Castanarc

It's been awhile since I went over to England to interview this band. The trip was nice. I spent some time with friends in Grimsby, and was able to make the trip to Appleby to have an interview with the band and their manager in a local pub. The interview was published in iO Pages 29 (December 2000).

Over the years I always kept appreciating the music of Castanarc. Mark Holiday and David Powell confronted the listener with a mixture of ambient progressive rock and uptempo high-energy rocksongs, in which the band didn’t bogged down in copying their own work, or work of others. But it turned out that in 1999 Castanarc released their final album Little Gods, a beautiful diamond, which continued to follow the atmospheric and musical direction the band undertook in earlier releases like Burnt Offerings and Rude Politics. After the release of Little Gods Mark and David told me they had great plans with their label. Neil Duty had returned and they were setting out a course concerning gigs and releases. There was enough shelved material for one or two sort of Archive albums.

How it turned differently. It seems like Castanarc was shelved shortly after I interviewed the band. John Spence their producer and engineer started to work with Mostly Autumn, Karnataka and Manning (solo project of the singer of Parrallel or 90 Degrees), to name a few.

A complete biography of the band, which I wrote some months ago, can be found at last.fm.

To give an idea of the music the band created over a timespan of 15 years, I enclose a link to a rough compilation, which contains the following tracks:

01. Peyote (Journey To The East)
02. When Doves Become Eagles (Burnt Offerings)
03. New Jerusalem (Rude Politics)
04. The Sun (Little Gods)
05. How Beauty Attracks The Beast (Rude Politics)
06. The Moon (little Gods)
07. No Mans Land (Burnt Offerings)
08. Journey To The East (Journey To The East)



Their discography consists of:

1984 Journey To The East (Peninsula Records Pencil 10)
1987 Journey To The East (Cue Rain CR02)
1988 Burnt Offerings (Cue Rain CUE03)
1988 Rude Politics (RCS PD71884)
1989 This Island Love (Pyramid Records 12PYR09)
1991 Journey To The East (Kinesis KDCD1001)
1998 Rude Politics (Khepra Records KHEP02)
1998 Burnt Offerings (Khepra Records KHEP03)
1998 Little Gods (Khepra Records04)



Furthermore they appear on the following compilations:

1984 Debut "Goodbye To All That" (Debut LC 8942/10 / 804 579-985 )
1993 Ugum Part II "Everything But The Boyd" (MSI UGU 00193)
1995 Kinesis Progressive Rock Sampler One "Peyote" (Kinesis)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Introduction To Dutch New Wave Vol. 32

Image
And that brings us to Volume 32 of An Introduction To Dutch New Wave. This time 65% of the numbers came from recent purchased vinyl. I will keep telling that Discogs has become a major resource for discovering and hunting vinyl from bands and artists, that sometimes released one single only. But since a couple of weeks I am using a great cross reference site called Nederlandse vinylsingles . The guys behind this site are doing a great job, tracking down all Dutch vinyl singles. Some information on several songs. The Kimono track is spelled wrong. I kept it this way, since the cover of the single shows the same title. It’s one of the groups of which I used the single b-side instead of the a-side. The others are Blackout (b-side of Obscure Disco), G.T. Modell (b-side of Scratch Your Act) and Weekend At Waikiki (b-side of The Valley). Frederic And The Flies was a one off project by producer duo Bolland and Bolland. Not only the group name refers to Adam And The Ants, t
Read more

A Flock Of Seagulls

Image
Being a fan for many many years I was really surprised the band decided finally, after 25 years, to do an European tour again. I am aware of the fact that it's only Mike Score nowadays who's left of the old line-up. Still I like to see them, because back in 1984 I was unable to visit the famous Noorderligt at Tilburg. On 09-09-09 A Flock Of Seagulls will play the well known Paradiso theatre in Amsterdam. I became an instant fan of the four when I heard I Ran on the radio. But it was Wishing (if I had a photograph of you) which really turned me into AFOS. Through the years I was able to track down most of their vynil releases. And of course the CD's followed as well. I even became a member of the Airborne Division. With the internet things changed and in 1996 I was able to get a CDR copy of most of the b-sides and rare recordings of AFOS ripped from vynil, which I like to share with you. The recordings are from the period 1982 - 1985 when they had the line-up of: Mike Score
Read more