Genre
Rock that borrowed its shape from classical music. What we care about is the moment Italy made it its own, and on whose labels.
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Monograph Prog
Magma
Theusz Hamtaahk
Twenty-nine years. Then thirty-nine. Then forty-two. That's how long Magma's three longest compositions took to reach a record in one piece, and it is why the band's discography tells you almost nothing.
Selection Prog
English prog
Ten records
Ten English records from 1969 to 1972, lined up by how much company stood behind them. At the top there's a multinational's catalogue number on the label. At the bottom a band paid for the pressing themselves: sixty-four copies, thirty-four pounds and sixty-eight pence.
Selection Prog
Italian prog
Ten records
Ten records released between 1971 and 1974, in the order they came out, each with its label and catalogue number. Lined up like this they tell you something no single record does: who was pressing them, and how little independence was involved.
Selection Prog
Krautrock
Ten records
Ten German records from 1970 to 1974, grouped by the label that issued them rather than by year. Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk stay out. Read that way, the catalogue numbers give away something the sleeves do not: three of the four imprints answered to one man.
Prog here means rock that stopped fitting into three minutes: suites, odd time signatures, albums built as one piece rather than a set of songs. The template was English, and it reached Italy at the start of the seventies.
What happened next gets told less often. Between 1971 and 1974 Italy put out dozens of progressive records, nearly all of them on the big Milan and Rome labels, and plenty disappeared from the shops within months. It is the most collected scene in the world after the British one, and the part we care about is exactly the part that sold nothing at the time.