Clearlight Symphony
| Clearlight Symphony | ||||
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| Studio album by Clearlight | ||||
| Released | 1975 | |||
| Recorded | Kaleidophon studio, UK The Manor Studio, UK 1973–1974 |
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| Genre | progressive rock | |||
| Length | 40:47 | |||
| Label | Virgin | |||
| Producer | Cyrille Verdeaux, Tim Blake, Simon Heyworth | |||
| Clearlight chronology | ||||
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Clearlight Symphony is a progressive rock album released in 1975 on Virgin Records in the UK. It is the first in a series of albums by a project led by pianist Cyrille Verdeaux with the participation of other musicians, including in this case three members of Gong on one side, and two other French musicians, Gilbert Artman (of Lard Free and later Urban Sax) and Christian Boulé (formerly with Verdeaux in the band Babylone, and a later Steve Hillage sideman) on the other.
Primarily psychedelic, but also serving as a forerunner of new-age music, the album's musical style manages to blend seemingly contrary elements: the symphonic rock concept is flexible enough to permit extensive jamming in both rock and jazz fusion styles.
The album was recorded for Virgin Records in 1973 and completed in 1974, after the label's first and highly successful release, Tubular Bells (1973) by Mike Oldfield, and was one of several subsequent Virgin albums that attempted to copy Tubular Bells' format of long pieces in a symphonic progressive rock style; in this case, exactly copying its structure of two pieces titled "part one" and "part two". Since the title Tubular Bells was initially better known to the general public than the name of its artist, Virgin Records decided that Clearlight Symphony would be a one-off album project with a title, but no artist name.
Recording was initiated with a session in which Cyrille Verdeaux, alone, played two 20 minute piano solos, which became the basic tracks for the entire album. In later recording sessions at David Vorhaus' Kaleidophon studio (side one) and the Manor (side two), Verdeaux and other musicians overdubbed more instruments onto the piano solo to create a complex arrangement.
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