Penguin Cafe – The Red Book (2014)

The story behind Penguin Cafe Orchestra is always one worth retelling. In 1972, Simon Jeffes experienced a sort of recurring hallucinogenic dream caused by food poisoning. The dream was about a lifeless concrete building containing equally lifeless inhabitants. “The scene was for me one of ordered desolation,” he said.
But after feeling somewhat better he went to a beach and, from there, the first line of a poem “I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe. I will tell you things at random” came to mind. It was here that an imaginary and self-contained world, all built around spontaneity and creativity and framed within this imaginary cafe, began to form.
This creation inspired the music one would hear in the cafe. “It’s the sort of music played by imagined wild, free, mountain people creating sounds of a subtle dreamlike quality,” said Jeffes. “It is cafe music, but cafe in the sense of a place where people’s spirits communicate and mingle, a place where music is played that often touches the heart of the listener.”

Simon Jeffes passed away in 1997, with the likes of Music for a Found Harmonium and Telephone And Rubber Band just two hugely memorable – and much used – examples of the work he left. Fortunately, his son Arthur was determined to carry on playing his father’s work and in 2009, formed Penguin Cafe. However, it isn’t all a case of like father, like son; Arthur is a fully-fledged composer himself and The Red Book is Penguin Cafe’s second album, following on from 2011′s well-received A Matter Of Life.