Shadoks Music
Pete Fine : One Day Of A Chrystalline Thought (US,1974)****°
Before hearing this album, I thought that Roy Harper’s Stormcock was one of the highest expressions a songwriter could combine with orchestral and guitar arrangements, but Pete Fine’s even more orchestrated item adds even more ideas of expressions to that, making this release like a true conceptual treasure of music.
While having played in a heavy guitar trio just before this, Pete Fine was considering making an ambitious classical composition, which became this conceptual piece, which not only featured a chamber string section, and French horns, but also 12-string and electric guitars, flute, electric bass, drums, and a bit of organ and piano, and various vocal parts.
The underlying leading instrument is not the classical strings, but the 12-string guitar, and the songs are intertwining wires into the compositional aspects, binding the different elements like pages in a bound book.
The composition is successfully divided into phases of sections, where on each moment a different part of the instrumentation leads and is led by an equal emotional strength, still typical for each specific instrument or form of expression (chorus parts with female vocals, strings, 12-string guitar, more heavy guitars, individual song expression (male or female vocalist), flute,.. These all appear at the right moments, and with its own emotional values.
A masterpiece. Only 100 albums were printed at the time. This is the first official re-release.
Only 100 albums were printed in his time. This is the first official re-release.
PS. Pete Fine also recorded a second solo album, called ‘Northstar’, in 1976. Shadoks has re-released it on LP. Previously, to the solo albums, he also had a heavy guitar trio called The Flow, with Pete Fine on guitars & vocals, Monte Farber on bass & vocals, Steve Starer on drums, with compositions by Pete Fine and Monte Farber. They recorded a half album, which has also been released by Shadoks with some extra recorded material.
