Mask, and Ye Shall Receive

Angine de Poitrine - Sherpa

OK, now there's been another 1946 death.... when's the one we're all waiting for? I'm just kidding. Or am I?

I'm working on Dolly P and Tim C, but today we're continuing with the hard-rockin' posts I seem to be backloading into August with these guys, just your average microtonal masked math-rockers.

The story goes that they had booked two slots at a venue on the same night and were trying to fool the promoter into thinking they were a different group so he'd pay them. It's always the promoter with the money, isn't it?

So they fashioned these crazy papier-mâché outfits and went on as a totally different band than the one that had played earlier in the evening. It worked, and an Affectation vs. Authenticity debate erupted as they began to go viral.

They concocted a whole narrative to go with the personae: that they were ETs from another world where everyone is famous, and it takes 6 hours to go to the supermarket because everyone has to sign autographs for everyone else. And so on.

Now, whether the costumery has anything to do with the music outside of the Magma-type storyline is up for debate, and this isn't Peter Gabriel-era Genesis where every mask is meant to move the characters being portrayed through the song.

Of course they've become, overnight it seems, one of the world's biggest bands, with slots at festivals on every continent this summer. And they've done so with a truly unusual brand of music, played as it often is in truly unusual time signatures, and with the barefoot, polka-dotted guitarist manipulating who knows how many live loops with his feet as they cycle through their tunes.

Anyway there were no 'board sourced boots of these cats until they played Fuji Rock a month ago today, and the HD video documenting their set got taken down pretty quickly, but I managed to pilfer the audio from that feed before it disappeared into the aetheric realms of copyright.

So, what do you say, O Court of Public Opinion? Hype? Sincere Progressive music with a theatrical twist? Somewhere between those poles? Dynasty-era KISS meets the scalloped-fretted guitars of Shakti on the Math Rock mountaintop? The floor is yours, apple cores.

Angine de Poitrine

Fuji Rock 2026

Field of Heaven

Naeba Ski Resort

Niigata, Japan

7.26.2026

01 MC introduction

02 Angine de Poitrine intro

03 Angor

04 Yor Zarad

05 Tamebsz

06 Mata Zyklek

07 Ababa Hotel

08 Sarniezz

09 Fabienk

10 Sherpa

11 Angine de Poitrine outro

12 L'Aberek/Ababa Hotel

Total time: 1:19:32

Track 12 is a bonus track from Session Secrete @ La Société Secrète de Cap-d'espoir en Gaspésie 

Percé, Quebec CAN 8.18.2025

Khn de Poitrine - guitar, bass & vocals

Klek de Poitrine - drums & vocals

320/48k audio extracted from enhanced bitrate HD YouTube Premium files

spectral analyses is lossless to 18 kHz for both

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited & remastered by EN, August 2026
530 MB FLAC/direct link

Personally I dig what these guys do, and beyond the hidden mystery schtick they are obviously badass musicians. I liked this show so much, I even added a bonus track that I came across, just because I felt like it.

I'll be back with one or two more at the tail end of the month, but until then I'd encourage you to peek behind the mask for a moment and take a taste of what these crazy Québécois from Canada are up to with their many-fretted micro-guitars, obscured identities and 21/8 loopy moves.--J.

Beyond the Realms of Birth: Rob Halford 75

Judas Priest - Breaking the Law

Well there's been a departure, and it's a big one. But it's also a milestone birthday. For someone who once famously sang with the departed on a TV show, in one of the oddest musical pairings ever witnessed.

Yes, that happened. So Dolly is dead, but the man folks call The Metal God -- deities know what other deities with which to sing, that's part of being one -- lives on, celebrating his 75th today.

When we were kids, if you'd have told us the singer of everyone's favorite Metal band was a homosexual, you'd have likely caught a beating at the bike racks after school.

It turned out not to matter, and as a stereotype-shatterer on legs, he can take a teeny bit of the credit. He sure brought gay BSDM gear into the vocabulary associated with music apparel, we can all agree on that little factoid.

Of course it helps to have one of the most identifiable voices in the history of all music in your mouth, if you're gonna go evaporating homophobia by example like this.

He's taken care of his instrument too, and can still sear-pierce the atmosphere with that trademark shriek.

Did I mention that Judas Priest was the first band I ever saw live? On September 1, 1979 in the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale NY, opening for Dynasty KISS.

We all must be getting very old very fast, because the intervening 47 years went by in an instant, and Rob Halford -- the young blond guy in the Leather Daddy Of The Year gear that rode the motorcycle onstage to begin my Live Music Life -- is 75 years old today.

Anything else I would say would just be filler, so let's get to this killer show, taped 45 years ago -- probably my favorite Judas Priest bootleg, and possibly in the ever-raging 1000 Best Boots Of All Time debate too -- that puts the meat on the bone about what makes JP definitive in their field far better than words will ever do.

Judas Priest

The Palladium

New York City, NY USA

7.22.1981

01 Supergroups intro

02 Solar Angels

03 Heading Out to the Highway

04 Diamonds and Rust

05 Hell Bent for Leather

06 Breaking the Law

07 Sinner

08 Beyond the Realms of Death

09 Grinder

10 Desert Plains

11 Hot Rockin'

12 You Don't Have to Be Old to Be Wise

13 Victim of Changes

14 The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Pronged Crown)

15 Living After Midnight

16 Tyrant

17 Supergroups outro

Total time: 1:19:09

Rob Halford – vocals

K.K. Downing – guitars & vocals

Glenn Tipton – guitars & vocals

Ian Hill – bass & vocals

Dave Holland – drums

Supergroups MC is Pat St. John

Supergroups In Concert "A Night On the Road" pre-broadcast LPs from the ABC Radio Network

transferred at 24/48, denoised and organized by LiQuiDz (Master Series 001), July 2022

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, slightly retracked and remastered for overall crunch by EN, August 2026
581 MB FLAC/direct link

I used the stellar 40th Anniversary LiQuiDz transfer of the pre-FM LPs for this, but I thought it was too drummy and the guitars were a little distant, so (as this is guitar-based music) I beefed it up slightly with the Audacity Legacy Limiter. Don't be mad, LiQuiDz! I think it shreds viciously now.

I'll be back in 24 with some more heavy sounds -- these are from just last month, and the crazy Canadians making them claim to be ETs, and wear bizarre masks when they do it -- but today is the day we go living after midnight, and kneel before everyone's favorite Metal God in birthday tribute.--J.

Dime Regained: Darrell Abbott 60

Pantera - This Love

OK, so if you're wondering where I am, I ain't dead yet. But my husband and I bought part of a restaurant downtown, and I've been hard at the task of constructing a whole series of playlists for the music in the place. I'll share them all here when they are all done in a couple of weeks, but there's a Roxy Music one, a 10cc one and a The Who one so far, and they are all around 4 hours long each.

That aside, I'm back here today for a milestone berfday of someone who, to state the obvious, should still be with us, wailing away.

He's gone decades now, and the idea that he only lived to be 38 years old will never be anything but one of the most unspeakable tragedies in the history of all music.

We all know what happened, and the 22 years since haven't made it any easier to swallow.

Assassinated live onstage because the gunman was upset the guy broke up his original band and started another one. I'm combing my brain for a less justified reason to kill anyone, and I'm coming up total zeroes, folks.

The way he was killed sometimes obscures what he accomplished whilst alive, as is often the case where If It Bleeds, It Ledes. But let's focus on his life, which still has a resonant impact today, OK?

He came into music at a distinct advantage, with a dad who'd produced Country artists in his native Texas, and by the time he was 16, he had his first record out with the band for which he'd become most beloved.

It took the rest of the Eighties, but by 1990 Pantera had really started to ascend. First on that year's Cowboys from Hell and then on their 1992 masterpiece, A Vulgar Display of Power, their sound quickly coalesced and they became huge.

In no small way a disciple of Eddie Van Halen, if I had to describe what he did that distinguished him from the trillion or so other Metal players of our lifetimes, it'd be the propensity to shift from the pyrotechnic to the melodic, often within the same few bars and the same solo.

If I had to pin it down, I'd say that somewhere between EVH and Deep Purple/Rainbow axemaster Ritchie Blackmore resides "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, who was born 60 years ago today.

Ranked #92 on Rolling Stone's Greatest Guitarists list, and #5 on the all-time Metal list, he's one of those players whose playing is always totally recognizable as his own, even amidst the aforementioned ten trillion other dudes who've attempted that style since Tony Iommi accidentally severed his fingertips and decided to tune down a half step.

To celebrate Dimebag Darrell and ensure us 1966ers stick together, I've cobbled together a complete version of a 1992 Pantera concert from the Hollywood Palladium that circulates in three different, not-complete forms, and documents their arguable apex, before internal tensions with their singer turned things sour.

Pantera

Palladium

Hollywood, California USA

6.27.1992

01 Heresy

02 Mouth for War

03 Domination

04 Hollow

05 Fucking Hostile

06 This Love

07 A New Level

08 Walk

09 By Demons Be Driven

10 Psycho Holiday

11 Primal Concrete Sledge

12 Cemetery Gates

13 Cowboys from Hell incl. Purple Haze

Total time: 1:00:22

“Dimebag” Darrell Abbott - guitars

Vinnie Paul - drums

Rex Brown - bass

Phillip H. Anselmo - vocals

preFM master CD from the Westwood One network, sourced from the bootleg CD "High Voltage" on the Massive Attack label

Tracks 05 & 07 inserted from a speed corrected master FM cassette of indeterminate origin

edited, retracked, repaired & remastered for unity by EN, August 2026
439 MB FLAC/direct link

This one was a trip, because there were a couple of instances where the cursing was edited out of the pre-broadcast CD, yet somehow made it out on air for the original broadcast. I did my best to restore the thing as best I could, including reconstituting a couple of those omissions.

I've got a few things lined up for the rest of August, and I apologize for my absence. But I'm doing that other project and there's only so many hours I can spend in front of Sound Forge, you know? Making 750 songs all the same volume by hand is not something I'd wish on anyone. OK, maybe on people who walk into clubs and murder the band onstage with automatic weapons, let's just say.

Anyway, I get that this kind of music isn't the usual fare on here, but I've wanted to cover the very deserving Darrell Abbott for years, and felt today was the day to drop the Dime on just such a display of the power still implicit in his playing.--J.

8.20.1966 - 12.8.2004

Prog Steady

The BBC Concert Orchestra - Tubular Bells (excerpts) - Mike Oldfield

For the first time in a long time, I took a month off from this bootleg buffoonery, using moving to the Oregon Coast -- into a house that sits atop a mountain, surrounded by rivers and forests and an ocean -- as an excuse to dial it down into Summer Vacation mode for a spell. Believe me, if you could see this place, you'd be ready to go offline forever too.

So now we're more or less settled in, my Soulseek ports are forwarded, and it's time to resume soundtracking the endless summer.

And what better way to unpause than a much-anticipated concert from just two weeks ago! I don't have to wait for an anniversary if it's something hot off the presses such as this little Prog-umentary, do I?

So yeah! It's BBC Proms season across the proverbial pond, with shows going from July to September as they do every summer, and as always featuring a must-see performance or three.

Perhaps the most talked-about one this year was this program they called Fanfare for the Common Man, essentially a 2 1/2 hour love letter to the once-maligned (but now, in this post-categorization era, seemingly redeemed) Progressive Rock genre.

Prog Rock. Maybe the most misunderstood, misnamed and misjudged area of all the music of our lifetimes.

I say misnamed because I find myself in full agreement with Brian Eno -- someone who ought to know -- when he says that Prog, with its gestures and structures often drawn as they are from 19th Century Classical music, isn't Progressive at all a lot of the time. And instead often faces backwards to Romantic sentiment, and not ahead to future progress unknown.

Of course there are tremendous exceptions. But you often find that the bands and artists (for example: King Crimson, Henry Cow, or more recently, Radiohead) that seem most forward-facing -- and therefore Progressive in the dictionary sense of the term -- reject the term outright, and can react with visceral derision when branded thusly in the media.

Of course these designations -- in the 21st Century, where the desktop computer contains whole recording studios that would have cost $200/hour to rent back when Prog was born at the turn of the 1960s to the 1970s -- mean less than nothing.

The creative energy that informed those times -- and led people to construct triple concept albums about blind pinball wizards and sidelong epics about the psychological disintegration of lighthouse keepers -- is just a regular, anything-goes aspect of things today, and no one bats an eye at music once deemed Not Rock And Roll Enough by the tastemaker cogniscenti the kids now call "influencers".

I've heard Rick Wakeman (who'd also know) say that Progressive Rock came about primarily as a function of the then-current hyper-evolution of recording technology, where musicians who in 1968 were dealing with, at best, four track gear found themselves twiddling dreamily at the faders of 16- and 24-track mixing desks just a couple of years later. What painter could resist going whole-hog into the redefinition of the canvas itself, you know? In the case of Prog's leading lights like Yes and ELP, some would say voyaging completely up their own, pretentious, 19th Century-aping asses, but to each his own. There's room in our world for both The Sex Pistols and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, isn't there?

Me? I'm just a lawn mower. And you can tell me by the way I've loved Progressive Rock since I was 15 years old, and a friend brought over some records one summer day that catapulted me, in 15/4 time, into the cosmic and colossal world of Prog. That day I was introduced to the irreproduceably distinctive, theatrical environments invented by Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. And to the cavernous, car-crash compositions of King Crimson, perhaps the most influential group of all time, after The Beatles, on other musicians of all stripes. And it didn't take long to get to the darkly creviced, scream-sung psychodramas of Peter Hammill's Van der Graaf Generator, or the grandeur of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, so beloved as the main theme to The Exorcist, either.

It's a genre of the music of our age that forms a substantial segment of who I am, and likely will always be a journey that never ends for me until the last crescendo of the last Mellotron chord fades away into the last, ferocious 21/8 coda. And Supper is Ready for this High Vibration to go on.

So, yes. Or Yes. Let's Promenade us up some Prog, shall we?

Various Artists

The BBC Concert Orchestra

Prog Rock: A Fanfare for the Common Man

BBC Proms

Royal Albert Hall

London, UK

7.18.2026

01 BBC introduction by Elizabeth Alker

02 Fanfare for the Common Man - Emerson, Lake & Palmer

03 Stuart Maconie announcement

04 Living In the Past - Jethro Tull

05 Out-Bloody-Rageous, pt. 1 - Soft Machine

06 Stuart Maconie announcement

07 I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) - Genesis

08 Northern Lights - Renaissance

09 Nights In White Satin - Moody Blues

10 Stuart Maconie announcement

11 Refugees - Van der Graaf Generator

12 And You and I - Yes

13 Tubular Bells pt. 1 (excerpts w. Matt Berry narration) – Mike Oldfield

14 BBC announcement

15 One White Duck - Jethro Tull (1992 recording)

16 BBC conversation with David Baddiel, pt. 1

17 BBC Radio 3 ID

18 Hocus Pocus - Focus (1970 recording)

19 BBC conversation with David Baddiel, pt. 2

20 More Fool Me - Genesis (1973 recording)

21 BBC announcement incl. Guy Garvey & Robert Ames interviews

22 Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, pt. 2 - Emerson, Lake & Palmer (BBC Concert Orchestra w/1973 Greg Lake vocals)

23 Stuart Maconie announcement

24 Sylvia - Focus/Komfo - Osibisa/Peaches en Regalia - Frank Zappa

25 21st Century Schizoid Man/I Talk to the Wind/In the Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson

26 Guy Garvey announcement

27 Entangled - Genesis

28 On Reflection - Gentle Giant

29 Stuart Maconie announcement

30 Maker of Islands - Incredible String Band

31 The Great Gig In the Sky - Pink Floyd

32 Stuart Maconie announcement

33 Crime of the Century - Supertramp

34 Stuart Maconie announcement

35 The Great Gate of Kiev - Emerson, Lake & Palmer

36 BBC closing announcement

Total time: 2:27:36

disc break goes after Track 20

The BBC Concert Orchestra

Robert Ames, conductor

with

The Staves (Jessica & Camilla Staveley-Taylor) - vocals

Guy Garvey - vocals

Jane Weaver - vocals

Gruff Rhys - vocals

Peter Hammill - vocals

Vanessa Haynes - vocals

Carl Palmer - drums

Stuart Maconie - BBC presenter

Elizabeth Alker - BBC 3 announcer

24/48 DVD Audio from an HD FLAC file posted to the BBC 3 online channel site, 

apparently only for the first 24 hours after the broadcast of the show on July 24th

spectral analysis is lossless past 22 kHz, making this equivalent to a high end preFM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited and remastered by EN, July 2026
965 MB FLAC/direct link

A special side shoutout to the Soulseek user @80sBoy, who helped me track down the pre-broadcast version of this thing, which apparently was posted via some sort of high-def audio player on the BBC3 site for a minute last week, as far as I can determine. Maybe it's still there? I don't think so, but I have no idea because the BBC online stuff is only available in Britain, and a VPN is such a hassle for a techno-troglodyte such as I.

I did my best to paginate separate tracks for a lot of the talking parts -- in case you wanna cut those out when you hear this thing -- but I left them intact as part of it to preserve the documentary feel of the overall presentation. I will be back in August with more crazy white people in costume (yes, those guys), but I thought I would make my return here by making this performance available, in well-manicured audio form, for anyone that was interested in what it sounded like earlier in July when the Proms went Prog.--J.