Alien 1979

Farout is a progressive/jazz rock band from Lappeenranta, Finland. It was founded in 1977 and was active until 1982 with various setups. Farout was the progressive rock champion in the Finnish Rock music contest in spring 1978. The band recorded their only LP-record so far for Kompass Records at Birdland Studios, Mellunmaki, Helsinki, in 1979. The creditable record engineering was done by Dan Tigersted, the studio guru of those days. He recorded the material on an 8-track recorder during five long working days.
The tenor saxophone and flute player, late Pekka Poyry guest starred on the record. Poyry, who died in 1980, became well known for his credits with e.g. Tasavallan Presidentti and Jukka Tolonen Band among numerous other recordings…

Muck Groh was born in 1946 and started his musical life by first learning the trombone before he became more known as a guitarist, first band he was featured in being the the krautrock band Ihre Kinder. Later on he founded Aera which mixed jazz and progressive rock and which he left in the 70's to pursue more solo projects, like his album "Muckefuck" (it is a German word for bad coffee) and another jazz rock group Grotesk. Besides a rich music career, Groh spent much of his time as a freelance painter until 2006 where he initiated a revival of Aera called Neue Aera with which he tours regularly. Groh's musical endeavors can therefore be checked in bands mentioned above while his only solo album in 1979 is a fine record with folk overtones that might also please fans of Frank Zappa's jazz rock oriented albums.

McOil got together in 1976 in Ochsenhausen in Oberschwaben. Their musi­cal direction: progressive rock of the harder kind. "All our hopes" was released in 1979 as a limited private presing of 1000 copies. As a bonus track this CD, which is taken from the mastertape, features the B-side of the single, but in a slightly different version, and also a two minute drum solo on "This time should never end" which is not on the LP.

Not quite a greatest-hits album and not quite a live album, Oingo Boingo celebrates not quite a decade of existence with the peculiar double album Boingo Alive. Elfman and bandmates re-record two dozen tracks from Boingo's prodigious canon in no particular order, and sweeten the deal by tossing in a few freshly penned numbers…

Great news for people who love morbid, mordant, sci-fi-inflected synth music: Infiné Music label is reissuing Zed's (aka Bernard Szajner) awesome imaginary soundtrack LP Visions of Dune (1979). Created over eight days on a borrowed Oberheim sequencer and an Akaï four-track, the music here represents some of the deepest, most intense evocations of alien atmospheres ever waxed. It's a claustrophobic and expansive collection of dystopian tone poetry and ominous electro rock that will appeal to fans of Heldon, Magma, and first-half-of-the-'70s Tangerine Dream. Szajner, now 70, told The Vinyl Factory that he conceived a series of what he called “mental impressions of a character, a situation or a concept” from Frank Herbert’s novel.

In the CD programme Psychedelic Gems, psychedelic and progressive bands and their background are featured bands, whose overall output of published or unpublished material would not be sufficient to justify a CD on their own. Most of them played during the late sixties and early seventies, having published no more than a demo tape or a single, which is why several of them are presented together on one CD. Each group - so far all of them coming from German-speaking countries - is accorded a full-page colour picture of the cover of their single, a band history in German and English and, if space is available, a photo of their label. In contrast to bootleg labels such as Visions of the Past, Electrick Loosers or Prae-Kraut Pandaemonium, all licenses were legally obtained from the artists or their record companies. Overlapping releases are therefore nothing to be surprised about. Together with the one of the Garden Of Delights series…