Penguin Café Orchestra – Perpetuum Mobile
Penguin Café Orchestra – Perpetuum Mobile
Penguin Café Orchestra, who found a home on the same label (Editions EG) that housed Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, is one of the hardest groups to classify. It is, largely, orchestral music, or at least chamber music, but it draws on English folk tunes, occasional sound effects (one track of theirs is built up around a phone’s busy signal), and even rock (they take on the Venture’s signature tune Walk Don’t Run and transform it into a lively jig). Most of the music features small string sections and light, vaguely ethnic percussion. Because it isn’t really classical and it isn’t really folk and it isn’t really rock, it often gets sent off to the “new age” ghetto to be lost among the Yannis and John Teshes of the world.
The music is often quite repetitive, although not in the Philip Glass, seizure-inducing mode, and the arrangements are all impeccable. This is perhaps best described as neo-chamber music, like much of the work of the other Eno, Roger. I love the odd phrasing of this song – which sounds like somebody with one leg shorter than the other trying to dance in time. Some of their music is absolutely heartbreaking and some of it soars with joy – this track is one of the latter. The few albums in their catalog (all worthwhile) were painstakingly assembled – most took three years or more to complete, but the results were always well worth the wait. Lyrical, emotional, refined, folksy, lively, and heartbreakingly wistful, Penguin Café Orchestra sounds both like it comes from Mars and is also very much of this earth. The group’s leader, the enigmatic Simon Jeffes, died of a brain tumor in 1997, robbing the world of one of its more interesting musical visionaries, but his café remains open for those weary travelers who want to rest their feet and have a cuppa in a charmingly quirky and restorative space. Cheers!