Where am I? J to M: 25 Artists Fifth Studio Album

Where am (is) I? I skipped I because I am (is) not important. It was a struggle getting this down to 25 and sacrifices had to be made and I is a less common first letter for the last name of artists. John Irvine has been one of my favourite authors, so I do matter after all.

his is the fourth poll in the fifth album by "artists" A to Z series. Before this series I did a "Bands" fifth album A to Z series. I have tried to avoid collaborations, archival works, most posthumous releases and I have tried to stick with studio albums in these series. Also, I have stuck with ones included in Prog Archives. While I have tried to reference various sources, sometimes it can be confusing and expect some errors. I have tried to present a variety of styles for the artist names while highlighting various better known artists (ideally with fairly known and well-rated albums). Hopefully many here can find something to like, and please mention any others that fit and you like.

Feel free to vote for an artist's album in this list that you enjoy no matter how limited your knowledge, and despite how many you might enjoy. I have opted to not make this multiple votes, but of course one can mention all one likes (and even dislikes) in a post as well as any others not listed.

Notes:
1. Manfred Mann: I included The Manfred Mann Band in the previous bands series,.
2. Kosmischer Läufer: I erroneously included Volume 5 in bands but I will include this under Z for the fictitious Martin Zeichnete. That said, Klaus Morlock can hopefully satisfy that fictitious craving if one is inclined.
3 Miranda, Javier: I very much had wanted to include Departures, which is very recent electronic release from march of 2023. I like it very much, but space was limited and as it is so new that did not make the poll. https://javiermiranda.bandcamp.com/album/departures

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Again, it's something of a mixed bag and various of these albums are far from the artists' best. Lindh, for instance (I love all of his earlier albums). While the most important to my life overall of these will have been Kitaro, and I loved all of the Silk Road albums, and Silk Road II was one of my most played albums in the early to mid 90s, the one that speaks to me the most now here is Klaus Morlock, and I love The Three Faces of Janice. I did a topic some time back focusing on Morlock and Kosmischer Laufer and mentioning some similar projects: Retro-Music Pretending to Be of the Past

Edited by Logan - 14 hours 43 minutes ago at 12:15

Kitaro - Silk Road II

Somehow this series misses me. I think I heard three of these, none made a big impression. (Will listen to your recommendation in the other thread though.)


Edited by Lewian - 11 hours 59 minutes ago at 14:59

Lewian wrote: Somehow this series misses me. I think I heard three of these, none made a big impression. (Will listen to your recommendation in the other thread though.)

I hear you, this wouldn't work as best of for the artists generally that released at least five studio albums. It has been something of an interesting one for me to research, and more-so incredibly numbing in its tedious way. Were I to go with debuts/ sole studio albums, there would be many more to cover that I like, and if I did seconds, there would also be many more, thirds and fourths also would have many more. Something of a law of diminishing returns often. Many of my favourites didn't put out five. Quite a few classic ones started out more interesting and were at their most progressive early on. There's a lot less for me to choose that I appreciate in this polls than if I went for a lower number of albums. A lot of the better known names here released what are considered better earlier albums, and we get into a lot that just aren't well-known.

One reason why I was interested in covering fifths is because I thought it might be interesting from a discussion/ reading this thread standpoint because so many of our favourites may have fallen out of grace by that time for us. I am interested in what people like and don't like and how people feel some of these compare to earlier releases, what people know etc. That said, I didn't think these topics would be very popular, especially with artists, because the concept of the poll is limiting, and may well offer up many less than stellar and little known albums. That said, I have few I like in all of them, but my biases are having an effect on the content even though these go out side of my wheelhouse and knowledge to a big extent. If I see a name I recognise in the archives letter category, I am more likely to check it out, and as I have been here so many years, and trawled through listings before. I recognise a huge number of those names even if I have not heard them. I try not to favour my favoured categories overmuch. For "artists" one does get huge number of very obscure and often very great to my ears electronic artists, but I try for diversity.

Tony Levin.

Wow, I get to vote for Jean-Michel Jarre's finest album!