Here it is – The fifth episode of AmiRadio is on the air. This one resulted in a longer playing time, exceeding the regular one-hour episodes I’m sharing here. As we like to say in Israel – I was in my schwung (apparently “momentum” in German…) and let my spirit move with the records. The mixtape turned out to be mellower, sort of contemplative in its vibe.
In my first years as a music digger, I came across this concept called Progressive Rock. I didn’t understand at all what was behind this term. As a child I always loved when they played Moonlight Shadow on the radio, I didn’t know anything about the performer. I believe that at some point I came across a collection of hits from the ’80s where the song came up and that’s how I went looking for more of Mike Oldfield’s stuff that was classified under Progressive Rock in the Third Ear store which was then located on Nordau street in Haifa’s Hadar neighborhood.
I found that Pink Floyd neighbored in the same bin with Genesis, which until then I had known only as a pop band from the 1980s and had no idea of their activity in the 1970s.
That’s how I discovered more and more artists and was totally caught up in the charms of the genre. A few years later I had a Progressive Rock band of my own.
What caught me, at first without theoretical knowledge at all, is the relative musical freedom of those artists. I do not know if my assumption is correct, but the reason why this musical genre was labeled as Progressive Rock was due to technical reasons – these bands contained the usual core of rock groups – bass/guitars/drums – to which added layers of different musical instruments and other audible effects that were really much more complex and sometimes bolder than what could be found in Classic Rock acts, of course, the music itself is complex and the songs or the pieces are much longer than a regular Rock song.
Even under this umbrella were sub-genres and phenomena, and what I am interested to mention in this context – Progressive Rock, especially in the circles of musicians and music enthusiasts in general, gets a lot of blows and was sometimes perceived as pretentious or ostentatious – sometimes justified – some of the artists belonging to this genre tend to show off their technical abilities with their musical instruments, and sometimes you can find whole albums filled with instrumental pyrotechnics and very little musical content with a statement. I have never been captivated by the technocratic content, and I have always connected to pieces and songs with clear shape and content – one that can be sung or played in the head.
The next mixtape contains pieces, some of which no one would label as Progressive at all, I find they have a straight connection to the genre, at least with their spirit 😉