Penguin Cafe Orchestra
Broadcasting From Home

Probably, Simon Jeffes, British musician and leader of the Penguin Café Orchestra, was met with the poet's death. Meaning he who still had much to do and say but whom life, through the classic incurable disease, decided to take away long before the game was truly over (in the series "the best always go first"). But Simon had already played a decent game with death, back in 1972, when he found himself bedridden from rotten fish poisoning, plagued by visions, especially of a building where people lived without emotions, without taste, constantly watched by an electronic eye recording their every move. The next day, feeling better and still amazed by such a vision, Simon goes out to sunbathe. At a certain point, strange words jump into his head: "I am the owner of the Penguin Café. I will tell you random things." And he went on to talk about how chance and spontaneity were important in life. Simon was struck. When he decided to put together his colorful and multi-ethnic ensemble, he didn’t let go of these concepts.

"Broadcasting From Home" arrives three years after their self-titled second album. Compared to that playful and suggestive work, this album perhaps recovers a touch of the seriousness of the first, while always remaining within the grooves of their classic largely anti-academic style. As usual, accompanied by the evocative paintings of Emily Young, the album continues their fusion program, even more unlimited compared to the past: "Music For A Found Harmonium" (written, in fact, on a harmonium found in the streets of Tokyo) starts dark and mysterious, evolving in less than a minute into a curious ballet for chamber concert performers, with strings laying out their demented melody and the charleston keeping a soft and discreet tempo in the background. It's music that knows no boundaries, that doesn't take itself seriously, and that is, in fact, enjoyable for this very reason: "Prelude & Yodel" smells of South American folk, but the violin gives it a melancholic majesty more in line with classical music, while "White Mischief" blends the romanticism of a piano distributing ethereal and dreamy notes more or less at random with a nervous and obsessive melody that becomes rhythm through a unique fusion of percussion and strings. Jeffes' project is undoubtedly to surprise, to confuse: on the one hand, he perfectly assumes the role of the seasoned classical composer, as in "Sheep Dip," where sad and romantic strings dominate, but then he finds his childish and colorful side in "In The Back Of A Taxi," with traces of South America again, around the Peru-Bolivia area, until the winds overlap the guitar, here making their first appearance on a PCO album, and everybody sets off on a nostalgic journey to pre-Castro Cuba. Winds that return in the surprising "Music By Numbers," where Jeffes even resorts to the metronomic rhythms of the drum machine, in a sort of frantic and pyrotechnic reggae, where the aforementioned instruments at the end give their sound grandeur that was really unprecedented in their albums. But he also seems interested in reconnecting with his own past: "Another One From The Colonies" and "More Milk" cite from the title two past masterpieces like "From The Colonies" and "Milk." The first is a wild cuatro and triangle ballet, while the extraordinarily sweet piano carries forward its hypnotic and playful melody, while the second, considerably less disconnected and more "concrete" compared to "Milk," relies on a soft percussive carpet over which the sound of the triangle becomes pressing and obsessive, with buzzing distortion-like sounds coming from afar, and the surreal bass accompaniment intervening from time to time with a tiny melody. Another quirky surprise are the "Nintendo-like" sounds of the piano in "Heartwind" (listen to believe, they seem out of the golden age of the Kyoto household) and the Brian Eno-esque "Isle Of View (Music For Helicopter Pilots)," already from the title related with the environmental creations of the eccentric English musician, with that guitar melody at the beginning even predicting the post-rock of a band like Dirty Three, before an almost imperceptible percussive rhythm sets the heavy ribbons of the strings in motion and scattered and dreamy piano notes. The album closes on a romantically elegiac tone with "Now Nothing," another display of Jeffes’ love for chamber music, in which a female voice (!!!) sings her poignant wordless goodbye before the entrance of the strings, which in two minutes fade away in the nostalgic notes of the piano. 

The last PCO album will be "Union Café," from 1993. Simon Jeffes, as already mentioned, left us almost eleven years ago, since then the Orchestra has reunited only for a series of three sold-out concerts at London's Union Chapel in 2007. It would not be right to ask the remaining musicians to take up the name Penguin Café Orchestra in their hands, whether feasible or not. Far from being a dictator, Simon Jeffes was a musician endowed with great class and a very personal vision of the world; his music is not political, yet it invites change, is not religious, yet invites living in communion with nature, is not social, yet seeks to penetrate the alienation gripping modern life and to bring it back to an ideal of peace and love far more substantial than what the hippies lost along the way in the '70s. It wasn't pop, it wasn't avant-garde, it was none of that. It was simply music, in love with the world and life, music that, like the paintings of a painter now passed on to a better life, have gained tremendous value after the death of the one who was its main creator. The best way to remember him and to remember them is to listen to those albums. Trying, if possible, to learn something.