Tales from Topographic Oceans

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tales from Topographic Oceans
Studio album by Yes

Publication
(s)

December 14, 1973

Label (s) Atlantic Records

Format (s)

2-LP, 2-CD

Genre (s)

Progressive rock

Title (number)

4th

running time

83:42

occupation

production

Yes and Eddie Offord

Studio (s)

Morgan Studios, London

chronology
Close to the edge Tales from Topographic Oceans Relayer

Tales from Topographic Oceans is a double album by the British progressive rock group Yes . It is the band's seventh album and the sixth studio album.

A key feature of Yes at the time this album was made was a permanent change of musicians. Before this album was recorded, drummer Bill Bruford had been replaced by Alan White , and keyboardist Rick Wakeman left the band for the first time after the tour for this album . However, he was supposed to return to Yes in November 1976 while working on the album Going for the One .

Tales from Topographic Oceans is considered a magnum opus and at the same time the band's most controversial work. Released at the height of progressive rock, at a time when bands like Genesis , King Crimson , Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes were enjoying their greatest popularity, a sophisticated concept album like this was both a milestone of the genre and one of the reasons for turning away from progressive rock. Despite its success, the album was viewed critically by many media because of its extremely ambitious concept. The British music magazine Sounds started with the headline “Yes: Wishy Washy Tales From The Deep”, and Melody Maker summarized its comment with a simple “NO”. But that was not the only attitude that was publicized in the music press: The German magazine POP wrote: “ Yes now lives up to this super success with Tales from Topographic Oceans . "

Emergence

After the success of Close to the Edge , all of the band members agreed that the next thing to do was to tackle a concept album on an unprecedented scale. Jon Anderson encouraged his fellow musicians to think about a topic for the album during the close-to-the-edge tour. In fact, it was he who came up with the decisive idea for Tales from Topographic Oceans . During a short tour of Japan from March 8-14, 1973, Anderson read the " Autobiography of a Yogi " (1950) by Paramahansa Yogananda , which Jamie Muir , the then percussionist of King Crimson, recommended. Paramahansa Yogananda mentions the Shastras (“holy books”), the holy scriptures of India , in a footnote .

Anderson spoke to guitarist Steve Howe about the idea of ​​basing the next album on these fonts, and the two met in their hotel rooms in their spare time to work on initial ideas for Tales . The tour moved to Australia and North America in the weeks that followed, and Anderson and Howe worked out the first two tracks, each one LP-side, in about a month. Two other pieces of the same length remained sketchy. In a six-hour marathon session until seven in the morning on April 20, 1973 in Savannah, Anderson and Howe recorded the previously available material on cassettes and drafted sketches for the structure of the four overlong songs.

After the tour ended on May 1, 1973, the two presented their ideas to the rest of the band. While bassist Chris Squire , with whom Anderson had already had a number of violent clashes, only reacted very cautiously, keyboardist Rick Wakeman clearly expressed his displeasure from the start. But Anderson, who was often called "Little Napoleon" at the time, got his fellow musicians to embrace his vision and the four-month recording sessions. Alan White and Chris Squire let Anderson and Howe guide them, albeit reluctantly, through the work, but keyboardist Rick Wakeman was so frustrated because of the lengthy work that he left the band after the Tales tour. In addition, as a Christian, he had not been able to get used to the philosophical-religious subject matter of the album, all the less since after reading a footnote, he did not see Anderson as an expert on the Shastric scriptures.

Anderson, who remembered the positive experiences during the recording sessions for The Yes album , originally wanted, like Howe, White and Offord, to record the album in the country, if possible at night and outdoors, in order to preserve the rural atmosphere in which this album was produced resurrected on a larger, cosmic scale on Tales from Topographic Oceans . But Squire and Wakeman resisted successfully, and the band went to ELP's Manticore Studios and then to Morgan Studios in London to work on the pieces and record the album. At least a compromise was found: Anderson had, to the amazement of his band colleagues and others involved, set up in Morgan Studio 3, including bales of straw, a wooden fence and a cardboard cow (according to Chris Squire, however, the band manager Brian Lane is responsible for this out of an ironic whim have been). But the singer's extravagances went even further: when he noticed that the acoustics in his bathroom at home were perfect for the sound he had in mind for Tales , he had Michael Tait rebuild his bathroom in the studio, a sound experiment that, of course failed.

Since much of Anderson and Howe's development had only been outlined, Yes worked on large parts of the album directly in the studio, a way of working that Wakeman, who was convinced that this work should have been done in the rehearsal room, very displeased. When his cooperation wasn't needed, he went to the bar or threw a few darts in the next room. To this day, Wakeman criticizes the fact that the lack of solid preparation meant that the album was blown to the 20 minutes in each case by inferior material in many places. He would have much preferred a more concise version of the material in four ten-minute pieces on a single album. Sound engineer Eddie Offord wasn't of much help in this situation either; Almost continuously high, he accidentally threw good material into the wastebasket, while the unsuccessful and discarded material was used. Such errors constantly had to be corrected by his employees, which is why the finished master tape, similar to Close to the Edge , was composed of many short snippets.

Philosophical-religious background

Scriptures of
Hinduism

Shruti

  1. Rigveda
  2. Samaveda
  3. Yajurveda
  4. Atharvaveda

each with the departments:

Smriti

Jon Anderson had the content-related inspiration for the four pieces of Tales from Topographic Oceans from a book recommended by Jamie Muir. It is the Autobiography of a Yogi ( Autobiography of a Yogi. 1950) by Paramahansa Yogananda, the founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship. On page 117, in footnote 6 in chapter 10, Paramahansa Yogananda talks about the Shastras (“holy books”), the holy scriptures of India. The original text of the footnote is:

“Pertaining to the SHASTRAS, literally, 'sacred books', comprising four classes of scripture: the SHRUTI, SMRITI, PURANA, and TANTRA. These comprehensive treatises cover every aspect of religious and social life, and the fields of law, medicine, architecture, art, etc. The SHRUTIS are the 'directly heard' or 'revealed' scriptures, the VEDAS. The SMRITIS or 'remembered' lore was finally written down in a remote past as the world's longest epic poems, the MAHABHARATA and the RAMAYANA. PURANAS are literally 'ancient' allegories; TANTRAS literally mean 'rites' or 'rituals'; these treatises convey profound truths under a veil of detailed symbolism. "

The Shastras are traditionally divided into four groups: Shruti , Smriti (not “Suritis”, as noted on the cover of the album), Purana and Tantra . Similarly, Tales is divided into four pieces. It can be clearly seen that Anderson takes the titles of the pieces directly from the text of the footnote.

The first group of texts, Shruti, includes the directly revealed works, the Veda (the word "Veda" means "knowledge" and is also related to the German word). Accordingly, the title of the first part of the album is The revealing science of god. The Vedic texts are the oldest texts of Indian religious literature and their oldest parts date from the 18th century BC. Until the 16th century CE, they were only passed on orally. The Vedic texts are the oldest evidence of an Indo-European language. They include songs, maxims , aphorisms and also prose , the oldest of which from the 18th century BC. BC, the youngest from the 3rd century BC. Come from BC. They consist of four parts, called samhitas (collections), the Rigveda (religious- magical hymns ), the Samaveda ( ritual chants), the Yajurveda (sacrificial formulas and mantras ) and the Atharvaveda (magical formulas and spells ). There are also comprehensive theological explanations ( Brahmanas ) for each of these collections . The best-known texts that belong in this area are perhaps the Upanishads (secret doctrines).

The second group of texts is called Smriti , which means "knowledge preserved in memory". Part 2 of Tales is called The Remembering. Smriti includes the famous and very voluminous epics Mahabharata (106,000 double verses) and Ramayana (24,000 double verses), the Vedanga (mainly auxiliary scientific texts for understanding and correctly transmitting the Veda) and the sutras.

The third group of texts is called Purana ("Allegories from ancient times", think of The Ancient ) and consists of 18 parts, mostly of the same structure, songs of warriors and bards from the first millennium BC. Of the 400,000 Puranas mentioned in the Brahma-vaivartta Purana , 18 are regarded as the main Puranas, again divided into three groups, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Puranas are often about five different subjects: cosmogony , destruction and recreation , genealogy of the gods, manvantara periods, genealogy of kings.

The fourth part, Tantra , deals with rites and rituals (the fourth part of Tales is called ritual ). It is about the practical aspects of religious practice to initiation rites , erotic rites , magic formulas and to Yoga . The tantric scriptures are revelations from Shiva . They too come from the first millennium BC. Chr.

All of these writings taken together are so extensive that Jon Anderson could not have read them all. Tales is therefore apparently only slightly based on the Shastric scriptures and their structure. Bad tongues have therefore sometimes called the album "the most extensive setting of a footnote". To what extent the lyrics refer to the Shastras in terms of content is difficult to say in view of Anderson's way of working to develop texts from the sound of the words. However, current topics of the time seem to dominate: nature, nature conservation, war, love etc. Also the musical implementation does not fall back on traditional Indian music at any point, the coral sitar , which Steve Howe plays in places, is just a sonic ornament .

Pieces on the album

  1. The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn) (Jon Anderson / Chris Squire / Steve Howe / Rick Wakeman / Alan White) - 20:27
  2. The Remembering (High the Memory) (Jon Anderson / Chris Squire / Steve Howe / Rick Wakeman / Alan White) - 20:38
  3. The Ancient (Giants under the Sun) (Jon Anderson / Chris Squire / Steve Howe / Rick Wakeman / Alan White) - 18:34
  4. Ritual (Nous Sommes Du Soleil) (Jon Anderson / Chris Squire / Steve Howe / Rick Wakeman / Alan White) - 21:35

Remarks

  • One of the early ideas for The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn) goes back to a song by Steve Howe called For This Moment . He released his demo in 1996 on his Homebrew album. The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn) was originally about 28 minutes long. Yes cut it by six, then another two minutes to fit on an album page. Those two minutes were put back in front of the track on the 2003 Rhino Records re-release .
  • Some parts of The Remembering (High the Memory) , on which only Rick Wakeman can be heard alone, are among the first pieces that the new drummer Alan White wrote for Yes.
  • On The Ancient (Giants under the Sun) the band tried to acoustically resurrect ancient cultures such as those of the Inca , Maya and Atlantis . The end of the piece (originally a Steve Howe song called Leaves of Green ) deals with the question of whether every high culture has to perish by a different people.
  • The piano at the end of Ritual (Nous Sommes Du Soleil) (the "Hold me, my love" passage) was played by drummer Alan White because Wakeman couldn't be in the studio at the time.

The album was remastered and re-released in 2003 by Rhino Records . This edition contains the extended version of The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn) and two bonus tracks:

  1. Dance Of The Dawn (studio run-through)
  2. Giants Under The Sun (studio run-through)

In October 2016, an expanded version of the album was released and remixed by Steven Wilson . Four data carriers (three CDs and one Blu-ray or two CDs and two DVDs) contain various stereo versions as well as high-resolution 5.1 mixes of the album and bonus tracks.

Musical content

Tales from Topographic Oceans was released on two LPs, which together have a total playing time of almost one and a half hours, and reached number 1 in the UK album charts, the top 10 in the US charts, before a Yes fan ever heard the album . It is the first Yes album to achieve gold status. In the documentary YesYears , Jon Anderson reports that after Close to the Edge was published in a newspaper it was said that the next thing Yes was going to do would be to set the Bible to music . In fact, Jon Anderson and Steve Howe took an even more ambitious approach in the Shastric Scriptures of India. This concept had four parts corresponding to the four-part structure of the Shastric scripts, which were distributed on four vinyl pages. It was The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn) by the band as zugänglichster, best viewed with the word "pop" in connection with part-bringing. The Remembering (High the Memory) is a more even, in parts almost meditative part with a high proportion of repetition, and thus one of the pieces that Rick Wakeman was particularly critical. The Ancient (Giants under the Sun) begins with a rhythm-dominated part that takes around 10 minutes and is improvised by Steve Howe on a pedal steel guitar , but ends with a silent passage of songs on the acoustic guitar. Ritual (Nous Sommes Du Soleil) is the most varied part next to The Ancient , it includes improvised passages as well as well-composed song parts, percussion parts, during which each band member played a percussion instrument, and even a bass solo.

The parallel to Beethoven's ninth symphony, which was sometimes thought to be seen in the structure of Tales , the quotation of the first three parts at the beginning of the fourth (in the range from approx. 4:00 to 5:15 min), ultimately only exists in a few Sounding a guitar solo is therefore not really a compositional component of the piece. The short quote from Close To The Edge in the same place is more interesting , one of the very rare self-quotes from a band that transcends an album. Apart from short quotations like these (it is mainly quoted at the beginning and end of The Ancient and at the beginning of Ritual from the first two parts, but mostly only in the context of guitar solos) the four pieces are only loosely due to their tonality connected and otherwise completely independent, the term “sentence” is therefore out of place, as is the conception of Tales as a single piece, which can sometimes be read. Terms like “ symphony ” (with the classic division into four movements), “ suite ” or “ song cycle ” can best be applied to the album. The four parts are also not structured in the same way, construction schemes range from an oversized stanza-refrain structure ( The Remembering ) to an ABC classification ( The Ancient ).

Only the basic idea of Tales from Topographic Oceans goes back to Indian culture. The music on the album is predominantly western , even in the most extreme passages ( The Ancient ). Traits of early world music can be shown in the sound of the work, for example in the driving rhythms at the beginning of The Ancient or in Steve Howe's sitar sounds.

Cover

The fold-out cover takes up the wishes of various band members. Roger Dean combined some of these ideas to create his picture. When opened, the cover shows a landscape in the starlight that takes on a strange green tone towards the bottom. The constellations are those of the five Yes musicians. In the middle of a gray and cold plain, a small spring gushes out of a rock formation, the water of which pours into a pond that never seems to overflow. Some green plants grow around this. On the right the picture is limited by a high group of rocks, on the left by a round stone in the foreground and another group of rocks in the background. Between these three rock groups there are two more landmarks: on the right, far behind on the horizon, a Maya pyramid , behind which a cold sun is just setting, on the left another single, upright boulder.

The rock formations are all from Roger Dean's sketchbook, he drew them from postcards from Dominy Hamilton's collection . These are Brimham Rocks, the last rocks at Land's End , Logan Rock at Treen and individual stones at Avebury and Stonehenge . The pyramid is reminiscent of similar buildings in Mexico and Guatemala (Jon Anderson suggested using a pyramid from Chichén Itzá for the cover), while a petroglyph in front of the pyramid reminds one of the drawings on the Nazca plain (this suggestion goes on Alan White).

From the left five fish “swim” in the foreground, at least one of them is now extinct, a bone fish . Most editions of the album have a water bubble around the fish that was not in the original picture. The album title and the Yes logo are located above the pyramid . Inside, the two pages show an accompanying text and the lyrics to the music between numerous nature photographs.

It becomes clear how Roger Dean tried to combine typical themes of the 1970s, such as the fascination for pre-Columbian cultures, astrology and nature, with ideas for images from Surrealism . Interestingly, Indian culture in particular does not play a role in the cover design, which, together with the not always successful combination of image elements that remain alien to one another, has led to criticism, including self-criticism. Nevertheless, the cover of Tales from Topographic Oceans has achieved almost iconic status in progressive rock and probably also in the entire rock sector and it is repeatedly voted the best rock album cover of all time.

Review

Guitarist Steve Howe still sees many of his best guitar pieces on Tales to this day . Bassist Chris Squire points out that he was in top form on The Remembering : He considers his contribution to this piece to be his best bass playing up to this point. On the other hand, he is not very enthusiastic about The Ancient to this day, while drummer Alan White likes this piece very much because of its ethno influence. Rick Wakeman, who was temporarily frustrated with the work on the concept work, in whose conception he was only marginally involved, later mentioned in interviews that he had enjoyed The revealing science of God and parts of The Ancient very much, but was never a fan of it Albums: it was 30 minutes too long, 60 minutes would be enough. The reasons for Wakeman's dissatisfaction are mainly due to the fact that singer Jon Anderson and guitarist Steve Howe largely dominated the compositions and left little room for the other three band members to develop themselves. In addition, Wakeman sees filling material in many places that would have been better left out.

This frustration continued on the album tour, as the bandmates really wanted to perform the entire album. Wakeman rightly feared that fans might feel overwhelmed by the abundance of new material (which many didn't even know at the start of the tour). As always, the shows opened with an excerpt from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, followed by Siberian Khatru , And You And I and Close to the Edge . Then Tales was played in full, followed by a single encore with Roundabout . For Wakeman, who had very little to do, especially during The Remembering , a great nuisance he caused during a concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on November 28 or 29, 1973 by eating an Indian curry dish - an allusion to both ambitious concept of “Tales” as well as the passages during “The Remembering” that are not very demanding for the keyboard player - commented on from afar. At the beginning of the USA tour in 1974, the second page The Remembering was initially sporadically, later regularly deleted and replaced with Starship Trooper (as a second encore), later other parts were dropped from time to time. But Wakeman had already decided to leave the band. The success of his own solo album The Six Wives of Henry VIII had opened up new avenues for him, and he was already planning his solo career during the Tales tour.

In 2002 the 5-CD compilation In A Word was released , a selection of which documented the entire work of Yes. As a special feature for this edition, the original intro for The Revealing Science of God , which did not fit on the vinyl edition, was restored and placed in front of the track (this was extended to 10:37 p.m.). This extended version was also released in 2003 on the CD edition of Tales by Rhino Records.

live

  • The Revealing Science Of God was played 166 times live in 1973/74, 1996, 1997/98 and 2002 and can be heard on Keys to Ascension
  • The Remembering was played 33 times live in 1973/74 and 2 times in 1976
  • The Ancient was played 54 times live in 1973/74
  • Ritual was played live 427 times in 1973–1976, 1997/98, 2000/01 and 2004 and can be heard on Yesshows

swell

  1. ↑ Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF)
  2. ↑ Release Date and Contents For Upcoming Steven Wilson Remix Of Yes' Tales From Topographic Oceans. MusicTAP, July 25, 2016, accessed August 6, 2018 .

Web links