My loveletter to prog...

From aforewritten comments it's easy to see that we have received complaints from a quarter. It really surprises me that some could see reason to be unhappy when those who buy these rarities at high cost and higher rarity share freely. Is this really the natural way of humanity, to take everything for granted if it is free and easy? For a small number to have the ability to ruin things for the greater good? In my work I know that a small, vocal, aggressive minority, can easily ruin things for the majority simply by creating onerous restrictions on the rest-- this is a kind of tragedy of the commons too... We see this everywhere in the bureaucracy of democratic countries where increasing regulations (which protect the tiniest minorities to the detriment generally of the rest) create hardships (e.g. financial) for the honest ordinary person-- who wants nothing to do with these issues. Well, my wife has the simplest answer to this: "we're doomed, and we deserve it. People are all selfish." (To which I usually say, what about me, am I selfish?)

In these posts I have attempted to communicate my deep and undying love for progressive music: as I sometimes say as a joke to my wife, I am so lucky every day to have so many beautiful albums to listen to, and also, to have a wonderful wife and beautiful children.
I feel I have searched all my life for this music. As we all know it's addictive. For sure it's a drug, one I couldn't bear to leave behind on my holiday... Once you 'get it' you can't go back, in my opinion, it becomes a passion. I cannot bear to listen to someone playing the muzak or soft-rock radio stations at work. I start to rant, and they of course all laugh. We want to hear something new and different every day, a new chord change or interval we never heard before, something completely unexpected again. Of course it will never be the same as the first time we heard Soft Machine (only about 11 years ago, in my case) or name any other of your favourite: for me, Carpe Diem, Pulsar, Transit Express, Jox, these are some of the albums that transport me directly on an interstellar drive to heaven at 99 percent of light speeds. Sometimes we find something that comes close to that beautiful feeling we first had when, jaw dropping and in ecstatic shock, we hear some kind of music that we never could have thought possible.

All my life I've listened to music, to pop and rock, to modern classical, getting bored of those, to jazz, getting tired of that, back to rock and then to metal and alternative until they lost interest... then when I discovered progressive rock I realized, here is the type that included within it all types, all styles, all genres, and not just in a kind of awkward mishmash (as is done nowadays by the novices) but actually in the most beautiful and harmonious way imaginable-- think of how Conventum melds together folk music and classical music, how Maxophone blends classical with rock, how the recent Genre band combined rock with jazz, creating a completely coherent whole. And the best of them all created music that was not only original, but beautiful and harmonious.

Why is it so beautiful? We don't know exactly why music is harmonious to the human brain. But I believe that it has to do with the concepts of chaos and complexity, which are general features of many things in life and physics. Basically, we can say that life as a chemical phenomenon is on the border between random chaos and complex order, it has a very distinct uniqueness which appears to be chaotic but which is rather at the maximum possible complexity. It is difficult to differentiate between the two but I think the human brain has the ability to tell-- for sure to a chimpanzee the music we listen to is random noise, but to us who can interpret the acoustic signals in the maximum possible information-processing manner, it is not, on the contrary, it operates at the maximum possible complexity which is comprehensible to the brain. This, to me, is what progressive music is: the maximum information we can process as beautiful all in one package, on the border of chaos, almost at the point of collapse, always at the edge of the abyss of the fall... This is why these sudden chord changes and dissonances appeal so much-- they can't be random, they have to be based on the collective musical consciousness of humanity, the unconscious heritage locked into the acoustic cortical connexions and synapses that have been passed on to us through generations. Surely this is the summit of music, of musical ability. All the collective aspirations and achievements -- and rock with its energy and strength, jazz with its emotions, and classical music with its scientific accuracy, are all important bases, together they create a three-dimensional vector space that we become lost in as a world that is more spacious and potential that any world we can come across in reality... a kind of infinite-dimensional Hilbert space in which the vector state of absolute beauty resides in permanent platonic perfection...

For sure we know that Joachim Kuhn needs no introduction, anyone who doesn't know who he is should not be reading this, so as a treat I would like to present this lost album from another master shige rip, called "Information", from 1981, with included cover. It has moments of the wonderful Kuhn that we love so profoundly-- the master who created Cinemascope, Hip Elegy, Sunshower, Springfever, etc., all of which when I first heard about 6 years ago I thought I was going to die of joy, thanks to the wonderful one who first shared them to me, the great "master of prog" mentioned before, to whom I beg forgiveness every day... I think it's an important (lost) document for all those who love Kuhn. Track 2 (Miles) has a bit of that Manhattan Transfer unison jazz sound but moves into some advanced-level songwriting, track 3 (Dreamworld) has a cool atmosphere of mysterious progressive, and 7 (Line of fire) features the typical waterfall-like solo piano style and constant key-changes of the inimitable master.

In closing, I want to mention that despite the deep love of progressive we have, we have to keep this in perspective, there are very very few people in the world who share this 'bizarre hobby' as my wife calls it, maybe one in a million. We really should be working together and not trying to hoard rarities from each other like little trolls. We shouldn't be hiding stuff in basements everywhere but instead like a kind of monastic collective effort, everyone should be trying to preserve as much as possible by ripping everything they can for the coming dark ages and making as much available as freely as possible. We shouldn't be bitching to another about quality of this or that rip or so on, but appreciate we are brothers and we are in this together, working together for the preservation of a cultural treasure greater even than the gold and cemetaries of the Nile. I believe this a hundred percent & this is why I do this. Those who complain should understand we all work full-time and have very little free time-- this is all done as a labour of love in our spare time and it's not like I have a chance in hell of ever getting any financial reward or any other success with this. What a joke!! I could (and probably should) be blogging about my crazy children and the cute things they do and the many toys we buy for them every day, and thereby I could get a million-dollar book deal and endorsement from Toys-r-us, but I don't, because this music is my true passion.

Please-- keep your complaints to yourself... We are not a medical licencing authority here. Again, when I tell my wife about these matters, she laughs, she says, some of these people never leave their parents' basements, do you not realize this?... but her main point is this, ít's so unimportant in the long run, do you not realize...