Red Summer - Release (UK, 1982)

http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/red_summer

A remarkable album coming from the totally unprogressive UK of 1982, hardly a year to expect huge imaginative sounds!  (Although note the last song "I wanna be a punk"-- clearly ironic coming from these progsters way behind the times ... but what about us, are we way behind or way ahead?)  I won't get into nostalgic reminiscences of M. Thatcher, the iron lady-- may she rust in peace, as the newspaper said. 

The music here is perhaps closest to Mike Oldfield's classic material but in this record tracks have been cut into shorter snippets for easier digestion.  Unlike Oldfield there is some pretty progressive playing with unusual chord changes, instrumentation, etc., where Mike perhaps never went past the baroque level of chordal understanding, this album progresses past the nineteenth century in advancement, comparable to Maxwell's equations perhaps to oldfieldian newtonian dynamics, whereas a true progster like Gentle Giant has absorbed 20th century complexity like the schrodinger equation.

Anyways, moving on, all the tracks (all instrumental) are like the soundtrack to a nice little promenade through the famed british countryside of heathrows and moors and heathered downs and heathen townships albeit one not yet marred by acid rain (though this was about to become a big issue there) with ultraviolet light raining down from ozone depletion, etc., etc., etc.

A surprisingly rare record that hopefully we can keep secret amongst ourselves.  I must as usual mention the striking beauty of the surreal cover.

The first track is quite exemplary, as perhaps is (infinite-dimensional) hilbert space for quantum field theory: