I heard of a game recently where you come up with imaginary prog rock albums using Wikipedia’s random article feature. The first random article gives you your artist name, the second gives you the album name and subsequent articles give you song titles. I thought I would give it a go…
Artist: Sony Bend
Album: Faye Cooper-Cole
Tracks:
- Bugle calls of the Norwegian army
- Riverside Park, Jedburgh
- Alfredo GarcÃa-Baró
- Dynasty Tour
- Charles Brooks Smith
- Francis Xavier Caldwell
- A Trip to the Dentist
And another attempt…
Artist: Colorado General Assembly
Album: ?a?avica
Tracks:
- Culture Shock (Sam & Max)
- Face Value
- Osazone
- Chestnut Hill Branch
- Dodworth St John the Baptist CofE
- Sheikh Fazlollah Noori
I quite like the second one. Almost sounds authentic.
I tried, but…
Artist: List of Northern Ireland cricket clubs
Album: Bell 427
1 Golden Square Mile
2 Play It Like That
3 Krasivaya Mecha River
4 Society Records
5 Chwa?owice, Lower Silesian Voivodeship
6 Bobot language
7 Deforestation in Brazil
It seemed like such a good idea…
How about:
Artist: Sh15uya
Album: John Cook School of Business
1) Wieslaw Z. Wisniewski
2) Buch, Swabia
3) Bruno Giuranna
4) WKVE
Only four tracks. WKVE is 27 minutes long.
Doesn’t work so well when you just get obscure names – the luck of the draw.
Danivon’s would have been a lot better if the album and artist were the other way round.
Well, I think the album title and first few tracks work (especially “play it like that”, which actually is an album title).
I’ve got the bug now…
Who would not want to hear an album by Assonet Historic District called Broissia?
Especially if the tracks were Kalachakra, Honey Badger, Western Autistic School, 214 Radical System and Kalash.
A couple of them really would not sound out of place on a 70s Yes album…
The classic album by St Pius X High School, released in 1972, was Pogórzanie. This was a triple concept album based on the life of António Dacosta and contained the following tracks:
LP 1 side 1: Frayssinhes
side 2: Bessingham
LP 2 side 1: Ewerton Teixeira
side 2: Porcher Island
LP 3 side 1: Karen Karnes
side 2: Tri Beta
The band never performed the entire album live, or indeed any of the individual tracks in their entirety, restricting themselves simply to the thirteen minutes of maniacal laughter that opened Frayssinhes.
Brilliant!
Even better than “Frizzle Fry” by Primus, with tracks called Sathington Willoughby, To defy the laws of tradition, John the fisherman, Too many puppies and Pudding time
Oh hang on… that’s a real one 😉
Rufino Segovia del Burgo, the ‘enfant terrible’ keyboardist left the band Mierzewo over the length of his live solos in 1974 (they wanted to restrict him to 30 minutes). His first (and only) studio recording since then was ‘Positive Depression’, a double album:
Side 1: The Color Kittens
Side 2: Ziehl-Neelsen stain
Side 3: WKQK
Side 5: Polylepis subsericans
He insisted that only prime numbers be used to denote track numbers or ‘sides’.
That Rufino, what a guy.
I’m pretty sure I saw Rufino once, at Batley Variety Club in the late 70s. The gig was cancelled due to poor ticket sales but Rufino insisted on performing anyway.
Always a ‘difficult’ performer, Rufino. I think it was the way he shunned traditional chromatic scales in favour of Ashtekar Variables.
I just found one of the pitfalls of this game, when the random article threw up a real obscure prog album: Forse le lucciole non si amano piu by La Locande delle Fate a 1977 LP by an Italian prog rock band.
Own goal…