Favourite Van Der Graaf Generator Album?

So Still Life, eh? What an album.

“La Rossa” is almost too good to be true

I'm finding it very difficult to listen to anything but APOLK at the moment. Even other VDGG feels like thin gruel. I guess this will continue until I play it to death.

Have dabbled in solo Hammill, actually think Gog/Magog maybe one of my favourite PH/VDGG things - first time I heard that was a similar 'fuckin hell he really went for it!!' moment

(also - are any of the various Pawn Hearts remasters particularly worthwhile?)

I've heard the one in the recent CD boxset was good. dunno about the latest vinyl reissue but I would assume it used the same master. but I can't say because my copy sounds pretty good

in fact I think I'll go listen to it right now

I mean...it spurred me to read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and study Buddhism and Asatru, so...maybe, but all that boils down to is thinking "OK, that was a bunch of bullshit, but maybe there's something out there that's not" and eventually coming away from all those explorations disappointed, too.

― but also fuck you (unperson)

i mean bullshit in what terms? this is another part of the lie, "catholic" meaning literally "universal". no universal church, no universal brotherhood of man. it's just about finding something that works for _you_. for me, that was taking hormones, getting my dick cut off, and becoming a communist lesbian witch. (by the way i do want to give shout-outs to hammill for his embrace of witchcraft in early VDGG, stuff like "necromancer" and "white hammer"; kind of a shame he walked away from that path IMO but again, people gotta do what works for them). what worked for me is probably just not gonna be right for most people, but for everybody i do think there _is_ something that's right for them.

I've heard the one in the recent CD boxset was good. dunno about the latest vinyl reissue but I would assume it used the same master. but I can't say because my copy sounds pretty good

in fact I think I'll go listen to it right now

thanks Frogbs - yeah while my beat up old vinyl copy still sounds great i can see how the medium might have limits re reproducing the frequencies of this band - might try and get the standalone PH CD release just in the spirit of scientific enquiry

and yes, why would one do anything else

I checked discogs, the reviews are...not great. though I think that's more the pressing than the master. though I'm not sure if the 2022 vinyl reissues used the new masters at all. plus, it doesn't have "Theme One"!

anyway there's a quote I read on RYM (I think) which called this album the "final boss of prog rock". that definitely feels apt. and who else could pull this off but Peter Hammill?

ahh fuck I had to pause "Lighthouse Keepers" 2/3rds of the way through to watch this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjrVg7eRHrc

no doubt this is the sort of thing that was going through Hammill's head all the time

i had to think about what i would call the final boss of prog-rock and i think it's probably the final version of dirk campbell's "zabaglione", performed only once in louviciennes on june 19, 1976, a performance so miserably demoralizing that campbell immediately quit the group, and rock music, forever in order to further explore occult theories regarding "early music"

seriously i would murder (a healthy salad) for a decent quality recording of it

angels arranged in triangles blowing across the ocean

other candidates include khan's "madman's rap" and the malgaard suite by comus

xxps ^ the cd remasters in the 'Charisma Years' box set are really great.

specifically I mean the new stereo mixes of H to He / PH / Godbluff / SL

Still Life is the album i listen to most.

I also first heard Hammill on Exposure, and later found Pawn Hearts on a trip to Ottawa. For a couple of years, I didn't explore any further because I felt "this is fine, but strange - how much more of this would I want"? It's at the extreme end of his oeuvre and sort of a strange place to start. Then I picked up H to He Who Am the Only One because the purple sleeve looked so appealing and that started the boulder rolling.

I hear Hammill in Halford; and when I heard The Number of the Beast, the songwriting gave me a strong feeling of "Hammill for Dummies" (sorry Maiden fans).

that's what "the lie" means to me, the unique sense of _moral inversion_ represented by patriarchal christianity.

I'm neither an expert in Catholicism nor baroque sculpture, but the piece that inspired the song, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini, has inspired interpretations that it is a representation of "the possibility of a female enjoyment that is infinite and unknowable, while masculine enjoyment is defined by finitude and failure": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_of_Saint_Teresa. Try looking at those photos while listening to the song.

well, i have read notes hammill made on the song saying that "the lie" didn't refer to the painting itself, but was inspired by the painting - and that's how i read it, as the patriarchal repression of female sexuality, its transmutation into suffering for the benefit of the patriarchy, for the benefit of the Male Gaze. _that_, to me, is The Lie.

i just bought a copy of the Pawn Hearts 2CD+DVD reissue from last year - haven't listened to all the bonus tracks, but fired up the Denon DVD-3910 to listen to the DVD-Audio disc with the "new stereo mix" - and I don't have Hoffman ears or purity of heart but it was pretty fkn awesome. totally revealing of extra details in the mix and honestly miles better than my grotty old LP.

just found a 2xLP copy of Vital - Live. pristine shape, too. I guess whoever bought it didn't like it much :)

I do find it amusing that VdGG were the last of the major prog acts to release a live album, and they did so in 1978, when the band and the genre itself were falling apart. not only that but it's a bootleg quality recording, with Jackson's sax infamously not even picked up on most tracks. in spite of all that it absolutely rules. it just tears up their whole back catalogue and the performances are reckless in a way you rarely see in prog. its also full of unreleased stuff which is pretty unusual for one of these live albums. in fact I can't think of another 70's live prog album with unreleased original material on it, let alone this much of it

There's "Conundrum" and "Quatrain" on Jethro Tull's Bursting Out, but I can't think of any others.

ahh well, that's one prog live album I haven't heard :)

Depending on whether you consider Santana prog (I do, especially in this era), there's a bunch of unreleased stuff on Lotus.

I do find it amusing that VdGG were the last of the major prog acts to release a live album, and they did so in 1978, when the band and the genre itself were falling apart. not only that but it's a bootleg quality recording, with Jackson's sax infamously not even picked up on most tracks. in spite of all that it absolutely rules. it just tears up their whole back catalogue and the performances are reckless in a way you rarely see in prog. its also full of unreleased stuff which is pretty unusual for one of these live albums. in fact I can't think of another 70's live prog album with unreleased original material on it, let alone this much of it

― frogbs

_another live_ by utopia

VITAL is so sick!!!! that bass tone!!!

I guess if you include prog bands that improvised from scratch onstage you'd have large pieces of Henry Cow's Concerts, some stuff from the Crimson live albums, and so on.
Tangerine Dream's Ricochet and Encore are almost entirely new/improvised music, but also questionably "live".

i highly rec the Maida Vale sessions too!!

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41lYm6lchFL._SY580_.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpolfQIPS84

even the recent Merlin Atmos live album is good

(plus it has VDGG handling some typically Hammill solo songs like Flight and Gog)

I do love them live around 75-78 cos they get really intense and have guitar and stuff.
Vital in the remastered form for the 2005 reissues is pretty good and I think has more David Jackson in as part of the remaster process I think. But there are a load of live sets around too. By the end they could rate as a pretty great dark post-punk band so hope there were a stack of people discovering them at the time. Like if John Lydon cited them do hope it lead to some people finding out how good they were and seeing them at this peak, one of several but others were years earlier too. Like not that they don't stand on their own feet since they did seem to be pretty marvelously maverick.

the maida vale sessions are fabulous, the version of "darkness" on there is wonderful. i don't think it's on the maida vale sessions proper, but the expanded version called "after the flood" has some wonderful material too - great version of "killer" and as i've already said, i'm really fond of "necromancer" - really fun '68 version here.

yeah think I mentioned turning up my copy of After The Flood a few days ago.