Style Master 4

One could easily make the case for designating the Masters Apprentices as the best Australian rock band of the '60s. Featuring singer Jim Keays and songwriter/rhythm guitarist Mick Bower, the band's earliest recordings combined the gritty R&B/rock of Brits like the Pretty Things with the minor-key melodies of the Yardbirds. The compelling "Wars or Hands of Time" and the dreamy psychedelia of "Living in a Child's Dream" were undiscovered classics, although the latter was a Top Ten hit in Australia. Bower left the group after suffering a nervous breakdown in late 1967, and the Masters grew steadily less interesting, moving from flower pop and hard rock to progressive and acoustic sounds.

One could easily make the case for designating the Masters Apprentices as the best Australian rock band of the '60s. Featuring singer Jim Keays and songwriter/rhythm guitarist Mick Bower, the band's earliest recordings combined the gritty R&B/rock of Brits like the Pretty Things with the minor-key melodies of the Yardbirds…

We all dreamt or wished to explore imaginary & far away grounds, between no man’s lands and intangible panoramas. Border 50 is an hymn to this laid-off concept, when frontiers and delineations dissipate to a wilder breadth, where, as Baudelaire would say, "Everything is beauty, luxury, calm and intense pleasure". Swiss-born artist Moreno Antognini aka Master Margherita treats us to a mystical and meditative album driven by low-end quiet pulses, swaddling guitar basslines, dense granular pads, giving a powerful homage to a certain definition of Doom Jazz, Stoner Rock and Nordic Ambient with influences from Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, Bill Laswell or Biosphere’s works. Carefully crafted over the course of two years, this Border 50 album stands apart, a return to the source for the artist, hallmark of Master Margherita’s irrefutable multi-instrumentist and storyteller talent.