Pythagoras - Papendrecht Live (1983)

Download

The Dutch formation Pythagoras was rooted in a Dutch record shop named Moonlight Records in The Hague in the late Seventies. The owner was drummer Bob De Jong, he had played in bands like Key, Pine-Apple and he also was a studio-drummer for the Dutch label Phongram. One of the frequent visitors of Moonlight Records was keyboardplayer Rene De Haan who told enthousiasticly about his plans to make synthesizer music. His room in the house of his parents was loaded with musical equipment like the Korg MS 20 and Trilogy synthesizer, a digital Roland piano, a Solina string-ensemble and a Firstman 1024 digital sequencer. The 'musical veteran' Bob was positive about 19 year old Rene his ideas and this led to the release of the album Journey To The Vast Unknown in 1981, a private pressing of 500 copies. Bob send a few promo LP's to some known DJ's like Wim Van Putten (famous LP-Show, great for progrock freaks!), Skip Voogd and Frits Spits. Within a very short time Bob the post box in his record ship was flooded with letters from synthesizer freaks, hundreds from all over the country! They had reacted on the contact-adress that the DJ's had mentioned in their radio programms. The album was re-released a few times and eventually it sold at about 5000 copies, an incredible result for a private pressing by an unknown Dutch duo playing synthesizer music!

In 1982 Pythagoras released their second LP entitled After The Silence, the music is more close to symphonic prog, due to the use of a Mellotron by Rene and the contributions by a wide range of guest musicians Nick Blaser (violin), Martin Knaap (bass), Carolien Krul (flute) and especially Arjen Lucassen (known from Ayreon) on guitar/bass pedals and Michel van Wassem (from Dutch Genesis-inspired group Plackband) on the Novotron. The label WEA arranged the distribution and soon the 500 copies were sold out and WEA asked for an option to make a third Pythagoras LP. Unfortunately this never happened although Pythagoras performed a few times on stage, along with synthesizer player Pieter Koerts. The Pythagoras disbanded and Bob and Rene went their own way. Rene played with Cloud Nine and then went to the Art Academy, he succeeded to become painter and graphic designer (he designed the covers for Dutch band Sjako). Between 1991 and 196 he joined the band The Blue Man Can.

The two albums by Pythagoras sound totally different and a bit simple but very tasteful: the first is cosmic oriented synthesizer music and their second is a wonderful blend of some spacey synthesizer - and classical music with bombastic symphonic rock featuring Arjen Lucassen (who later got fame with his Ayreon project) delivering a Gilmourian guitar solo and Michel Van Wassem (who recently plays in the new Plackband line-up) with some majestic Mellotron eruptions. Both albums are still not available on CD.

Papendrecht Live One 15:43
Papendrecht Live Two 6:21
Papendrecht Live Three 9:38
Papendrecht Live Four 5:21