Penguin Cafe Orchestra
Music From the Penguin Cafe

In the distant 1976, a little-known Simon Jeffes formed a small orchestra of "penguins" composed of four classical elements intent on creating sophisticated music that doesn't take itself too seriously. In fact, music that isn't overly pretentious, capable of uniting various continents, religions, and ethics into a single project.

That's right, we're talking about World Music here. And the aforementioned Jeffes, leader of the Penguin Café Orchestra, is a genius. Not one of those eccentric, pathological geniuses constantly seeking the latest oddity, a bit like Zappa. No, he is one of those quiet geniuses, who prefer to operate in the shadows rather than in the sunlight. Above all, he is an ambitious, visionary genius, and perhaps the history of music owes him a debt, given the limited recognition of his musical project.

Let's move on to the actual music of these penguins. They debut as a quartet with the "Penguin Café Single," included in their debut album, a single that immediately clarifies the quartet's classicism and summarizes all of this in 6 minutes. Then we proceed through the plaintive singing that drags along the gray mood of the orchestra in "In A Sidney Motel," the strings of "Surface Tension" that seem to recall Eno's "Discreet Music," or "Milk," a very tribal track in its sparse yet impactful cadence, to the airy and cheerful "Giles Farnaby's Dream" where their idea of World Music is more visible, or the strange "Pigtail" in which the music emerges from electronic sounds echoing in the arhythmic void of the track. Most of the tracks mentioned here average around two minutes in length, forming a genuine suite.

Thus, a separate discussion should be made for the twelve minutes of the poignant "Sound Of Someone You Love Who's Going Away And It Doesn't Matter." It is the longest track of the album, conveying to the listener a unique melancholy and sweetness, in the repetition of those notes progressively emphasized by the strings in the background, increasingly sad and affecting. Magnificent, grandiloquent, and essential music at the same time.

This remains the most homogeneous and complete masterpiece of the Penguins, even though subsequent works will certainly not be inferior and consistently offer remarkable points of inventiveness from Jeffes, probably the link connecting Eno's creativity to Glass's quest for minimal ethnic sound.