Ramases
Ramases (actually Barrington Frost , often mistakenly equated with the session sitar player on the LP Space Hymns , Martin Raphael ) was an English musician. Together with his wife Dorothy, who chose the stage name Selket , he released several singles between 1968 and 1975 and the lavishly produced albums Space Hymns and Glass Top Coffin , which are assigned to psychedelic rock . He passed away through suicide shortly after the release of the second album.
biography
Barrington Frost was born in Sheffield in the second half of the 1930s . After school he went to the military and became an instructor. In the late 1950s he performed as a jazz singer and met his future wife Dorothy, whom he married after only three weeks. As a representative for central heating, Frost and his wife then went to Scotland. Over time, the couple developed a certain eccentricity, as Frost shaved their heads and the couple redesigned their bungalow in the style of a Roman villa in 1967, now in Sheffield. A mosaic of the Roman emperor Hadrian adorned the exterior of the house. The drainage technology of the bathroom was planned according to ancient Egyptian principles.
By working with antique frescoes for the house in Sheffield, the couple came across images of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II and the Egyptian goddess Selket , in which the couple saw a resemblance to themselves and of which the two, who meanwhile had psychedelic music with esoteric or . had begun to write texts with a cosmic touch, derived their artist names.
In 1968 Ramases & Selket succeeded in signing a record deal with CBS , whereupon the two tracks Crazy One and Mind's Eye were recorded. The single was unsuccessful. With this result, which was unsatisfactory for both sides, the collaboration with CBS came to an end.
In the same year, the further single Screw You was released on the much smaller label Major Minor . Track names and artist names were varied several times for later new editions, the artists were u. a. Called Ramases & Seleka or Ram & Sel .
In 1970 Ramases signed to Vertigo Records , a Philips sub-label specializing in progressive rock . At the suggestion of Harvey Lisberg , the manager of Herman's Hermits , Ramases and Selket recorded the 1971 album Space Hymns at Strawberry Studios in Stockport . As a studio musician to implement the compositions of the artist couple were Eric Stewart (lead guitar and Moog synthesizer ), Lol Creme (lead guitar and Moog synthesizer) and Kevin Godley (drums and flute) requires that as a session musician to Lisbergs songwriter Graham Gouldman (guitar and bass) were active. Stewart and Gouldman had previously been with Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders , as a quartet with Godley & Creme they formed the band 10cc two years later . The cover of the Space Hymns album was designed by Roger Dean . It could be folded out to six times its size and shows how the top of a church tower is blasted off and soars into the sky as a spaceship. The album was a moderate success in England and Germany. The music has been compared to Hawkwind and Quintessence . Characteristic are the use of backward tracks, confused flute melodies and pelvic crescendos to hypnotic repetitions. The title You're the only one, Joe only repeats that line of text 35 times with several voices.
Two singles were released from the album. Jesus come back and Ballroom , which was called Balloon on the album . The album also features the song Crazy One, which has already been released as a debut single, now as a new recording under the title Quasar One , as a hymn to a quasar . The reasons given for the different titles are transmission errors by the record companies.
Since LP and singles were only moderately successful and there were no live performances, the musician was quiet in the following years. The musician couple moved to Felixstowe in Suffolk with Frost's mother .
It wasn't until 1975 that a second album was released with Glass Top Coffin . The production in the Phonogram Studios in London was directed by Barry Kirsch , as accompanying musicians appeared: Jo Romero , Pete Kingsman, Roger Harrison, Bon Bertles (from Nucleus ) and Colin Thurston, also were members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra participated in the recording and Sue Glover and Sunny Leslie from Brotherhood of Man had been hired for choral singing . The result is a concept album that contains hymn chants about orchestral music ( Golden Landing I & II ) as well as dynamic progressive rock (title track Glass Top Coffin ). The cover was again elaborately designed, now as a fold-out cover with the punched out silhouette of a person who seems to plunge into space like a spaceman. Due to the design of the cover, there were differences between the record company and Frost, who saw his original intention only inadequately implemented and made final corrections to the printing plates at the last second before going to press , but these only marginally affected the visual design and the rest of the time Manufacturing process. Despite the extensive production, the album had no noticeable reception at all.
The artist, who was considered a car fanatic and whose personal environment was not free from problems, then withdrew from the public. The press reported even less success than airbrush painters, so one of his pictures is said to have been more widely used as printmaking. He is also said to have worked as a designer of chess pieces and worked on a philosophical book. Shortly after the publication of Glass Top Coffin (according to various sources in 1976 or 1978), the artist passed his life by suicide, but his death was not known until the mid-1990s.
In 2000, Swedish actor Peter Stormare found Frost's widow Dorothy through newspaper advertisements in the East Anglian Daily Times . Stormare's interest and demand from fans eventually led to the re-release of the two Ramases albums. The demo recordings for a planned third LP Skylark are lost.
Discography
Singles
- Ramases & Selket: Crazy One / Mind's Eye (CBS 3717) 1968
- Ram & Sel: Screw You / Gold is the ring (MM 14553 AT) with PS 1970
- Ramases & Seleka: Love You on / Gold Is The Ring (MM 704) 1970
- Ramases: Balloon / Muddy Water (Philips 6113 001) 1971
- Ramases: Jesus Come Back / Hello Mister (Philips 6113 003) 1971
Albums
- Space Hymns (Vertigo 6360 046) 1971
- Glass Top Coffin (Phillips 6360 115) 1975
literature
- Martin Aston: Pharoah Dynamic , in: Mojo. The Music Magazine , May 2013, p. 108.
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ramases |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Barrington Frost |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English musician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | between 1935 and 1940 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1976 or 1978 |