Perpetuum Mobile by Simon Jeffes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96wFECBRCsI
Alan Dearling reflects on the opportunity to witness a concert on the current 2025 tour which sees Penguin Cafe bringing the music of the legendary Penguin Cafe Orchestra back to life. Penguin Café, on this occasion was a seven-piece, under the direction of Arthur Jeffes, son of Penguin Cafe Orchestra founder, Simon Jeffes. They performed at the packed Unitarian Church in Todmorden. Spell-binding. Intricate patterns of musical light and shade. Loops of sound – a mix of folk and classical minimalism. Something special for those who were present. I saw the original Orchestra in Bristol in the early 1980s. Penguin Cafe are a little more restrained, but musically and artistically just as powerful, and the music of Simon Jeffes is a thing of beauty. Well done to Andy Sloman for organising the concert.
The concert featured many PCO favourites from the original six original Penguin Café Orchestra albums, which have recently been re-released on vinyl for the first time since their initial pressings, courtesy of [INTEGRAL] / Universal Music Recordings.
I would place the Penguin Café music into a similar musical ‘bag’ as the work of Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, SteveReich, Alexandre Desplat and some of Brian Eno’s output. It’s extremely filmic. Repetition, melodies, lots of musical hooks. Almost contagious in its ability to engage and cast a spell.
Here are some snippets from Wikipedia about the PCO, their music, and the legacy. And, it’s a musical beacon which the current Penguin Café under the direction of Arthur Jeffes is still nurturing and allowing to burn brightly and with intensity.
“The Penguin Cafe Orchestra (PCO) was an avant-pop band led by English guitarist Simon Jeffes. Co-founded with cellist Helen Liebmann, the band toured extensively during the 1980s and 1990s. The band’s sound is not easily categorized, having elements of exuberant folk music and a minimalist aesthetic… The group recorded and performed for 24 years until Jeffes died of an inoperable brain tumour in 1997.
In 2009, Jeffes’ son Arthur founded a successor band simply called Penguin Café. Although it includes no original PCO members, the band features many PCO pieces in its live repertoire, and records and performs new music written by Arthur.”
Even if you haven’t ever heard of Penguin Café, you are likely to recognise as least a couple of their compositions. Again from Wikipedia, here are snippets from the descriptions of the PCO tracks:
“Telephone and Rubber Band
The Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s most famous piece may be ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’, which is based around a tape loop of a UK telephone ring tone intersected with an engaged tone, accompanied by the twanging of a rubber band. (He recorded it on an answering machine). It is featured on the soundtracks of Nadia Tass’s film comedy ‘Malcolm’ (1986) and Oliver Stone’s film ‘Talk Radio’ (1988), and in a long-running advertising campaign for the telecoms company One2One (now EE). The 1996 single ‘In the Meantime’ by New York City-based English rockers Spacehog featured a tweaked and detuned sample of ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’. It was also the trademark song of Caloi en su tinta, an Argentinean TV show about artistic animation.”
Music for a Found Harmonium has often been described as ‘an enchantment’.
It was written by Simon Jeffes utilising a harmonium he had found in a back street in Kyoto, when he was staying there in the summer of 1982, soon after the ensemble’s first tour of Japan. He wrote it after installing the found harmonium in a friend’s house in one of the many beautiful parts at the edge of the city. ‘Music for a Found Harmonium’ was also used in the trailer for, and over the end credits of, the 1988 John Hughes movie ‘She’s Having a Baby’. In the credits, many film actors and celebrities of the time invent their favourite name for an imagined child. ‘Music for a Found Harmonium’ gained further massive exposure when it was released on the first Café del Mar volume in 1994.
A number of pieces including ‘Numbers 1-4’, ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ and ‘Music for A Found Harmonium’ were included on the soundtrack of the Channel 4 documentary series, ‘Road Dreams’. Quite significant musical track record!
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