Eternal Return's Post-Rock Debut and Cool Cover Song Videos
Let's get both experimental and retro!
Welcome to another edition of Michael’s Record Collection. Today I’m going to talk about a new release in a genre that I don’t normally delve into, which is the ambient/post-rock/experimental style. After that, I’ve got some cool videos of cover songs by well-known artists to share with you in case you’ve missed them.
My apologies for the tardiness of this week’s edition, but I actually had two interviews on Friday with vastly different bands. I stupidly wasn’t thinking and wore the same shirt for both interviews, so when the other one drops, I’ll be wearing the same Rush shirt from the Snakes & Arrows tour that you see me in above. Hopefully you’ll find this story humanizes me and somehow makes me more endearing.
Anyway, you’ll learn more about Secret Sphere’s new release later. For now, let’s get to Eternal Return!
Fans of Talk Talk’s later, more experimental music, David Sylvian’s solo work, Rain Tree Crow, This Mortal Coil, or Robert Fripp & Brian Eno collaborations will likely be interested in a new album called Once Only by Eternal Return. The project’s first release is out now on NEWdoG Records and can be found on streaming services like Spotify, as well as in online shops such as Burning Shed and Amazon.
Eternal Return consists of the existing ambient recording duo Dogon (Paul Godwin and Miguel Noya) — who gained notoriety in 1996 for the album Notdunjusta, which WIRED magazine called “The Best of Progressive Ambient” — along with bassist Colin Edwin (Porcupine Tree, No-Man, O.R.k.), Estonian guitarist Robert Jürjendal (Toyah Wilcox, Fripp’s Crafty Guitar School), and drummer Miguel Toro (Royal Dust). Five musicians living in five different countries came together virtually and eventually in person to record a dreamy, textured, post-rock treatise on nomadism. It’s a particularly personal subject for Noya, who is a Venezuelan expatriate. His experiences heavily influenced the album’s themes.
Godwin explained how the five members of Eternal Return eventually came together over a period of several years.
“Miguel and I met in the front row of a King Crimson concert in 1981, the reformed Discipline tour, and I believe its first show in the U.S. — in Boston,” he said. “We discovered that we were both students at Berklee (College of Music). And for 35 years we’ve been working as Dogon.
“In 2016, we were invited to participate in an ambient music festival — if you can believe that that exists. There’s an amazing one called Kukemuru in Estonia. And we asked our friend David Rothenberg who would be a good musician to collaborate with if we were going to Estonia, and he recommended Robert, who also had roots in King Crimson and, and Fripp philosophy and playing. And so, we invited Robert to collaborate with us on the concert at the festival. And it was a very good fit and collaboration, and then subsequently we, we started to record together remotely.
“Then we discovered that Robert had been playing with Colin Edwin, the bass player formerly of Porcupine Tree, and they've done a record together and we really enjoyed that. And so, Miguel is a nomad, both politically, economically, artistically — he's living away from his country of Venezuela. And so, I think we got the idea, ‘Let's form a band. Let's get Colin and then let's work with Miguel Toro, another Venezuelan expat, living in Berlin. Let's get the band together and book a studio in in Berlin and find these kinds of creative, progressive, and ambient oriented musicians and let's put them all together in a studio and see what we can get.’”
The first time the five musicians were ever all together in the same place was in Berlin, when they gathered to record the album at The Famous Gold Watch Studio, reportedly a former munitions factory and Stasi headquarters.
The inclusion of Edwin in an ambient/post-rock project may surprise some longtime Porcupine Tree fans, but Jürjendal, who has worked with him on other projects, says the bassist’s musical range and interests are vast and include jazz. He’s also apparently an excellent programmer.
“Colin’s style, it's very wide and he's really a very sensitive musician,” Jürjendal said. “Besides Porcupine Tree stuff, he has quite many kinds of other projects that (are) not so famous.”
Once Only is a short album, with its five tracks totaling only 32 minutes. The individual tracks range from three to just over seven minutes in length, so it never overstays its welcome the way some experimental music can.
“Everything came out really fast and easy,” Noya said of the recording process, noting that the musicians, though in the same studio, couldn’t see each other. It was recorded before the pandemic broke out, so it wasn’t an issue of social distancing, but rather the configuration of the studio that separated the band.
“It was a trio in the main room and then the two of us. The guitar and the piano/keyboards in another room, so it was like quintet split by two,” Noya said.
The album opener is “Nomad,” an ethereal piece that reminds this listener of something you might hear from No-Man on the Together We’re Stranger album.
Trumpet by Syrian musician Milad Khawam — another expatriate in Berlin, much like Toro and Noya — and mournful guitar from Jürjendal, along with some beautiful piano, highlight “The Void,” a dreamy piece that envelops the listener like a warm blanket on a cool night.
After “The Void” comes a trio of songs that hold together as a suite and Godwin said were born out of a long improvisation by the band. The third, fourth, and fifth songs on the album — “A Medium-Sized Village,” “The Triggering Town,” and “The Bottom of the Pond” — are the most avant-garde tracks on Once Only.
“Miguel and I had recorded (“The Triggering Town”) and released that on a Dogon record previously. It was mostly piano and vocal with very light synthesis,” he said. “And so, in this case, we felt like we wanted to hear it for this ensemble and see what happened to it. We did a long improvisation related to, but not specific to, “The Triggering Town,” and that piece really just developed organically in the studio, and it was a separate piece. But then, you know, after, when we were listening to all the rough mixes and so forth, we started to realize we could create a kind of suite.
“So, in fact, pieces, three, four, and five on the album are really part of a trilogy, a suite. One is this long improv that happened before. That's called “A Medium-Sized Village.” And then “The Triggering Town” itself, proper. And then, following that became “The Bottom of the Pond,” which is this kind of quite post-rock sort of intense answer, in a way, to “The Triggering Town.” So, both those envelope pieces on either side of “The Triggering Town” were not planned at all before the studio.”
One of my favorite parts of the album are the powerful vocals near the end of “The Bottom of the Pond,” which are low in the mix, so the effect is almost soothing despite their delivery and ferocity.
Those who aren’t big ambient/post-rock fans may still enjoy album closer, “Sky,” a beautiful track that strays closer to pop territory than the rest of the record. It starts delicately and builds brilliantly as it moves to its crescendo, before finally closing with a soft and lovely acoustic guitar riff. It’s a great song for a quiet evening on the back porch with your favorite beverage in hand.
It was fascinating to hear from the band how the album came together and to find out more about their background. You can watch the entire 30-minute interview here.
These Cover Song Videos are Worth Your Time
They say things happen in threes, and so it was that I came across three videos in the last couple of weeks that feature great cover songs.
One of these was posted on the MRC Facebook page recently, but with Facebook reach being what it is, it only got like 25 impressions and so I felt it worthwhile making it part of the next newsletter. John Mitchell (It Bites, Kino, Arena, Frost*, Lonely Robot, The Urbane, etc.) has been putting up some excellent cover songs on his YouTube page and one of his best is his cover of “A Gentleman’s Excuse Me,” a song that originally appeared on Fish’s 1990 solo debut, Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors. Mitchell doesn’t just nail the song, he also shines in the video:
Next up is a faithful cover of Aerosmith’s rock classic “Dream On” by Neal Morse Band guitarist and vocalist Eric Gillette, who is a fantastic musician and has the chops and the talent to be a household name. I like the way he shot everything separately to give the viewer different things to focus on with subsequent viewings.
Finally, I came across this new video to an old cover. Ray Wilson, who stepped into Phil Collins’ vocalist role for the last Genesis studio album, Calling All Stations (1997), sings this Pink Floyd cover of “High Hopes” from the 1994 album The Division Bell. He recorded the cover a while back but this is a new video, per his Instagram post.
If you can’t play the embedded version below, you can check it out at this link.
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