Recommend me something by The Incredible String Band (+ upload a track or two please)

[Ellestin]

this thread will go places, I can sense it!

 

[Sanctums]

For why? A while ago, I bought "I looked Up"; Nothing to write home about.

 

[Ellestin]

^
irony detector off

keep the comments flowing guys!

 

[Climb Thar Hill]

flowing into or out of the topic?

 

[Sanctums]

^
irony detector off

keep the comments flowing guys!

 

[Ellestin]

I can't resist linking a cool video from those guys. This band has been totally invaluable to me in the past few months, and certainly always will.

Also their music and lyrics are much deeper than meets the eye, it's not at all about mushrooms turning into pink butterflies or banging Nepalese mountain goats... In fact the hippie blueprint is probably what kept them from more deserved acknowledgement in the prog music circles. Anyway here's the answer to the Half-Remarkable Question. Or not.

 

[Demilich]

You must listen to 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter


edit: no uploads til later 'cause shit, I gotta go to work yo!

 

[Ellestin]

doesn't this cover just scream "buy me! buy me!"

Wee Tam & the Big Huge has pretty ace songs too although I think at the time they has quit doing drugs so the totally surrealistic style changes and chord progressions that make Hangman's... so uniquely out there are less frequent.
Even the s/t is excellent, though plainly folk-oriented with their subsequent eclectism only embryonic in places, no sitar and no weird Morrocan instruments on there. On a side note they recorded it as a trio featuring banjo legend Clive Palmer who later went on to form C.O.B. (Clive's Own Band), whose Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart album is another must-listen of the acid folk smala.

 

[Demilich]

Moyshe McStiff is one of the best albums ever, imho.

I'm now totally falling in love with Bread Love and Dreams (yeah, I know, what the fuck is up with this band name) album The Strange Tale of Captain Shannon and the Hunchback from Gigha, which I'll upload samples from tonight if I don't forget / get too lazy.

 

[Ellestin]

yeah Bread, Love and Dreams are totally awesome, too. Great fingerpicking, laid-back songwriting and a taste for faraway, longing atmospheres. They should have foreseen that their monicker wouldn't earn them much friendship beyond the 60's though
Even though both albums stem from the same recording session, I'm a bigger fan of Amaryllis (pretty fucked up cover too), especially the self-titled trilogy, which I mistook for an early Pink Floyd thing first time I heard it.

Guess we're pretty much on our own here Demilich, mind if I draw the curtains?

 

[Ellestin]

I'm not going to say I've found something similar to Comus because that would be misleading and so wrong, as always, but Germany's Hölderlin certainly deliver some of the most comely, meandering, dreamy prog/folk I've heard since first falling for/into The Herald... Absolutely beautiful. Download link on the pic if you like:

 

[Demilich]

I have "Holderlins Traum" already downloaded, but I never listen to it. Hmm.
Soon.

 

[Ellestin]

Red Hair is rapidly becoming one of my fave ISB songs, yet it's totally mainstream and casual by their standards. The last 30 seconds or so just give me violent goosebumps

 

[Demilich]

Red Hair? That would be me!

So I'm ridiculously in love with this band lately. Listen to them every day, especially 5000 Spirits... and now the s/t is growing on me like cancer.

Today I've dowloaded Changing Horses and I Looked Up as well as watching some video from Woodstock, and from the Be Glad For the Song Has No Ending tape.

This has to be one of the most genius bands ever to have existed. It isn't rock-based at all other than in some of the song structures.

Also, Ellestin, do you happen to have mp3s of Wee Tam & The Big Huge, or A Liquid Acrobat As Regards the Air?

I've read that the latter of those two is the best representation of their post-drug era.

 

[Krilons Resa]

these fags were @ Woodstock? How the F have I not heard of em?

..prob have, un-knowingly.

 

[Krilons Resa]

I can only find Nebula Nearnessess, which appears to have been released in 2004?????


Hook a fucker up!

 

[Demilich]

http://peppermintstore.blogspot.com/search/label/Incredible%20String%20Band

Link to an awesome blog that has a bunch of their albums

Top priority = self-titled, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion

Also, the rest of the blog rules too. The download links are in the comments, you have to click on where it says "3 comments" or "1 comment" or however many to find them. Full albums.

 

[Ellestin]

these fags were @ Woodstock? How the F have I not heard of em?

This is because for some reason they never made it to the Woodstock official documentaries. They were particularly unlucky with the course of events there, and maybe a little ill-suited for the whole atmosphere as well. Here's a few explanation, taken from their biography:

Woodstock, Heron agrees, was hardly a smashing success for the group. The band declined to perform on Friday night due to heavy rain, opting for a slot the next afternoon. Sandwiched between Creedence Clearwater Revival and Canned Heat on Saturday, they were treated to a less than rousing reception. “Joe Boyd has a theory,” Heron says, “that the people who went on while it was raining became famous—Melanie and Richie Havens and all that. His thing is that, on Friday, people were just pleased to be there. The heavier drugs hadn’t kicked in yet. By the time everyone had spent a day eating beans in the mud, they were more into listening to Canned Heat—which, I must say, was a band I enjoyed, too. But people were really roughing it—it was very pioneer-like. To have this flimsy String Band up there doing their thing, well…”

Aside from the peevishness of the crowd, Heron insists that the group chose the wrong songs for the performance. Even while ostensibly touring to support a new record, he explains, the Incredible String Band always drew heavily on new, obscure and otherwise unrecorded material; in retrospect, Heron thinks they should have stuck to stronger tunes. A recently discovered “proper film” of the band’s Woodstock set, he says, has at least convinced him that the performance wasn’t as bad as he and his fellow band members remembered. At the very least, Heron muses, it was an interesting experience. “We were helicoptered in with Ravi Shankar, in one of these military helicopters with no side. I was absolutely terrified. There’s actually footage of us coming out of the helicopter, and I look very white. It was one of the high points of terror in my life, and I had to share it with Ravi Shankar.”

 

[Demilich]

I read that they refused to play in the rain because they'd incorporated a lot of electric instruments into their sound by then, and were afraid of getting electrocuted and shit. Someone suggested they do an acoustic set but they refused. What the fuck is that? Their best music is all acoustic anyway!

 

[Ellestin]

Also, Ellestin, do you happen to have mp3s of Wee Tam & The Big Huge, or A Liquid Acrobat As Regards the Air?

I've read that the latter of those two is the best representation of their post-drug era.

Sure, I will upload them later tonite. Liquid Acrobat As Regards the Air is the only album I need from their late-stage line up, but it's briliant in every respect, slightly more proggish and focused, as the era commanded. It's a wonderful blend between typical Mike Heron folk/rock songs, cosy yet touching, as found especially on 5000 Spirits, and some of their best 8 minute + epics. Wee Tam & The Big Huge took some time to sink in because of its scope and the fact it's less unbridled than Hangman..., which I had discovered first, but now it's a favourite as well. "The Half-Remarkable Question" is my favourite song by the ISB.

I Looked up and Changing Horses I have less sympathy for, but they do have some great stuff going, like the wonderful hippie anthem Creation or the downright creepy Pictures in a Mirror.

I also can't seem to get tired of this band, their music is simply too deep and many-faceted, while managing to keep a layer of innocence most bands lose after their first appearance in the charts. There are weeks at a time when I will listen to their stuff exclusively, sometimes to the same album four times in a row. It's like morphine. Or like Death in June to Moose.