Preludes Airs & Yodels

Penguin Cafe Orchestra | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 22, 1997)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Caroline
• ASIN: B000000HQ6
• In-Print Editions: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #271,775 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Music for a Found Harmonium

2. Perpetuum Mobile

3. Penguin Cafe Single

4. Air

5. Telephone and Rubber Band

6. Dirt

7. Giles Farnaby's Dream

8. Oscar Tango

9. Rosasolis

10. Air à Danser

11. Music for a Found Harmonium

12. Yodel 3

13. White Mischief

14. Prelude and Yodel

15. Harmonic Necklace

16. Steady State

17. Nothing Really Blue

18. Pandaharmonium

19. Piano Music [Live]

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Simon Jeffes's gravity-defying ensemble serves up a compilation of 19 tracks dating back to 1976. A great primer for beginners, this includes marvels of wit and construction like "Telephone & Rubber Band" and "Music for a Found Harmonium" (which is also heard here in a version by Celtic group Patrick Street). --Jeff Bateman

Product Description

Comp of the best tracks from their six studioalbums plus Patrick Street's performance of 'Music For AFound Harmonium' and the exclusive Orb remix of it, entitled'Pandaharmonium'. --This text refers to an alternate Audio CD edition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mood Music for Happy Schizoids, August 17, 2000

By 

"tom926" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preludes Airs & Yodels (Audio CD)

God bless my ex. He couldn't carry a tune if you elmer glued it to his vocal chords but he turned me on to this wonderful group about a month after we first started dating. As an uptight college student, I used to put on the first two Penquin Cafe Orchestra albums (vinyl no less) to study. I figure if I were going to be tortured by masturbatory French semiotic theorists, the least I could do is have this wonderful music to keep me sane. I am a long way from tearing my hair out over Derridoo, I mean Derrida, but these wonderful Penquin Cafe Orchestra songs have traveled with me to four cities and countless apartments. I have always wanted to choreograph "Perpetuum Mobile" and "Steady Skate" for a pair of ice skaters (lord, what Torvil and Dean could do with those luscious long gliding cello lines), danced around my room to the extravagant silliness, driven uptight musicians crazy who won't admit that minimalism can be as mentally expansive as the pharmacological substances they imbibed in great quantities, marveled at how wonderful a spinet and ukelele could sound together (like an unexpectedly savory meal in a hole-in-the-wall restuarant)in "Giles Farnaby's Dream," consoled myself over bad times and celebrated the good ones with this wonderful music playing somewhere within earshot. I introduced my ex to hundreds of albums over the 8 years we were together before he died, but this is the ONLY music he ever introduced me to, and for that alone I am grateful to have met him. God bless you for that Mr T wherever you may be, and I hope you are happily humming along--offkey of course--to Air A Danser wherever ye may be.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Gold Chartbusters, March 28, 2000

By 

Mr. A. Pomeroy (Wiltshire, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Preludes Airs & Yodels (Audio CD)

This is a collection of the Penguin Café Orchestra's music, from the first album ('Music from the Penguin Café') to their last ('Union Café'), with extracts from a couple of deleted EPs, and two remixes of 'Music for a Found Harmonium', one by ambient techno artists The Orb the end.

As an introduction to the band it serves its purpose, although there's rather too much of the later, dull stuff, for the simple reason that there's more of it than the earlier, weird stuff.

For a proper 'best of' go out and buy 'Music from the Penguin Café' and 'Penguin Café Orchestra'.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended, July 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Preludes Airs & Yodels (Audio CD)

What happens when you take some eccentrics trained in the Old School, - throw them in a room with cello, violin, synthesizer, piano, guitars, oboe, harmonium, bass, and gentle percussive devices? As compelling as an English Garden on a blustery day, you get the best of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, "Preludes, Airs & Yodels", a 1996 compilation covering the 70's and 80's. Not dated. Not classifiable. Very positive. Very wise. Good for musical snobs and derelicts alike.