Various Artists
Th Sea and the Bells
Into this morass the Rhino label has hurled a real depth charge. The five-CD progressive-rock comp Supernatural Fairy Tales is a fairly exhaustive survey of the era (1967-76), and it sheds some light on the music of our own era as well.
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But Supernatural Fairy Tales isn’t just a journey through the past; it’s also a tarnished mirror in which one sees uncanny reflections of the post-rock present Today’s arty experimenters may not wrap themselves in gold capes , but they are resuscitating prog rock s ambitious musical climate. Tortoise’s most recent opus, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, opens with “Djed,” a multisectional epic that fits snugly into Henry Cow’s long-form chamber rock mold. Even Japanese noisemonger Zeni Geva injected the music on its recent Freedom Bondage with tricky meter and sophisticated compositional development; leader K.K. Null has described it to me as “progressive hardcore.”
The key to understanding this renewed newed fascination with the grandiose and the complex may be in the section of the box set’s liner notes that points out that many of the original proggies had been knocking about in various musical settings well before the heyday of prog. Prog and post rock alike are mostly the work of slightly older musicians who, bored with rock’s basic Sturm und Drang, were searching for something new and more challenging to play. While some of their experiments have been less than successful, their motivation is admirable.
