Mystery cassette from thrift store - who is this 70s prog rock band

Thanks, that’s interesting, but I’m dizzy now. :wink:

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It’d probably help if we knew where in the world this came from. There are a lot of bands that were known locally, but obscure elsewhere.

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I staged a show of theirs (well, I was one of the small team responsible) in '79 or '80 in the UK during a university tour, and it was a complete joy.

Live at Carnegie Hall is still on my iPod and still gets fully aired from time to time.

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Have you read White Tears by Hari Kunzru?

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You wrote that probably tongue in cheek, but I know somebody whose silent (!) videos on youtube get violation notices regularly…

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IIRC The early Eloy sounded not far from this. Not sure about the voice though.

Btw, keep in mind that the tape was recorded by miking the record player speaker, ie it’s not live, it just sounds sorta because it captures room reflections and other sounds as well and it also lacks some frequencies a direct recording connection would have kept intact.

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They said it was found in a “charity shop” which is a UK term

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No, but wow. Adding it to my list. Thanks!

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That’s my favorite of theirs, along with Prologue.

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I’m gonna have to agree…I’m hearing a male voice, not female.

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No way. Whoever this is, they can’t seem to sing in key.

I’m thinking it’s a demo tape that got duped several times over. It does have a bootleg vibe to it, but that would suggest a band that was worthy of bootlegging.

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since when does rock and roll require singing on key? that seems to go against the whole spirit of rock, lol.

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I have some small experience with this, having begun my musical career in about 1973 and building my musical chops by copying bands like Yes, ELP, a other prog-rock legends.I play a '77 Rickenbacker bass as most of the prog bassists of that period did and still do, and I’ve played in a number of bands that attempted to write and record material like this.

Having said that, I haven’t a clue. At times it sounds like early Renaissance, others like a cross between Camel and Amon Duul. I can hear bits and pieces of early Genesis, very early Yes, even some things that remind me of Le Orme. There are at least two women’s voices and two men’s voices which is why it reminds me of Amon Duul. The arrangements are very Renaissance and the keyboards quite reminiscent of Tony Banks.The guitar–hmm, not sure. The shredding technique leads me to place it somewhere around 1978. The bass is from around that time too. It’s either a Fender Jazz bass set up like a stereo Rickenbacker into two different inputs in the mixing desk or it’s a true stereo Rick (like mine) that’s split into two different amps with two different roll-offs.(Yes, I can hear all that. I’ve been using that technique for nearly forty years. It’s unmistakable)

Jeez, I really don’t know. There were a lot of short-lived little prog-rock bands during the mid to late 70’s that sounded like this. Some made it into the national scene (like Starcastle), some were painfully obscure (like Curved Air, which was Stewart Copeland’s first big band before the Police), some slipped away before they ever did a full tour or anything more than a demo. Same thing is true of the jazz-fusion bands of that period. (There was quite a bit of crossover in that area as well) I was in a couple of bands like that. We were mostly just feeling around, trying to find a musical identity that suited us. We played what we thought was cool and it was often schizophrenic: a little of this, a little of that. Hey presto, we got a song we’ll forget in six months.

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Touché.

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I still want to know who Milky Edwards & the Chamberlings really is.

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I have, two thumbs up! Always great to see a novelist dissecting white liberal guilt so well.

The oddly filtered sound might be an artifact of the original duping plus conversion to the digital format, but it also might mean that this was not meant to be released. It seems to be in mono. Maybe duped using a microphone in front of a speaker. It seems that some care was taken in the mixing. Perhaps a band that got recorded on spec but never signed?

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Reminds me of “The Night Begins to Shine.”

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It never ceases to amaze me how brutally effective this is.

I’ve uploaded personally recorded videos of live performances of songs covered by other artists in different styles that somehow get tagged by content ID.

I can only assume they dictate the lyrics from the songs and match them with some kind of lyrics database.

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Seriously? You are talking about the music on the mystery tape? It’s maybe a bit too generic 1970s for my taste, but I can’t imagine anyone hating it. What sort of music do you like?

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