GENTLE GIANT — Three Piece Suite Announced

British progressive rock band GENTLE GIANT formed in 1970 when the Shulman Brothers [The Howling Wolves, The Road Runners and Simon Dupree and the Big Sound] teamed up with Gary Green and Kerry Minnear, plus Simon Dupree drummer Martin Smith to create a new project. The band featured three lead vocalists

The band’s first album was the self-titled “Gentle Giant” in 1970. The sound combined the collective band members’ influences of rock, blues, classical, and 1960s British soul. The Tony Visconti produced “Acquiring the Taste” followed in 1971.

“Octopus”, the fourth and possibly the most famous album from the group, released in 1972, included a madrigal inspired by R. Laing’s philosophical arguments and songs based on obscure novels and philosophers. In 2015 Steven Wilson remixed this LP and re-released it on CD/Blu-ray via the band’s Alucard label. The album the album featured original cover-art by Roger Dean.

Gentle Giant releases today 09 August 2017 — the first taste of their new Prog Rock compilation titled “Three Piece Suite” remixed by Steven Wilson, and out September 29th.

“Three Piece Suite” is a specially curated selection of songs and compositions from the band’s first three albums. Track choices are determined by the low availability of multi-track master tapes from the era. Only a few songs of each album are known to exist as multi-track recordings, the rest are presumably lost.

Steven Wilson explained, “To create the new mixes, I used Logic as the software and Universal Audio plug-ins, which provide emulations of classic analog outboard effects, channel strips and old mixing desks…I used these tools to clean things up and bring out some more clarity, detail and definition in some of the instrumental interplay. There was never a question of trying to outdo the original mixes, but offer different perspectives on them.”

We listened to the PEEL THE PAINT Steven Wilson remix from the forthcoming album [shared below] —

This is a soft colour work with quintessentially English voice, brilliant and elegantly renderd melodic lines and very kindly bass-notes. At it’s heart this is a calm “Country Garden” piece with more in common to baroque that it ever has to prog-rock, or even electric folk, for that mater. But this a lovely and sympathetic re-mixing, nonetheless.

Link: https://www.facebook.com/gentlegiantband/