#PERPETUUM MOBILE PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA FULL#

For this first release, they also recruited Neil Rennie on the ukulele and Emily Young to design the eye-catching album cover. Leibmann on cello, Nye on keyboards and Wright on violin remained with Jeffes for most of the subsequent recordings of this first phase of the Penguin Cafe adventure, but apart from Jeffes, Leibmann was the only member who has appeared on every one of the early albums. Calling themselves the “four musicians in green clothes”, they began recording and in 1976 released their first album, Music from the Penguin Cafe.

When he recovered, he transformed his dream into truth and invented the PCO.įor the Orchestra, he recruited like-minded players Helen Leibmann, Steve Nye and Gavyn Wright. I will tell you things at random.” Jeffes tried to imagine what the house band of that cafe might sound like. The following day a voice in his head said distinctly, “I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe.

#PERPETUUM MOBILE PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA FULL#

In 1972, food poisoning confined Jeffes to bed where he dreamed of a Kafkaesque residential block full of people with empty lives. Then the piece grows into fruition with little fuss and perfect symmetry. Melody and harmony, rhythm and tone colour are fused together right from the very beginning, in an ambient seed. Most of all, he was seeking pure musicality, pieces constructed of the vital essence of the art.Ī Penguin Cafe composition rarely seems made up of separate parts, but is much more like an organic growth. African music alone seemed to contain elements he was seeking, powerful rhythms, freer harmonic approach, the mysterious qualities of its silences, an unmelodramatic emphasis on cadence, imaginative tuning systems and improvisational flair. Similarly, his brief flirtation with rock came to nothing. He grew to be dissatisfied with the barren tonalities of contemporary avant-garde work. Born in 1949, Jeffes studied the classics in London before trying his hand at experimental music. That magnetism is present in all the music he made. But Jeffes was special and attracted beauteous oddity by some form of magnetism he carried around within himself. I have never found a harmonium in a backstreet, or any other musical instrument for that matter, not even a harmonica. The song was composed to celebrate this lucky find. He located the person who had discarded it and obtained permission to take the instrument away. The real story behind the track is that Simon Jeffes (1949-1997), founder of the Orchestra, was on tour in Japan and wandering through the backstreets of Kyoto when he found an abandoned harmonium balanced on the apex of a pile of rubbish. The title of that soul enhancing song, ‘Music for a Found Harmonium’, struck me as curiously enigmatic, so much so that I later entitled one of my books Stories from a Lost Anthology as a sort of tribute, an allusion noticed by no reviewers. There’s a suspicion in my mind that I actually bought the album Signs of Life on cassette first. Listening to the album at home I was delighted to recognise ‘Music for a Found Harmonium’ as the opening track. Perhaps the cover image had intrigued me. I went into a record store and bought the album Broadcasting from Home at random. The melody and the visuals matched well, but it was years before I learned who was responsible for the music and I did so by pure chance. It was ‘Music for a Found Harmonium’ and it accompanied a short film featured on television called simply ‘Interlude’ that I have never been able to trace since.

I recall the first time I heard a Penguin Cafe track. They formed one of the background soundscapes to my student years. The Penguin Cafe Orchestras, and the plural is necessary because there were several of them, were responsible for a unique sonic experience, creating a blend of folk, jazz, classical and faux ethnic music that managed to pull off the difficult trick of sounding instantly familiar to the subconscious mind, as if it had already existed in the past but had been forgotten for ages and now was being retrieved from some pool of inspiration common to humanity.

Perpetuum mobile penguin cafe orchestra