1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 366. Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Music From The Penguin Cafe Orchestra (1976)

 

And so begins Year 2 of this project.

I do like these oddball little albums. Chances are you, like me, may have heard some Penguin Café Orchestra before and not known it, especially their track (not on this album) Telephone And Rubber Band, using a telephone dialling tone as the basis for a track. 

They’re quite minimalist and mostly instrumental, kind of a meeting between folk music and bands like Can or Faust. Simon Jeffes, the founder and core of the group, plays guitar, and most of the tracks on here feature strings from Helen Leibmann (cello) and Gavyn Wright (violin). As with these largely ambient type of groups, it’s difficult to pick out a track, and many on Side One are short 2-minute pieces. The aptly named Penguin Café Single is probably one of the most complete-sounding pieces on here, but of the shorter tracks I liked Giles Farnaby’s Dream. The longer, 11-minute piece on Side Two with the glorious title of The Sound of Someone You Love Who's Going Away And It Doesn't Matter really does sounds like that. I guess “art-folk” is perhaps a good way to describe the sound. 

Jaffe got the idea from a fever dream after suffering food poisoning, and it all does have a bit of a dream-like, slightly surrealist feel to it, but remaining eminently listenable rather than turning into Trout Mask Replica. It’s the kind of music you’d find in an Indie film when they couldn’t afford Nick Drake. 

I liked it, but it was quite a slender offering in the end. Given that this is “albums you must hear before you die”, this one left me glad that I had encountered the Penguin Café Orchestra and had my horizons widened just a little bit, while some albums (usually in the CSNY family tree) have left me feeling that I probably could have coped with not having heard it.