Seven Scenes from the Painting "Exhuming the First American ..."
Kew. Rhone.
Pipeline
Catalogue of Fifteen Objects & Their Titles
One Footnote (To Kew. Rhone.)
Three Tenses Onanism
Nine Mineral Emblems
Apricot
Gegenstand
Cartoonist, surrealist and musician, Peter Blegvad is known for his radical and avant garde leanings with Slapp Happy and Henry Cow amongst others. This release with John Greaves (ex Henry Cow) and Lisa Herman was released... more » in 1977, also includes contributions from Carla Bley and Michael Mantler.« less
Cartoonist, surrealist and musician, Peter Blegvad is known for his radical and avant garde leanings with Slapp Happy and Henry Cow amongst others. This release with John Greaves (ex Henry Cow) and Lisa Herman was released in 1977, also includes contributions from Carla Bley and Michael Mantler.
"I shall be brief. After spending nearly ten years on the lookout for Kew.Rhone. I found a CD release stuck in the 'G's in Virgin. One copy. So I bought it. It was a pleasure to hear the complex and witty (as opposed to deadening) melodies and lyrics, with the added bonus of Carla Bley's limpid orchestrations. This is music moving at an amazing pace - for art rockers to be finally playing with the big boys (Andrew Cyrille; Michael Mantler) and girls (Carla). But the joyful shock came when I played the record on my new PC. A very deceptively quiet intelligence had included a sound and image archive lasting well over one hour (to explore all the twists) and including unreleased tracks from the album (hidden), interviews, animations and full length alternative versions by none less than Robert Wyatt. Cult! Simply sublime. Buy it and weep that Greaves and Blegvad aren't considered as important as Becker and Fagen, if not (quite) Lennon-McCartney."
Awesome partially-buried gem of mid-1970's mutant music
peter@epl.meei.harvard.edu | Boston | 10/26/1998
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Amazingly witty and musically intricate, more pop sounding than Henry Cow, more uplifting than the Art Bears or Cassiber, yet more dissonant than Hatfield and the North, this is one of the buried treasures of 1970's "progressive-experimental" rock-jazz music (for lack of a better label). Extremely listenable, entertaining, even erudite, if not obscurantist. Some lyrics are anagrams on Kew.Rhone, others are palindromes, e.g. "Peel's foe not a set animal laminates a tone of sleep", still others are musings on the first excavations of Mastodons (as physically carried out and depicted in painting by Peel himself). Data tracks accompany the audio-CD, with comments on the meanings of the songs. They just don't make 'em like this any more."
A reminder of when intelligence was almost fashionable.
M. Sommers | Athens Greece | 09/17/2001
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Having been a big fan of Henry Cow, I had heard of this album, but had never seen it in a shop, and therefore I only obtained a copy a couple of months ago. I think I must have played it every day since then. John Greaves, who I knew primarily as a superb and inovative bass player and strong vocalist, proves himself to be a fantastic composer (and pretty good pianist, too). Peter Blegvad's lyrics are witty (if mind bogglingly obscure) and the other musicians on this record are superb. It is one of the most intelligent records I have heard in many years, and yet still has plenty of tunes you could whistle, if you were so inclined."
Animal laminate
boeanthropist | Cambridge, MA | 01/27/2000
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This builds on the dada-erudition-language-game-songs only hinted at in its predecessor (Slapp Happy's "Desperate Straights") -- it's too clever by a factor of fifty, and never ceases to amaze. One of my ten or so favorite albums of all time. "Twenty-Two Proverbs" and "Catalogue Of Fifteen Objects & Their Titles" are hysterical; "Three Tenses Onanism" (look it up) even more so. As a founted receptacle of mystery, it reminds me more than anything else of Oak Island -- each time giving up a tiny bit more of its secret, but never the whole thing. But a blessing, nonetheless. So imagine being given a musical tour of the failed Oak Island dig sites by the progeny of some bizarre union of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Rev. Charles Dodgson. Unique, perverse, long-winded to a virtue, and nearly perfect -- it always saddens me Blegvad couldn't maintain this pitch. Yet perhaps -- like the children in Henry Kuttner's "And Mimsy Were the Borogoves" -- he outdid himself, as was seen so more. Spooky."
Track Listings (11) - Disc #1
