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Orchestra Luna - Orchestra Luna (Market Square Records; MSMCD147)
Released June 2007 via Proper Music Distribution

www.marketsquarerecords.com

www.properdistribution.com

Along with Captain Beefheart’s 'Trout Mask Replica', Tea and Symphony’s 'Joe Sago', Wild Man Fischer’s 'An evening With Wild Man Fischer' and the GTO’s 'Permanent Damage' lie many unsung and criminally ignored masterpieces.

One such is Orchestra Luna’s eponymous debut, reissued for the first time summer 2007 on the Market Square label.

Described by one critic on its 1975 release on Epic as 'the soundtrack to a musical that never took place', Orchestra Luna is the first and only album by this innovative Boston based music/theatre outfit, whose modus operandi was a three-pronged one male/two female vocal attack with musical backing and spoken word contributions.

Mixing poetry and music was commonplace then and practised by The Liverpool Scene, Occasional Word and Hawkwind with the late Bob Calvert. However, nobody quite achieved the fine balance of narration and music as Peter Barrett did with Orchestra Luna which worked into its repertoire an element of showbiz that harked back to Vaudeville and the glory days of early Hollywood musicals.

This befitted the timeframe as Camp and Vaudeville both had their proven places at the grand table of Glam Rock, a genre enjoying commercial sucess at the time.

The band played predominantly in New York and Boston, opening for Roxy Music amongst others, and its off-kilter theatricality endeared it to 'glam' fans.

Produced by Rupert Holmes and Jeffery Lesser, the album kicks off with 'Were You Dancin’ On Paper' and immediately the die is cast in favour of cascading vocal harmonies offset over a shuffling jazzy rhythm that breaks into a startling guitar solo.

Richard Kinscherf (who later changed his name to Berlin) composed the bulk of the material apart from 'You Gotta Have Heart' written by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross from ‘Damn Yankees’ and 'Were You Dancin’ On Paper', penned by Francesca Reitano, who according to Kinscherf wrote ‘the most amazing songs I’d ever heard in my life’.

'Little Sam' featured Richard's sister, Lisa Kinscherf on lead vocals recalling Noosha Fox with a hint of Roxy Music and King Crimson progression in the musical front.

Again the ghost of Fox revisits 'Fay Wray' while 'Boy Scouts' sounds like a dry run for the B52s crazy brand of looniness. 'Heart' captures everything from Tin Pan Alley to 'West Side Story' and incorporates Peter Barrett’s unique spoken word interludes.

'Doris Dreams' was a 12-minute tour-de-force of inter-related words and music. Jon Garelick of the Boston Phoenix described the song as ranging "from Gilbert & Sullivan to scat jazz singing to psychedelic Hendrix guitar, through a poetry reading, a long ballad section and a final instrumental improvisation".

Not quite your ordinary progressive rock track from 1975, but then again Orchestra Luna wasn’t quite your typical album of the genre.

Its spoken word, lunacy and music may inhabit a space somewhere between Rocky Horror and the Bonzo Dog Band, and make a fond nod to other Brit contemporaries like Fox, Sailor and Cockney Rebel, but there was in fairness more to Orchestra Luna.

It was the quintessential art rock band: intelligent, informed and utterly original. Of course, it was all to come to tears as revealed in this 2007 reissue' s telling of the Orchestra Luna story by music writer John O'Regan with personal recollections by Richard Kinscherf in a 16 page booklet complete with period publicity stills.


O'Regan sums up: "Orchestra Luna’s music was as if from some sort of parallel universe, an alternative musical reality where elements of rock, pop, 1970’s progressive styles and Broadway musicals stood side by side quite normally and with perfect fit. If ever there existed music from another time place and universe – this was it. "

Issued May 2007 by Singsong Entertainment Publicity www.singsongpr.biz

Contact: Peter Muir; tel 00 44 (0)1296 715228 peter@singsongpr.biz