Concept? Write your own..

Touch Me, I'm Russian

This story takes place in the year 2054, when 99% of the people living in Finland are foreigners. One day, September 25th to be exact, a man working at the statistics bureau notices that in Finland there are in fact people from every nation in the world. Of course he gets the idea that Finland must try to make it to the Guinness Book of Records by making a world record in the new game called "Touch a member of every nation in the world within the borders of one country in alphabetical order." The game goes like this: First an Albanian touches an Australian, then the Australian touches an Austrian and so on, until a member of every nation has been touched (Except the Albanian, who has to touch himself.)

However, this is only the backstory (and thus it's printed on the back of the record sleeve). The album focuses on one moment in the touching game, a moment when a Romanian beauty queen is supposed to touch a Russian person. It turns out that every Russian person happens to be on a holiday outside Finland, except one, a hideous old man who smells like cabbage and has no teeth at all except one that is green and brown. So, this is the man that the Romanian beauty queen has to touch. (I'd like to make it clear that not all Russian people smell like cabbage, this man is a very rare exception. In fact, some Russian people smell very nice indeed, but they have nothing to do with this story.) Anyway, the Romanian beauty queen, who smells very nice, is very much disgusted by the man she's supposed to touch. This is why it takes a very long time (42 minutes and 53 seconds to be exact) to make up her mind and touch the man. The lyrics of the one song on the album consist of the thoughts in the woman's head from the moment she's touched to the moment she touches the Russian man.

Tracklisting:
A1: Touch Me, I'm Russian, Part I (20:56)
B1: Touch Me, I'm Russian, Part II (21:57)

^ These are brilliant!  

Vompatti wrote: An Incomplete List of Things to Hold on to when You're Drowning, Op. 21½ The name says it all. The music consists of instrumental pieces varying from orchestral music (Ladder) to ambient (Log) to noise (Witch). 1. Boat (3:45) 2. Oar (2:33) 3. Log (3:57) 4. Rope (6:13) 5. Ladder (5:58) 6. Duck (1:46) 7. Witch (12:47)

This nameless 4-song EP is more like art-pop than prog, but I think it might pass as Crossover Prog. Instead of explaining what the songs are about I here provide short excerpts of their lyrics:

1. Daylight Losing Time (4:30)
Turn off the light / and turn the pointers on your clock so you can dream / of the moments that were lost in time...

2. My Girl Is a Dressmaker (2:56)
With a needle in her hand and fabric on the other she is made for me / yes, she is made for me / but her dresses are made for her...

3. Every Time I Talk Like a Swede (I Lose Control) (4:45)
Scandinavia, you've got my by the tongue / with your swell pronounciations / and those charming punctuations / oh, every time I lose control...

4. Last Words of a Depressed Literary Critic (3:37)
La la la, la la la / la la laa laa la laa / la la laa, la la laa laa la laa / if I had a dog I'd name him Franz...

If you're wondering what the concept is, it's "Songs about some things that are not closely related to each other."

This album has no name, but anyway,

The story takes place on a distant planet called Volkswagen. The protagonist, a young lady named Sofia Kleinbus, is the daughter of an engineer who's building a space ship so that he can one day go fishing into outer space like his grandfather did during the great depression when fish was really expensive. But Sofia is a vegetarian who doesn't eat fish, so she doesn't want his father to finish the ship. She hides his tools in the garden where he can't find them, because it's a secret garden where only Sofia can go in her dreams. But suddenly a mad scientist captures Sofia and takes her into his secret laboratory where he downloads the contents of her mind and uploads it into the mind of a stripper named Shirley who also plays chess. Now Shirley can also go the secret garden, which she does. She steals the tools and gives them to the mad professor who uses them to build a device which he plans to use to take over the world. (These are the only tools he can use to build it, because they're magical tools.) But suddenly there's a storm and the device gets all wet and the power is on, which means there's a huge explosion which opens the gates of the jail where the mad professor had earlier put Sofia. So now Sofia can go to her father and ask him to build a massive weapon to defeat the mad professor. Her father knows a blacksmith who makes tools to build weapons, so he buys some and builds the weapon, a huge cannon. But the mad professor has already moved to another planet with the stripper, and Sofia's father can't shoot him with the cannon because he doesn't know where he is. When a mad professor is hiding somewhere, it's nearly impossible to find him, so they don't even try. But soon it's summer again and they forget about the whole thing. This is where the album ends.

Then there's this epilogue where a giant muffin falls from the skies.


Edited by Vompatti - September 18 2008 at 16:42

^ Luckily, in several years time this page will become entrapped in a blackhole created at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (mk2) and waft back through the annals of time, (pausing briefly to look at today to see it's own crreation), before continuing further back to an era when spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures of several different species really did gather together in a cave to listen to a Pict. And just maybe, a person from that era, not unrelated to that very Pict, would read these words and say - "Hmmm... there's an idea".

Edited by Dean - September 22 2008 at 17:56

Okay, hmm, lemme think...I only fronted the world's worst prog rock band for a while, so oughta be king at this sorta thing...here's a concept EP for ya!

Cat (2008):
1. Dawn (1:03)
2. Wild thing (7:48)
3. Jellied Nasties called Cat Food (13:01)
4. Sleep/Thrown out/Sleep (reprise) (9:19)
5. When everyone in the house are asleep: (30:44)
          a) The breakout
          b) The lookaround
          c) The hunt/The Prey
          d) The re-entrance
          e) The gory playtime
           f) The show-off

1. Morning after/Thrown out prey/Brekfast (16:08)
2. Sleep (second Reprise) (2:52)
3. The gentle art of Laziness: (15:17)
          a) Yawn
          b) Drool
          c) ...
          d) Lazy Epiologue
4. Playtime madness (9:01)
5. Cats are better than Dogs (18:25)

Meh...

The Longest Day (24:56:32)

Ambitious...