Jumble Hole Clough: The Erik Satie Toga Party

English avant-garde musician Colin Robinson has been listening to a lot of Van der Graaf Generator and the Bonzo Dog Band lately and it shows on The Erik Satie Toga Party, the new album by his one-man project Jumble Hole Clough. Subtitled as "a Compendium of The Macabre" and "a series of sordid short stories" he went in at the deep end to find hidden gems and ditched items that still work. And of course there are quite a lot of insider jokes as well, like inserting a snippet of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf into Gurdjieff's Trousers.

Robinson's mostly deadpan delivery is a nice contrast to the bells and whistles he has sprinkled with reckless abandon upon his free-flowing compositions. He always had a soft spot for the craving for weirdness that is part of the human condition. Take Don't Sit On My Rugose Cone, which could very well be the first song to have been written about this made-up creature that can be found in the works H.P. Lovecraft. God's messengers can be bad news as any fan of Doctor Who knows and A Fear Of Angels is in sync with that premise.

The two parts of In The Frigid Air channel the pastoral side of early Pink Floyd, with a few recurring guitar motifs and subdued studio trickery that are both scary and gentle. He may wandering without a map, but he makes sure that he will always be somewhere safe, to ensure that he is Back In Time For Tea, even when he went Sailing With Me On The Zuider Zee (Part 2) (a continuation of the track that was included on his 2016 album Bela Lugosi's Dad). What The Hell's Going On Today? sums this new collection of songs nicely. Robinson does not know either, but he sure was having a whale of time to stitch it together.

The Erik Satie Toga Party is a self-released album. Buy it (pay-what-you-want) from his website.

Tracks:

1. The Erik Satie Toga Party
2. Don't Sit On My Rugose Cone
3. Fizzy Spiders Broke My Shehnai
4. He Sang A Little Song
5. Where Do Ferrets Live?
6. Gurdjieff's Trousers
7. In The Frigid Air (Part 1)
8. A Fear Of Angels
9. We Can't See The Wood For The Trees
10. Surprise!
11. What The Hell's Going On Today?
12. Back In Time For Tea
13. In The Frigid Air (Part 2)
14. Sailing With Me On The Zuider Zee (Part 2)
15. After The Swans

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HCTF review of ...and I Think The Little House Knew Something About It; Don't You?