Saturday, March 12, 2011

Coalition - Mindsweepers 1975

Continuing shortly on from the last fusion post of Genre here's another ultra-gem dug up out of the heaps of oblivion by osurec. This is from mid-seventies and without doubt has a bit more of the earlier Soft-Machine style of prog-fusion. Here are some of the peculiarities of this particular record that make it highly worth your while:
Starting with a strong opener in C minor with an unusual chord change to F sharp (?) we move into a sax solo interlude followed by a C major composed baroque-style canon. This to me harks back to Charlie Mingus' song of the same name (I think, because that track was also in C but I might be mistaken since I haven't heard it in years).

Side two starts with a march (believe it or not) in 7/4 alternating with 9/4 which gives it that jerky sound, starting with drums and flute, and then using some really tasty strange piano chords full of jazz-dissonances to accentuate the simple melody. We then get a G7 song that recalls spring especially with the constant flute solos hovering abovehead like a pesky songbird looking for peanut butter. This then crashes abruptly into a modal E song, that is, scale of diatonic C is used for solos, no sharps. Some incredibly tough gruff electric key chords, typical modal sounds stage rhodes soloing, before returning to the G7 theme.
Quite a good record and outstanding to hear something so unknown, turn out so good. They did a second album subsequently called "Birth"...

I can only repeat how rich the mine of fusion is from this period with seemingly no bedrock in sight still. This is especially true of german late-seventies fusion, to which I would like to turn attention to shortly. In this regard there is a huge amount of impossible to hear material out there, which some feel should be hidden from the masses of humanity. It confuses me why one would want to hide from fans music that they would love, when in the first place, there are so few fans of this style still around and about, and why someone feels they need to hide it from those very few fans who are probably diminishing year by year in number. Maybe someone can explain to me the rationale in the comments section without getting too rude in the process. What is without a doubt true is that the germans adopted the progressive fusion style (just as they mastered electronics and krautrock and developed them into artforms) and really ran with it, creating some of the most amazing high-energy jazz-rock in human history since the middle ages. This should be part of the german heritage but puzzlingly it is not. Of all countries it seems as if germans are the least cognizant of their progressive past.

Mindsweepers..

12 comments:

Tristan Stefan said...

http://rapidshare.com/#!download|609tl2|449424254|Coalition_-_Mindsweepers.zip|57898

Unknown said...

thankyou!

Dr Dopo said...

This is fantastic! I love this sound so much! Can someone tell me a little about this band? I can't find anything about them!

bluetongue said...

Link is dead.Thanks anyway.

Anonymous said...

http://lix.in/-986ccb

bluetongue said...

Thank you for the new link.Much appreciated.

Anonymous said...

amazing post, but is UNBELIEVABLE that people like all you here loves prog so much and make a MONO RIP to put here. Dont you know the difference between MONO and STEREO or is it intentional?

Ramede said...

Thanks Frog !!

Anonymous said...

Many many thanks.
Totaly unknown to me.
First time I heard it and I love it.
Could you please advise me for unknown jazz-rock european bands? (1973-1982)

microBatteur

Tristan Stefan said...

http://depositfiles.com/files/kr3ikykgc
NEW RIP OCT 9, 2013

Mac said...

Could you re-up the file again since the link has already expired?
I'd appreciate it if you could fix the link of "coalition's birth" as well!

Thanks!

Mac said...

Would it be possible to re-up the file as the link has already expired?
It seems the album is so great an album!

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