On this audio complement to a home video, John Cale is heard in two concert appearances, one on each CD, filmed and recorded for the German Rockpalast television series. On the first disc, from October 13, 1984, he plays with a band consisting of guitarist Dave Young, bassist Andy Heermans, and drummer Dave Lichtenstein; on the second, from March 16, 1983, he is solo, accompanying himself on either acoustic guitar or piano. Thus, the album encapsulates the two sides of Cale, the aggressive rocker and the classically trained recitalist and singer/songwriter. Interestingly, the two sides are explored sometimes with the same songs, albeit played differently.
While John Cale is one of the most famous and, in his own way, influential underground rock musicians, he is also one of the hardest to pin down stylistically. Much has been made of his schooling in classical and avant-garde music, yet much of what he's recorded has been decidedly song-oriented, dovetailing close to the mainstream at times. Terming him a forefather of punk and new wave isn't exactly accurate either.
This double cd pack is more than a simple anthology. It starts with a complete John Cale-overseen remaster of the long out-of-print 1982 album "Music for a new society", along with 3 exclusive new tracks. But the real meat of the work is M:Fans, a complete reworking of the entire original 1982 album, to which the remastered "Music for a new society" serves merely as preface. "John Cale re-contextualises the original songs into radical new forms to resonate with the digital age. Includes a new recording of 'Back To The End' - a previously lost track from the original session."
John Cale's 1992 live Fragments of a Rainy Season holds a special place in the hearts of longtime fans. Cale was no stranger to concert sets. Among his most notorious are the snarling Sabotage/Live from CBGB's and 1986's howling Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Fragments captures Cale completely solo. His iconic singing voice, rainbow variety of melodies, and poetic lyrics are accompanied only by his piano or acoustic guitar. It's easily his most welcoming album, the one that provides a solid introduction as he ranges through his back catalog.
After decades of being circulated on inferior-sounding bootlegs, the January 1972 reconvergence of Velvet Underground (VU) co-founders Lou Reed (vocals/acoustic guitar), John Cale (guitar/viola/piano/vocals), and Nico (vocals/harmonium) in Paris at Le Bataclan has been committed to commercial release…
John Cale's reentry into the world of pop music is a contentious and accessible one. This is the Welsh iconoclast at his most elegant, energetic, and innovative. HoboSapiens finds Cale using samples as the base of all his tracks and using musicians to fill in his ideas – ideas that were firmly established melodically, lyrically, and texturally. There are a couple of dozen players here, including guitarists Joe Gore (Tom Waits, PJ Harvey) and Joel Mark, Eno (and his two daughters Darla and Irial), bassist Jeff Eyrich, a small choir of Italian voices, a choral quartet called A Tonal Choir, drummer Marco Giovino, and samples by a host of electro-wizards.
John Cale's great credit, both inside and outside The Velvet Underground, was to have found the inoculation dosage that would addict the music industry to sound without alienating one world from the other. But outside the "official" VU there was also an uncut version of the virus, incubated behind the slum walls of the 1960s Lower East Side, and maintained live in the liquid nitrogen of these insolently recorded reel-to-reel audiotapes, recorded and produced by Tony Conrad and now available in this massive Table Of The Elements 3xCD boxed set.