Aug 20: 'The Lark Ascending' #4: Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Richard King's 2019 book explores British music and its link with the landscape of Britain. Here's the 4th post connected with the book.

There is a chapter on the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

This is the track most people will associate with the band.

The album this was from was released in 1978, and called 'Music from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra'. Credit was given to Simon Jeffes. He was an acolyte of the composer John Cage.

The front cover of the album features a painting by Emily Young.

The follow up also featured Emily Young art work.

She was the inspiration for the early Pink Floyd song 'See Emily Play'.

The second album featured the track 'Telephone and Rubber Band', used in TV advertising.

The book explores the story of the "found harmonium". In 1982, Jeffes found it abandoned in a Kyoto side street while in Japan collaborating with Ryuichi Sakamoto. He picked it up the following day and took it to his apartment and then back home to London. It was then taken across the world. This piece was to do with found objects (objets trouvés).

There were connections with the new age music released by Windham Hill, and Brian Eno and Michael Nyman's music.

The book is available from all the usual places and comes highly recommended.

Feb 25: Silent album

A silent album was released this week in 2025.

It was 'released' by over 1000 artists.

Here's Sir Paul McCartney explaining why he is against AI being used in this way. Of course, he used AI himself - or did he? Read this.

In 2023, Sir Paul and Beatles drummer Sir Ringo Starr used AI to extract the vocals from an unfinished demo left by John Lennon to produce a new song, Now and Then. The song, billed as the Beatles' final release, drew widespread praise and was nominated for two Grammys and a Brit award.

"I think AI is great, and it can do lots of great things," Sir Paul said. "We took an old cassette of John's and cleaned his voice up so it sounded like it had just been recorded yesterday. So it has its uses. But it shouldn't rip creative people off. There's no sense in that."

The album project called 'Make it Fair' was a protest about the use of copyrighted music to train AI models, which could then produce music which copied their style. Music generates billions of pounds to the UK's economy, and is also part of the UK's 'soft power'.

This was the 'track listing' on the back of the album...

The message is clear to Goverment, who have done *checks notes - nothing about it.

Generative AI can produce 'music' but it's not really music. Nick Cave has spoken about this elsewhere.

Sting warned about them back in 2023.

The campaign website is here, where you can find out about the artists who contributed to the project.

And don't forget that John Cage got there first with the silent piece of music back in 1952.

And here's William Marx performing the piece: