JONATHAN'S DIVE

"Jonathan's Dive" is a debut album of the Leiden/Rotterdam, The Netherlands based three-piece band EDGAR'S HAIR featuring Hans Brussee (guitars, vocals, trumpet, moog taurus, stylophone, organ, theremin), Leon van der Leer (drums, percussion, xylophone, backing vocals, moog taurus, moog prodigy, sitar) and Leo Zwaan (bass, backing vocals) - who are assisted by four guesting musicians providing winds, percussion, violins, and piano, as well as two female vocalists and seven readers-narrators.

Self-released for the Clear Spot Int. distribution in the formats of 2LP/2CD/MC, "Jonathan's Dive" is not your average conceptual prog-rock epic. This is literally a 93-minute audio-visual soundtrack-screening to the iconic fable "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" by Richard Bach. The original structure of the book - four parts, three of which were first published in 1970 while the fourth part was added in 2014 - are carefully preserved in the album. It's interesting that "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" was first cinematized in 1974, and the soundtrack for the film was written by Neil Diamond. However, EDGAR'S HAIR have absolutely different and original vision of the Bach's bestseller.

They offer complex and dramatic, highly nuanced and detailed, multi-leveled and poly-stylistic, yet very cinematic in its nature music with extended instrumental passages interweaving various Progressive, Experimental, Fusion, Psychedelic, Neoclassical and Worldmusic trends. The dramatic focus in on the internal fragility and vulnerability of a human to the challenges of life. It explains the titles of the four album parts: "Awareness", "Conflict", "Succeeding" и "Emptiness". Each album's part takes a side of the 2LP edition and reflects a particular part of the book. The music is generally unclassifiable in traditional categories. It can be described as Experimental-Prog, Post-Jazz, Neo-Kraut- Psychedelia but the most adequate definition would be Cinematic-Rock which absorbs a variety of influences, and utilize particular stylistic elements to create a specific dramatic character. The authors stress that no samples and no loops were used in creating the musical content. Each track on this album including pure ambient pastoral soundscapes - there are totally 13 pieces on the album - can evoke very personal associations which can vary from listener to listener.

Overall, EDGAR'S HAIR's debut album is grandiose and majestic work. The only problem with it is that in order to understand it properly you'll have to listen to it from the beginning to the end at once, and one single listening is definitely not enough to catch all nuances and feel overwhelming beauty of the album. Highly recommended for lovers of inventive Modern-Rock beyond the trends.