Monday 7 March 2016

The Rias Orchestra Cond. by Helmuth Brandenburg's Babylon A.M.C. 197? [Library, Intersound ISST 114]




Once again, thanks to my library collector friends for these shares, and once again, thanks to someone for introducing me to something so shockingly good...  How could this music have escaped us until now, after all the collecting???  There's nothing like finding a new artist one never knew about...

A shockingly progressive fusion composition that flows together like a concept album, which it is of course when you scan the song titles, all names from ancient Babylonia, from an easy listening conductor/composer named H. Brandenburg, you can see how prolific he was back in the day.  The LP reminds me a great deal of Arif Mardin's (he of Atlantic Records fame) progressive fusion masterpiece which I mentioned before, The Journey.  (Probably this is his one and only progressive work too, it's rare that we find more than one in these artists' oeuvre, unless we are dealing with someone like Alan Hawkshaw.)

Note that most of the output of Rias Orchestra with H. Brandenburg is godawful muzak, the kind of easy listening with simple and loud strings that sound like vibrating saws that gave the genre such a dreadful reputation, unlike Gianni Marchetti's Solstitium album (soon to come).

Consider the track called Tardema:





Amazing?
Only one of many in there...


7 comments:


  1. Babylon mp3:
    https://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/vmtciy

    Three more from him in one package: Themes 1, Themes 2, and Movements. Only the middle opus has some material worth hearing.
    https://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/plps5o

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  2. Once again some amazing looking stuff i've never seen before… much thanks! Looking forward to hearing!

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  3. Amazing album,much appreciated mate!!!

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  4. Julian, thanks very much for posting this album! I'd been wanting to specifically hear this one for a long time.
    Does anyone know what the titles to the tracks mean? These appear to be Hebrew words. Or: what do the letters "A.M.C." in the LP's title stand for?

    Anyway, thanks again Julian for posting this!

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  5. Thanks for all these "Brandenburg concertos". The variety of skills and styles some library composers have achieved is simply astonishing.

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  6. Found another blog post of this, showing year issue as '78:
    https://hot-butt-head.blogspot.ca/2016/03/the-rias-orchestra-conducted-by-helmuth.html#

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  7. Love the sample and love the cover.I look forward to hear the rest.Thanks.

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