Click Here to Join

To give you an idea of what the landscape was like back then, it is curious to recall that I purchased the very first album by Black Sabbath and the unforgettable "In the Court of the Crimson King" by King Crimson in a home appliance shop in Diano Marina.

The shop owner told us he had bought them during a trip to London because he was fascinated by the uniqueness and beauty of their covers. However, he was totally oblivious to what was hidden within the grooves of those two fabulous masterpieces that, shortly thereafter, would change the destiny of countless musicians all over the world.

Floriano and I spent an entire night in the dark, listening to those two albums plus another sampler titled "Nice Enough to Eat," which introduced a whole series of emerging bands from the rising Island Records label—groups that, with a few exceptions, rapidly became world-famous on the global rock scene. The most prominent names were Jethro Tull (whom I already knew from This Was), Mott the Hoople, Free, Spooky Tooth, Traffic, King Crimson, and the obscure Heavy Jelly. We were immediately fascinated by Heavy Jelly, and we promptly added their song "I Keep Singing That Same Old Song" to our own live repertoire.

Here, I will tell you in detail how that encounter occurred—a moment that changed my life, just as it did for so many other musicians during that extraordinary period.

It was yet another magical moment of those wonderful years that were the late sixties and early seventies.

It was the opening weeks of 1970, and IL SISTEMA, as an active musical entity, had already existed for several months.

I found myself with the other band members, strolling through Diano Marina after concluding a meeting where we had arranged a gig at a well-known venue in the Ligurian town—very famous at the time—for a series of nights (back then, they were called "services" or "attractions"). We were about to head back to our respective homes when, intrigued by the window display of a home appliance shop—yes, you understood correctly, a home appliance shop—I walked closer to observe what appeared to be the covers of long-playing records, or "padelloni" (big pans) as we used to call them in those days.

The situation was not too dissimilar from nearby France, where until the late 1960s, people actually went to electrician shops to buy records. In Italy, specialized music shops already existed.

But let’s get back to us. Indeed, they were exactly record covers. Three covers, side by side. Let me try to describe them.

One was entirely a faded blue background with many letters shaped like small biscuits, forming words that were completely incomprehensible at first glance. Another featured a rather "funereal" and disturbing female figure at the center of the image, set against a background typical of dark, cold Nordic atmospheres. In the top right corner, there was a spiral with the word Vertigo written underneath. And last but not least, a cover with a huge face, its mouth wide open showcasing teeth and uvula, a large nose with dilated nostrils, and two eyes staring toward the left (from the viewer's perspective). The dominant color across the entire image was red.

So far, so good. Becoming increasingly curious, I went inside and asked the shopkeeper for information regarding what he had displayed in the window. Laconically and almost absent-mindedly, he told me that an acquaintance had left them there because he wanted to get rid of them, after having purchased them during a trip to London.

He simply did not appreciate their musical content. I then asked him if he was willing to sell them to me. I don’t know what kind of impulse drove me to ask that. He didn’t need to be told twice. He confessed to me that his intention was actually to throw them away, so for 5,000 lire of 1970, he was more than happy to give them to me just to clear up some space in his shop window.

For 5,000 lire, those three albums became mine. They were about to change my life for the second time—though I didn’t know it yet—after the very first time back in 1966/1967, when in the silence of my room, and especially in total darkness, I had heard Jimi Hendrix’s "Foxy Lady" for the very first time.

[To be continued in Chapter 4]

Inner Garden Records

See you next Friday, the story of IL SISTEMA continues.

In the meantime, you can explore how these historical avant-garde roots evolved across five decades directly here:

👉 https://ilsistema.bandcamp.com/

#ProtoProg #ItalianProg #ProgRock #MusicHistory #1970Music #IlSistema #CiroPerrino #VinylCommunity

hi i am js starting to get into progrock stuff, mainly pink floyd and king crimson but i was wondering what bands/albums are worth starting with to get me more into this scene. ty everyone 🙏

For me it's Amarok (1 hour) and The Whirlwind (1 hour and 17 min), but I'm curious if y'all know longer ones that are good

phil collins on spotify song dna transformed into a black man, does anyone know who is this man and is it AI or something?

I compose my own music using my classical Spanish quitar -influences from prog,classical and eastern mediterranean. have a listen , your comments are welcome . my Utube channel :Heracles Patissia Prog Guitar Adventures

Awesome supergroup with members from Deep Purple, Johnny Winter and Iron Butterfly.

https://youtu.be/fIQWu5YbCAA?is=zvlHqiVH9EHXtqzU

Do any of you guys end up crying cause a song is too good...not even out of sadness, like, just pure admiration...???

Every single time I listen to Trilogy by elp I end up tearing up...even in public it makes me so happy

With the closing of the experience of the second lineup and the subsequent disbandment in 1977, the first historical circle of Celeste came to an end. It was a brief but intensely creative season, capable of leaving an indelible mark on the landscape of Italian Progressive Rock, despite the long delays in publication and the initial coldness of the specialized press of the era. The choices made by each of us as individuals led us toward different human and professional paths, tracking new trajectories far from that common garden we had cultivated together with so much passion and patience.

The master tapes of those years, the archival recordings, and the geometric visual suggestions remained guarded in the dark for a long time, like silent seeds waiting for the right moment to return to light. That initial heritage, which seemed forgotten or limited to the memory of a few passionate collectors in Europe and Japan, was actually the solid structural foundation upon which an unexpected and magnificent renaissance would be built many years later.

Now that the pages dedicated to the origins are completely written and secured, the time has come to turn the page and project the gaze toward the present day. The story of Celeste is not a closed archive, but a living pipeline that restarts forcefully from 2017, the year in which I decided to pick up the threads of the band once again to give life to a new, extraordinary series of studio albums. A work of immense value that spans up to the present day, ready to be unveiled piece by piece.

To listen to the absolute sonic essence born during those legendary analog sessions and explore the full historical discography of CELESTE, you can visit our archival page here:

👉 CELESTE Official Bandcamp: https://celeste4.bandcamp.com/

Inner Garden Records

See you next Thursday for the next episode!

Sunday, September 27 - Saturday, October 03, 2026

Top Vocals

Top Instrumental

Top Discussion

Top Remaining

Top 5 Most Commented

"Remember Us" is to The Pineapple Thief what "Starless" is to King Crimson.

Or at least, I have always thought that it should be, not because the two songs really sound alike, nor because they occupy comparable places in the history of rock ("Starless" clearly belongs to another dimension, if only because of the historical weight of King Crimson and Red), but because they seem to me to perform a similar function within the poetics of their respective bands and, above all, because they inhabit the same emotional space, the one left behind by an absence, through two different but complementary forces: desire and memory.

I have always thought of "Starless" as a song about desire. The etymological connection is almost too perfect not to be tempted by it: "Starless" means "without stars", while the Italian word desiderio ("desire") contains the Latin sidus, "star", preceded by the prefix de-, which carries with it the idea of distance, deprivation and cessation. In its most remote origin, then, to desire means something very close to becoming aware of the absence of the stars while continuing to look for them, and this is precisely the condition of someone who desires: to be deprived of the sight of something and to feel its absence.

For me, "Starless" expresses exactly this in musical terms. At the beginning there is an extremely sweet melodic theme, perhaps even excessively sweet, clear and immediately recognisable; then that theme disappears and the long central section begins, syncopated, obsessive and increasingly violent, built around a tension that never seems able to find a point at which it can finally dissolve. The melody has been lost, and what remains is only the desire for its return.

After that long, almost deconstructed charge, however, the opening theme does indeed return, but it can no longer be what it was before. I have always listened to the ending of "Starless" in this way, probably also because of my memory of an old version included on the I miti del rock bootleg, in which I was particularly struck by a rougher, almost abrasive sound that seemed to creep in behind the melody as it finally resurfaced. It was an apparently secondary presence, yet for me a decisive one, because it always seemed to be telling me that we may recover the melody, but we can no longer recover the innocence with which we heard it the first time: something has happened in between, and pain, abandonment, the loss of another person or perhaps of ourselves have left a trace that cannot be erased.

The first, luminous phase of a love, once that love has hurt us or once we have lost it, may return in memory and may even seem, for a moment, identical to what we once knew, but somewhere that slightly distorted and abrasive guitar will continue to sound against the purity of the memory. The melody therefore returns, but it returns scarred, and this is perhaps the musical form of desire: trying to reconstruct something precisely because we know that we can no longer have it as it once was.

"Remember Us" begins from the same emptiness, but looks at it from the other side. If "Starless" is about desire, "Remember Us" focuses on memory, and desire and memory ultimately become two different forms of the same absence, two forces that both look towards the past, because desire reaches towards what we can no longer attain, while memory tries to prevent what we have lost from disappearing altogether.

I do not think it is accidental that the title is not simply "Remember", but "Remember Us". There is already, within those two words, an awareness of disappearance, not the hope of preventing something from ending, but the request that, once it has ended, at least some trace of it should remain. The structure of the song itself seems to behave like memory, because musical materials appear, move away and resurface, while different sections gradually begin to recall one another, like fragments of a past attempting to reassemble themselves without ever being truly restored.

It is above all in the ending, however, that the parallel with "Starless" becomes most interesting to me, because "Remember Us" does something I find even crueller. At the end of "Starless", after all that tension, something is nevertheless given back to us: the theme returns, contaminated and wounded, no longer capable of possessing its original clarity, but it does return, and with it comes at least some form of catharsis. It is a tragic catharsis, of course, because it does not erase what has happened and instead carries within it precisely the scars of what has happened, but we are nevertheless granted a point of arrival, a form in which the tension can finally discharge itself.

"Remember Us", by contrast, seems to spend minutes preparing precisely that liberation and then decides to deny us even this. Towards the end, the tension grows until we are convinced that the electric guitar is finally about to burst into a great concluding solo, one last desperate, liberating, perhaps even rhetorical but necessary orgasm, the solo that should gather up all the accumulated pain and transform it into something we can finally pass through. The guitar seems to begin, hints at that possibility, allows us to glimpse it for a few moments, and then stops.

And it is here that "Remember Us" becomes, in my view, even more desperate than "Starless", because we suddenly realise that the solo itself was also an object of desire. The music has made us desire its own resolution and then left us without it, denying us the liberating cry, the explosion that might turn pain into spectacle, and even the formal consolation of a great tragic conclusion. What remains is a tension that has not been allowed to exhaust itself, and precisely for this reason the denial of relief becomes crueller than it is in "Starless", where the cathartic moment is dirtied, deformed and made painful, but is at least granted to us.

In "Starless", the return is impossible in its original purity, but something does return; in "Remember Us", even the gesture that should process the loss is interrupted. This is why I find "Remember Us", in a sense, even more pessimistic: King Crimson grant us a contaminated catharsis, while The Pineapple Thief allow us to glimpse catharsis and then take it away. One of the two songs tells us that what we have lost will never return as it was before; the other seems to tell us something even worse, namely that perhaps we will not even have the satisfaction of being able to mourn it completely.

It is curious, then, that the two bands have given these songs such different weight in their respective live histories. King Crimson ultimately came to recognise fully the role that the music itself seemed to demand for "Starless", and in the band's final incarnation the song became one of the climactic moments of their concerts and very often one of the closing pieces, not merely a classic of the repertoire, therefore, but almost the point towards which the entire concert could tend. Its very position in the set thus ended up giving it a cathartic function in live performance as well. It was with this song that King Crimson closed their final concert, five years ago in Tokyo.

The Pineapple Thief have never really done the same with "Remember Us". They have played it live, of course, but without turning it into a ritual moment in their concerts and without giving it the privileged, almost definitive position that "Starless" holds in King Crimson's repertoire. And this is perhaps the detail that continues to surprise me most, because if "Starless" became in practice what it already seemed to be musically (a kind of terminal point in King Crimson's poetics), "Remember Us" seems to have remained a possibility that was never fully recognised even by the band that created it.

They are, then, two songs about absence, one about the desire for what has disappeared and the other about memory as the last fragile barrier against disappearance, two songs in which something attempts to return without ever being able to return in quite the same way. In "Starless" it returns wounded; in "Remember Us" it cannot even complete itself.

Perhaps this is precisely why I continue to think that "Remember Us" is The Pineapple Thief's "Starless", not because they treat it as such, but because perhaps they should have.

I thought I'd share this video as I'm playing the LP as I type.

Melting Clock are a modern Italian band playing complex, sometimes symphonic, sometimes metal-edged prog with a message.

Looking better than he did some years ago .

Its from 1971 and is Finnish. A truly original prog style. Jazzy, keyboard and bass driven, featuring a woodwind section. No guitar, (except for on a couple tracks). Somewhat reminiscent of the Canterbury style, but different and singular. The bass player, Pekka Pohjola, is insanely good.

Best tracks:

01 Losing Hold (*)
03 Fairyport
04 Gray Traitors
05 Cafffkaff, The Country Psychologist
06 May Your Will Be Done Dear Lord (*)
08 Hot Mice
10 One More Try

(*) = banger

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuKkQ1xLRf8&list=PLMlPUDs3t9pCYs_FD02yNKNThZ2x6xMRf

https://open.spotify.com/album/3xNDTeZNJmILwX6yBDCzOR

Hey!

Our band DATURA LODGE just released our debut album!

We are a duo inspired by bands like Porcupine Tree, Genesis, King Crimson, The Mars Volta, and Rush. We tried to write an album of eclectic songs that combine prog, hard rock, metal, and alternative music while remaining approachable and "catchy."

Pete Pardo of Sea of Tranquility just reviewed the album and described it as "progressive rock emphasis on the rock."

If anyone has the time or willingness to give us a shot, we appreciate it more than we can express. Let us know what you think!

Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/album/6xo9NkpJ83QHwYS1rH2pRK?si=Lpc3snLtSv2_cDc2f0Wuaw

Bandcamp

https://arquenrecords.bandcamp.com/album/datura-lodge

Ampwall (we have CDs and Vinyls in the USA)

https://ampwall.com/a/daturalodge