Pyramid Flac

Jaga Jazzist return with their new album Pyramid, where the legendary Norwegian eight-piece takes a deep dive into post-rock, jazz and psychedelia influences. It’s their first album since 2015’s Starfire, their ninth album in a career now spanning four decades, but it marks the group’s debut on Brainfeeder, the LA-based imprint curated by Flying Lotus. On Pyramid, Jaga Jazzist have crafted a suitably cosmic sound to match their new label home, all the while nodding to forebears spanning from 80s jazz band Out To Lunch and Norwegian synth guru Ståle Storløkken, to contemporaries Tame Impala, Todd Terje and Jon Hopkins. Each of the album’s four longform entries evolves over carefully plotted movements, the tracks’ technicolour threads dreamily unspooling.

Even with six different vocalists lending their talents to the album, Pyramid still remains an average bit of material from the Alan Parsons Project. Not only does the album's theme evolve around the mystique of the pyramid, but it also touches on man's fascination with superstition and its powers…

Roots is probably the most emotional CD from Pyramid Peak. A review of 30 years of friendship and musical partnership, deeply connected by the common passion for electronic music. When Andreas Morsch and Axel Stupplich first met in 1987 they didn’t know that this connection would last until 2017. Today - 30 years later - they can look back to 10 common CD releases and many live gigs in Europe. Since their beginning Andreas and Axel remained true to the Berlin School type of electronic music. But they have created their own style which can be described best as the typical “Pyramid Peak Sound”. This sound has come to perfection on Roots: sparkling sequences, driving beats and empathic melodies with almost epic sound sculptures…

In the late '60s, Earland became one of the stars on the B-3 organ and earned a classic with 1969's Black Talk. Like many organ players in the '70s, Earland moved over to the Fender Rhodes, the Mini-Moog, and the ARP string synthesizer with mixed results. This 1977 album is the follow-up to 1976's Odyssey. While Earland's skills are never in question here, the execution and the style are the problems here. Although many players legitimately started to do more material pertaining to the universal, even zodiacal concerns, by this time it was becoming old hat. The title track is symptomatic of Earland's the more pensive direction and even emotive Gabor Szabo's guitar solo; can't save the "deepness" from being cloying. Of course with albums of the type, the biggest success comes when the artist isn't really trying.

Due to the lack of support from the Governments who see art as a way to get more taxes or private industry who prefer to invest in foreign acts, and the difficulties to reach the USA or British markets, it's unusual for a Latin American band to have a long and prolific career, but 31 years and 15 studio albums make of CAST from Mexico, one of the exceptions to this rule…