Another 1420...
Not only joy at an incoming BoC album for the first time in more than a decade, but a neat link to a favourite group of mine, equally underappreciated and in some ways linked.
Both Penguin Cafe and the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra are, and were, hugely experimental in nature (Brian Eno was the executive producer for the PCO's 1976 debut album). Listen to early PCO and you'll hear not only folk, classical and world music influences but the unmistakable thread of early electronica woven into the music.
Simon Jeffes, founder of the PCO, died in 1997. His son Arthur set up Penguin Cafe not as a tribute but a conceptual rebirth. 14 years later their first album debuted, and the joy I felt at realising new music I loved was on its way is mirrored by the release of Inferno after a similar gap.
1420 was written in 2012, similarly based on the Wow! signal, after Arthur Jeffes was commissioned to create music for a NASA mission involving the Kepler space telescope. It was beamed into space in 2013.
So many things come full circle...