She was our pussy. Gilli Smyth has gone off to Planet Gong to join Daevid Allen, who also left this mortal coil a year ago. The Guardian eulogizes her here.
Rock
[Music] Incredible String Band – Creation
The Incredible String Band were at their best when the Scottish acid folkies would just let go and jam for long stretches at a time.
[Music] Rishad Shafi & Gunesh – Baikonur
Rishad Shafi was a drummer and percussionist from Turkmenistan who headed the best prog band out of Central Asia in the 1980s, Gunesh.
[Music] Orkiestra Ósmego Dnia – Dlaczego wschodni wiatr niesie mróz
I’m not sure if Orkiestra Ósmego Dnia (Orchestra of the Eighth Day) would qualify as a world music band, an experimental project, or an improv group, but leader Jan A. P. Kaczmarek has gone on to making some rather good movie soundtracks.
[Music] fauxmúsica – Ad Astra
Ad Astra is a project of Zane O’Brien, one of the most creative minds working in electronic music today. This release is one of the better experimental electronic releases I’ve heard in quite some time.
[Music] Rock in the USSR – New photos of the Leningrad underground during perestroika

Victor Tsoi
The Calvert Journal has a great blog post full of photos from the 80s and 90s underground rock scene in what was then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia.
[Music] RLW / PAAK – Zur Arbeit I
From Attenuation Circuit’s Bandcamp site:
Ralf Wehowsky and Peter Kastner, aka RLW and PAAK, present their third collaborative album in a series of concept albums dedicated to various subjects. This record, their first on attenuation circuit, is about work, and as on the previous records (about food and religion, respectively), the titles, liner notes, and the sound itself suggest a rather sarcastic take on work, or more precisely, the situation of working people today.
Ralf Wehowsky has been a fixture on the international experimental scene since his 1980s work with P16.D4 and related projects on the Selektion label. The fusion of electronic sounds and non-musical, musique concrète material is characteristic of much of his work. Peter Kastner, working both in improvised sound and visual arts, brings a low-fi approach to jerrybuilt sound objects to the collaboration. By contrasting everyday noise that might well have been recorded in a factory, or factory canteen, with startlingly artificial, almost deliberately cheesy harpsichord and mellotron sounds, they create a tension between a nostalgia for beauty and the barrenness of everyday life, in three pieces, or perhaps movements. The liner notes leave no doubt as to what the three movements stand for: The 19th century with its mass exploitation of industrial workers (courtesy of a quote by Karl Marx), the 20th century with its progress toward more social security for working people, and the 21st century, which sees an erosion of solidarity as neoliberal policies take away social benefits such as rent-controlled housing.
Crap Marxist verbiage, but great music, as always.
[Music] Simple Minds: From Beauty to Bombast, the early 1980s — Progarchy
For those of you who read progarchy, you know that we often (maybe not often enough, but often) review things that are, at best, vaguely prog. We often veer into art rock and art pop. My favorite genre outside of “straight” prog is progressive pop such as PET SOUNDS, SONGS FROM THE BIG CHAIR, and […]
via Simple Minds: From Beauty to Bombast, the early 1980s — Progarchy
[Music] VAN TRIER’s cloud of sounds — Yeah I Know It Sucks
Renee Van Trier is an artist of many kinds, she does so many things (from performances, photography, videos, acting…) that we almost forget that she is also a refined experimentalist in music and song making! Luckily Van Trier has a lovely online cloud with great examples for you and me to hear and be wowed […]
[Music] Companyia Elèctrica Dharma – Moixeranga Del Diable
Companyia Elèctrica Dharma were a Spanish band based in Barcelona who fused prog, jazz, blues and symphonic rock together rather wonderfully.


