSCI (Milan 1956) has recorded  records, made videos, soundtracks for mute films, written books and collaborated among the others with musicians as Chris Cutler, Elliot Sharp, Steve Piccolo, Jon Rose, and Keith Tippett.
After a very interesting project of a tribute to the Third Ear Band unfortunately aborted (a wonderful 5:48 track titled "The awakening of Orus" was recorded...), just recently he has dedicated to the Third Ear Band some short lines at his blog http://robertomusci.tumblr.com/post/44601596678/third-ear-band-the-third-ear-band-was-born-in#notes
This is a short interview with him.


How did you know the Third Ear Band's music?
"Absolutely by chance. At the beginning of Seventies I used to go to Sinigaglia Fair in Milan (it's a flea market) with some friends: we was a bunch of "musical addicts" that every Saturday used to meet there for sharing opinions about records and music. I remember in that period after to be involved in Progressive and (more or less) hard rock I was now more interested in new kind of sounds (as like the so-called Canterbury sound, minimal music, Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" and some records of Eastern and Arabic music). Just by chance I exchanged one of my albums with another, it was a strange record with a full size purple cover, with clouds and alchemical-ritualistic pictures

inside, and four tracks quoting the four elements taken from the pre-Socratic Archè.
After few days I was folgorated by that music as like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus or as the illumination of Buddha under the tree of Bodhi.
I'd never heard a music like that (and now it's the same, after around 50 years after) - a band with oboe, cello, violin and percussions in a Synth and Marshall world! A strange, deep music, with reminiscents of ancient and magic times; alchemical, sometimes obscure, sometimes solar, dances with obsessed rhythms, sounds from a pre-human world (in  the words of Lovecraft), chants from a far folk and chords of dissonant violins, near to the contemporary music.
I envy who doesn't know the Third Ear Band: the first listening of their music (expecially that related to the 1968-1972 period) is just like to go into a world of sounds and magic atmospheres."

Which elements of TEB's 'poetic' impress you mostly?
"Surely the way of improvisation and composition that generates a unique music; a music that wrap and alienate you.
The use of modal improvisations, with pentatonic and eptatonic scales derived from Arabian and Indian music culture, the mixing of particular timbre, the use of percussive rhytms with a metric dilatation, that ancestral call to the ritual music (from the ancient Egypt to the Druids). It's a strange sensation, but listening to their music in a room it seems that sounds are stratificating on different levels and the listener loses the cognition of time and space...".

How much TEB has influenced your way to compose and play music? 
"They influenced me very much when I recorded my first album in 1984 ("The Loa of music" - Raw Material). When one listen to it it's Glen Sweeney's obsessed rhythms and Ursula Smith and Richard Coff dissonant violins to be very evident. I'm very far from the second phase of the band (from 1988 onwards: "Live Ghosts", "Magic Music" and "Brain Waves") even if several tracks are very good, and it's a coherent evolution of their old atmospheres.
I've been so lucky to hear the Third Ear Band two times in Italy (maybe in 1989 and 1994... I'm not sure of the right dates): in spite I was very diffident (sometimes it happens when the distance between the album recorded in studio and the live concert is huge) I remember they was two wonderful gigs with the band able to recreate that particular magic sound (I don't recall the right line-ups but I'm sure there was an electric guitarist and a soprano player)."

 

Specifically, which TEB's compositions do you think inspired you more?
"Surely their first records: "Alchemy", "Third Ear Band", "Abelard and Heloise", "Music from Macbeth" and "Prophecies". For myself "Earth" and the music for Polanski's "MacBeth" are memorable".

Are you still listening to their records?
"Sure! From that period, with the Popol Vuh's music, Third Ear Band's music is timeless art that I'd listen to forever (and I'm listening to it from about fifty years)". 

One of the several projects made by Roberto in Multimedia.

What about that aborted project of a tribute to the Third Ear Band?
"The lure to recreate that old music atmospheres for letting them live is still great in me. Basically the project was inspired by John Oswald's work who coined the expression "Plunderphonics". His work on Michael Jackson repertoire (with related legal case, i.e the cover: Michael Jackson's head on a female body...) was really clamorous. The idea was to record a tribute to the Third Ear Band just using their original music for recreating that musical poetic and the sensations they gave to me, playing the right instruments and looking for that pictures linked to their specific iconography (ancient Egypt, Alchemy, Druids...). Of course I would like to close this project..." 

ROBERTO MUSCI DISCOGRAPHY 
(a selection)


"The Loa of music" (Raw Material, 1984)

"Losing the Orthodox Path" (Les Disques Victo, 1997)

  

  

"Steel Water Light" (ReR Megacorp, 2001)
 

"The End of the World" (Auditorium, 2003)

   




"Vampyr and other stories" (ReR Megacorp, 2015)

 











CONTACTS
"To absent friends, lost loves and old gods" (blog): http://robertomusci.tumblr.com/

Roberto Musci Web site:

http://www.rmusci.com/
Soundcloud:  
https://soundcloud.com/roberto-musci

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Musci 

no©2015 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)  

An old French band with vague references to the Third Ear Band's sound.

"Early 70’s, a group of musicians around Jean-François Gaël, André Chini, Philippe Gumplowicz, Pierre Buffenoir and Youval Micenmacher formed Sonorhc in 1971 near Paris. This discreet band had released only three albums in twenty years: «Purf» (LP-1972), «Outrelande» (LP-1982) et «K’an» (CD-1991). 2014, Fractal Records propose today the first official reissue of the two first albums in a beautiful remastered edition after more than forty and thirty years respectively (!); two rare albums, difficult to find and much sought after by collectors.

The musical world of Sonorhc is oriented to collective improvisation and the research of tones; they create a sound full of invention, rich technically, made by many differents instruments which incorporated judiciously elements from the rock music, free-jazz, acid-psych, concrete, ethnic and experimental making them as one of the most atypical French Underground group, and seems somewhere more closer to the German “krautrock” bands like Between, Agitation Free, Deuter, Limbus 3, Dzyan or the UK group Third Ear Band. But as the most well-known French band Magma, Sonorhc owns their original and strange logo and shows a strong collective: Jean-François Gaël studied musical composition with Michel Puig, guitar with Roger Chaput, electro-acoustic music with Pierre Schaefer at the GRM, and had composed many movie soundtracks later. Pierre Buffenoir taught guitar at the Conservatoire d’Ivry. André Chini is composer of contemporary music in Sweden. Philippe Gumplowicz is a music teacher at the University of Evry and with the percussionist Youval Micenmacher had recorded the 1978’s album “Marron Dingue” with the band Arcane V (see the Nurse With Wound list).

Jean-Francois Gael and Pierre Buffenoir

The present edition “2 albums in 1” includes the first “Purf”, a pure jewel of the genre and this one, for example, could had been easily one of the landmark album of the legendary 70’s Futura Records “son” or “impro” series and “Purf” well worth alone the purchase of this disc (!!), plus the second “Outrelande” a compilation of tracks recorded from 1973 to 1982, and with for both their original cover. To summarize these 74 minutes with Sonorhc, just 3 words as the American blog “Mutant Sounds” has wrote : “A Total Mindbomb”. THIS IS A «MUST» HAVE ! CD limited edition 300 copies."

(from http://www.soundohm.com)

As usual, it's difficult to say if a band (a really great band!) like Sonorhc sounds as like the Third Ear Band. Listening to their first album, published by Disques du Cavalier in 1972 (as CVR MG650), it brings me back to several different references to bands as Popul Vuh, Magma, Agitation Free... Sometimes also a Paul Minns' oboe is heard but...
Anyway you can test your personal impressions listening to the track here below and write us what you think about it:

no©2015 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)  

"Third Ear Band’s Psychedelic Alchemy in Macbeth" by Glenn Kenny.

A remarkable essay of analysis on TEB's "Macbeth" music has come in last December by Glenn Kenny (critic at http://www.rogerebert.com/) published on The Criterion Collection Web site at http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3387-third-ear-band-s-psychedelic-alchemy-in-macbeth

Here's the original text of it:

 

“We were just in London, clubbing, all those things people did in the ’60s in the middle of London,” British actor Francesca Annis recalls, in an interview on the new Criterion release of Macbeth, of “crossing paths” with director Roman Polanski in the days when the Polish-born director was launching his career in the West with the still-galvanizing thriller Repulsion. “Clubbing” in London in the ’60s arguably had more cultural significance than you find in contemporary nightlife. Nightclubs were also cultural laboratories of a sort, in which musicians and other performers, sometimes with psychedelic assistance, sought to expand the borders charted by the likes of the Beatles and the Stones. The scene at London’s UFO Club, for instance, yielded experimenters both obscure and, in some cases, eventually monumental, like Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine, and an aggregation that would eventually be known as Third Ear Band—which in 1971 would provide the score for Polanski’s chilling Macbeth.

The murder of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child in the summer of 1969 was in fact the second traumatic loss Polanski had suffered that year; in April, his longtime friend and collaborator Krzysztof Komeda had died after sustaining head injuries several months earlier. Macbeth was the first film Polanski made after these tragedies, and only the second without Komeda’s participation. (American jazz musician Chico Hamilton’s score for Repulsion is often mistaken for Komeda’s work, which in itself says a little something about varieties of cultural cross-pollination.) Contemporary accounts claim that Polanski, back in Europe after a U.S. filmmaking sojourn that had seen him complete the remarkably successful Rosemary’s Baby, was told of the band by an acquaintance who had worked with them on their soundtrack for an obscure animated German television film, Abelard and Heloise.

Writing of Third Ear in his excellent account of British folk-rock in the ’60s, "Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music", Rob Young notes that the group “sculpted an esoteric chamber music from acoustic elements,” yielding “incantational songs—without words, a ritualistic consort music.” Ritualistic is a significant word here; in Polanski’s film, one of the most appalling and memorable set pieces is the witches’ sabbath, and the movie’s many murders are depicted almost as fever-dream rites. Young quotes founding member Glen Sweeney, the group’s percussionist (he played a variety of hand drums), thusly: “I called the music alchemical because it was produced by repetition.” For the recording of the music soundtrack, Sweeney and oboe/recorder player Paul Minns, another founding member, were joined by cellist/bassist Paul Buckmaster (a classically trained musician who was also doing string arrangements for Elton John in this period, and who would later collaborate with Miles Davis), violinist and electronics player Simon House (later of the sci-fi psychedelic madhouse Hawkwind), and guitarist Denim Bridges, and they improvised the score at London’s Air Studios while looking at black-and-white rushes of the film. The full results of their efforts are collected on the album "Music from Macbeth", a bracing record that presents an experience pointedly different from that of the film . . . but just as breathtaking and sometimes harrowing.

There’s a hypnotic effect created via the alchemical repetition: not just in the rhythms of Sweeney’s hand drumming but in the motifs Minns spins out on his wind instruments. In the early ’60s, the British guitarist Davey Graham had taken his interest in Moroccan music and applied it to a new guitar tuning that went on to influence such players as Bert Jansch and Jimmy Page. The repetitions inherent in some forms of Western modal music—old British folk songs, for instance—seemed to find an affinity in the drones of Indian ragas. The tonal limitations of early electronic instruments, such as the VCS3 synthesizer played by House on the Macbeth soundtrack, lend themselves to a certain form of musical minimalism. The consonances implicit in these musical forms that were largely considered culturally discrete give Third Ear Band’s music for Macbeth an uncannily old-world feel, in that it evokes an atmosphere in which certain ideas of “difference” had not yet been fully formed. This feeling of a kind of antiquity prevails even when the electronic instruments in the band’s array are foregrounded. Hence, nothing in the score for Polanski’s film seems overtly anachronistic: it all fits into the sometimes verdant, sometimes blighted, always eerie and enigmatic world where the filmmaker sets the bloody action.

But Polanski uses the music sparingly in the movie, and sometimes remixes it ruthlessly. For the scene in which Macbeth (Jon Finch) seems compelled by a floating dagger to undertake the murder of Duncan, Third Ear Band recorded a track (titled “Dagger and Death” on their album) on which a repeating single-stab guitar note (like something out of a slo-mo version of the psych-rock hit of a few years earlier “Pictures of Matchstick Men”) is underscored by moans from violin, recorder, and even what sounds like a bowed percussion instrument; two minutes into the track, Sweeney’s hand drum comes flurrying in, whipping up a small frenzy that drops out as suddenly as it began. For its use in the film, though, Polanski just about mutes all the instruments save the guitar, the stinging note synchronized to the floating dagger as it first tempts, and then leads, Macbeth, drawing him down the hall to commit his first foul deed. It is with the stabbing of Duncan that the hand-drum section of the piece is heard, to great effect. In other scenes, such as Macbeth’s consultation with Lady Macbeth at the well where they both ineffectually try to wash the blood from their hands, Polanski keeps the music at the brink of audibility. When Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, the violin swells from a larger piece of music are dropped into the soundtrack percussively.

In "Electric Eden", Young says that Third Ear Band’s “arcane, absorbing music stands as one of several unexplored lanes leading away from the psychedelic garden that remains neglected and overgrown.” It’s true that very few of the musicians who came in their wake attempted anything as ambitious as this group did. But they were influential. The soundtracks that the German group Popol Vuh created for Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo would be unimaginable without the precedent of what Third Ear Band did in Macbeth (and in fact, Herzog used a Third Ear song on the soundtrack of his Fata Morgana). Such works exerted considerable power over musicians such as Gary Lucas, the alchemical guitar wizard who co-composed Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” and “Mojo Pin” and who recently unveiled a new guitar score for James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. Lucas recalls visiting Glen Sweeney in London in 1973 and being presented a copy of the Macbeth script, the front page of which was embossed with a simulated-blood thumbprint! Sweeney himself passed away in 2005.

This six-minute track, “Overture/The Beach,” as it appears on Third Ear Band’s "Music from Macbeth", illustrates the atmospheric, improvisation-based method that gave Polanski a wide range of aural options to mix into the film’s actual audio track:

Here, Polanski uses the band’s percussive “stabs” on a guitar string to give hallucinatory dimension to the vision of a floating dagger that coaxes him to murder, which he does to a flurry of almost panicked-sounding hand drumming, discordant cello moans, and more pointed guitar shrieks.

no©2015 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

New various artists compilation with the Thirds music on it.

Compiled by Matt Sewell, "A Crushing Glow" is a 2LPs compilation with music by various artists as Durutti Column, Popol Vuh, Meic Stevens...

It has been published by Caroline True Record (as CTRUE 15) on May 2014 in a limited edition of 500 copies on double azure blue vinyl. 

The first 25 orders from http://www.caughtbytheriver.net have came with a limited edition four colour risograph print of artwork by Sewell.  
Artwork, selection, liner notes by the same Sewell - John Kertland is the producer.

Third Ear Band has the great untarnished "Stone Circle" ("Alchemy"'s original version) on it.

This is a presentation of the album:
"Caught by the River readers will know artist and illustrator Matt Sewell as a bird enthusiast first and foremost, but he’s also a dedicated and knowledgeable music aficionado and music collector. To channel his second love, the painter of walls around the world and the bird brain behind the bestselling books "Our Garden Birds, Our Songbirds" and "Our Woodland Birds", has joined forces with Caroline True Records (CTR) for ‘A Crushing Glow’; a limited edition 2-LP compilation, on coloured vinyl, released April 28th.

Matt has delved deep into his mixed bag of musical tastes for a 13-track sonic excavation, pulling out songs as diverse as the pastoral post-punk of The Durutti Column, through the bucolic pop of Parsley Sound and the panoramic kosmique of Ashra, reimagined edits from Lobt Noch Irrt, and the Acid of Tin Man via the indo-prog of the Third Ear Band; many songs never before released on vinyl or else long deleted.
Featuring all-original artwork from Matt inside and out, the album is strictly limited to 500 copies. Artwork is contained within a deluxe full-colour gate-fold sleeve, with full colour inner-sleeves – on coloured double vinyl and detailed sleeve-notes carefully crafted by Matt.

Strictly limited to a 500 vinyl-only release with no repress, there will be no CD or digital version of the album".  
no©2014 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)