Showing posts with label Soft Machine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soft Machine. Show all posts

3/21/17

Guitar Legend Allan Holdsworth 12 CD Box Set Collection and Accompanying Double CD Collection

THE MAN WHO CHANGED GUITAR FOREVER Box Set
EIDOLON-a 2-CD Best Of To Be Released on Manifesto Records on April 7th.


Los Angeles, CA-based Manifesto Records will release a new, complete 12-CD box set by guitar innovator, jazz, and progressive rock legend Allan Holdsworth titled The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever, along with a 2-CD updated and expanded “best of” collection selected by the artist, titled Eidolon. Manifesto Records referenced the box set’s seemingly portentous title from the cover story title featuring Holdsworth in Guitar Player magazine’s April 2008 edition. Given his humble nature, Holdsworth is a bit embarrassed by the title and finds the notion that he changed “guitar forever,” somewhat overblown—more befitting of names like Orville Gibson, Leo Fender, or Ned Steinberger.
Holdsworth, born in Bradford England in 1946, embarked on a solo career as composer and bandleader exclusively in 1979. Holdsworth’s career as producer, bandleader, and lead composer is documented in this box set, and with the artist’s 28-track selection of favorites in Eidolon. Both packages include extensive liner notes, and an updated 2016 interview with Holdsworth discussing each release, his history, and approach to the instrument.
From 1982 through 2003, Holdsworth recorded a dozen albums that have been lovingly put together for The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever collection. Featured on the box set are eleven remastered studio albums, starting with the 1982 studio release, Allan Holdsworth, I.O.U., and the archival 2003 live release, Then!, recorded live in Tokyo in 1990. All feature additional bonus tracks added for special editions or the original Japan releases, along with the original artwork and studio credits. Also included are the Grammy-nominated Road Games, (1983), Metal Fatigue (1985), Sand (1987), Secrets (1989), Wardenclyffe Tower (1992), Hard Hat Area (1993), None Too Soon (1996), The Sixteen Men of Tain (2000), and Flat Tire: Music for a Non-Existent Movie (2001).
Holdsworth has been recognized by many of the world’s most accomplished and unique rock and jazz guitar virtuosos. Luminaries including Eddie Van Halen, Carlos Santana, Frank Zappa, Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin, Joe Satriani, Tom Morello universally expressed reverence and astonishment at Holdsworth’s pioneering approach to his playing and vast vocabulary of “uncommon” chord voicings.
He further expanded the guitar’s orchestral potential with a range of electronic effects, then moved on to become one of the early innovators of guitar-based synthesizer controllers. In the nearly five decades Holdsworth has been touring, collaborating, and recording, he has created an immense sonic and musical legacy.
In the ‘70s he played with legendary Miles Davis drummer, Tony Williams and Cream bassist Jack Bruce as the band Lifetime, and toured with Soft Machine. He worked with former Yes and King Crimson drummer, Bill Bruford’s first solo project, Feels Good To Me, and subsequent recordings with Jean-Luc Ponty, and Gong. Bruford suggested Allan for the progressive-rock “supergroup,” U.K., which, along with Bruford, also featured John Wetton and Eddie Jobson. Both The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever and Eidolon will become precious to those who love the world’s great guitarists. Fans of deeply unique, sonically rich and pristine recordings of great musicians taking their music to the next level and beyond, will also be in awe of these collections.


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www.Manifesto.com | facebook.com/allanholdsworthmusic


Amazon Preorder Links: The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Changed-Guitar-Forever/dp/B01N5P4DLD/ref=pd_bxgy_15_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=114FQBNT8G0S6NJR2KE9
Eidolon
https://www.amazon.com/Eidolon-Allan-Holdsworth/dp/B01MZ9MJN8/ref=pd_bxgy_15_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B01MZ9MJN8&pd_rd_r=WRMTGKTVCWHHRABY2813&pd_rd_w=XGPWl&pd_rd_wg=pntBS&psc=1&refRID=WRMTGKTVCWHHRABY2813

















3/13/15

Daevid Allen, Jan. 13, 1938-March 13, 2015


It is with great sadness that we report the passing away of the great Daevid Allen, for many years the leading light in the anarchic collective Gong. Daevid lost his long battle with cancer, and the world is a little less sunlit as a result.

Daevid Allen was the kind of mercurial, inspiring individual whose free-thinking nature positively touched the lives of all who came into his orbit. When the Australian-born Allen first arrived in England in late 1960, he ended up as a lodger in the home of Robert Wyatt’s parents; the first Beatnik to be seen in the Kent countryside. Allen brought a glimpse of a different world and way of living to Wyatt and his friends, and later, as a founder-member of British psychedelic pioneers Soft Machine, added his unique vision to British rock music at the time.

It is as a founder-member of the sprawling collective Gong that Allen will be most closely associated; born out of the Paris Spring Commune of 1968, their debut album Camembert Electrique was memorably released in the UK in 1974 on the nascent Virgin Records label for the price of a vinyl single. Gong were never blessed with a stable line-up; Allen left the band in the mid-seventies, but reformed Gong in the early nineties. The latest Gong album – I See You – was released late in 2014, and was greeted with universally glowing reviews, a brilliant restatement of Allen and the band’s enduring musical and lyrical values.

Although Daevid Allen’s death at the age of seventy-seven is a sad loss, his lasting legacy – an unapologetic desire to live, explore, entertain and inform through his remarkable body of work, outside of the world of the everyday – will live on.

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This is a February 27 video of Daevid performing a piece from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet in Bryon Bay, Australia where poets and artists gathered to help celebrate his life and work.   daevid allen - poet first and last - Pizza Paradiso - 27 Feb 2015 from Planet Gong on Vimeo.

"For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance."