Paralardra (other than being the misspelling of the title of a book by C.S.Lewis) was a group of visionary young men who got together in the mid-seventies to explore the vast universe of music.
BEFORE THE WONDER YEARS
I can't actually remember how many years I was involved in Paralandra because before Paralandra there was the "Group of three guys from the high school choir who became music geeks" group. We would occasionally attend a concert of one of the two local university Avant-Garde of performance groups. In my opinion the most entertaining of those concerts were the ones put on by the university students for their final, year end music projects. You never know what was going to happen. They could play a piece of music that used the percussive sounds of a series of dinner plates breaking on the floor every 12 bars or feature a guitar player on stage getting ready to play his classical guitar but never actually playing a note though out the whole performance. It was hilariously insane. They used a big electric wall clock on a music stand to execute the various "song" sections by. Although usually not very musical, it was very entertaining and on the way out the door, we always felt like we got our money's worth.
Attending all those Avante-Garde concerts really got us going and we decided that the "Group of three guys from the high school choir who became music geeks" group would form their own Avante-Garde musical group.
The first piece of music the pre-Paralandra group wrote together was a little 25 minute tune base on the book of Revelations from the Bible. We actually ended up recording with one of the guys (Steve) reading right out of the bible (who unfortunately at the time had a bad cold). The mood was cosmically enhanced through the use of a instrument amplifier that had a built-in spring reverberation effect that we borowed from a guy in school.
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