Music Arcades: Penguin Cafe Orchestra: Union Cafe

I have privileged and under-privileged listening times for music. The latter are the times when I'm focused (no, really) on work and just playing something through the computer — that's how I listen to the previous night's Late Junction, for example. The trouble is that, when I'm concentrating on work, I've become pretty expert at blocking out music, so I can get to the end of a track I really like before I even realise what or who it is. By contrast, the time between 7.00 and 7.30 when I'm giving the Boy his pre-bed feed is much more privileged: apart from cooing at him and grinning like an idiot, my mind is clear and I'm all ears. But the top spots of the whole week are the Saturday or Sunday sessions when I brew myself a latte and take up position in the Listening Chair. I'll probably have a book on my lap, but if the music holds me, the book stays there.

That's where I found myself last Saturday morning, as I looked forward to reacquainting myself with Union Cafe. I didn't get much reading done. My god, this album is close to flawless. If I were to try and pick holes, I might say it was ten minutes too long, but then what would I cut (apart from the dripping sound that takes up the last four minutes of the last track)? So many exquisite pieces of music, providing a perfectly balanced portrait of what made the Orchestra so unique.

Sadly I never saw the PCO again after 1985 — at least, not in their 'lifetime': there were the wonderful posthumous shows last December that I mentioned before. I'd have loved to hear them play more of these pieces live, not least to hear Simon Jeffes introduce and explain the titles of Another One from Porlock and Lie Back and Think of England.

When I say that Union Cafe is perfectly balanced, I mean things like the way Scherzo and Trio hits you between the eyes with its catchiness (not to mention its invention, with a closing section that veers suddenly between Fear-like dissonance and the most delicate boogie-woogie flourish); and then Vega is the most subtle, sinuous, sliver of a melody, which creeps up on you slowly. In my case, I think it took about 15 years before I noticed how moving it is.

Then there are the tracks where Jeffes takes a tricksy, cerebral idea and turns into something emotional and poignant. Like the valediction to John Cage, where the "entire musical material is derived from the notes C.A.G.E. (except the piano which also plays D.E.A.D.)" — and of course it's 4 minutes 33 seconds long. Or Pythagoras on the Line, which imagines a world where telephone ringtones are arranged in harmonic intervals determined by mathematical series. Only Steve Reich comes close to Jeffes in the elegance of conception and execution of musical ideas.

Lest it all get too contrived, this cleverness of composition is balanced by a track like Thorn Tree Wind, where there is no (human) composition at all; it's just a recording of an aeolian harp left out in the wind.

Being so musically ignorant that I can't even say what counterpoint is, I know that many of the ideas go over my head. And many are deliberately, charmingly opaque. Why does Lifeboat (Lovers Rock) borrow its tune from The Rolling Stones' Lady Jane, just as Neil Young's Borrowed Tune, did? I haven't a clue.

I enjoyed this album so much that I accorded it the privileged listening spot on Sunday as well. With some trepidation, because it's possible to fall in love with music one day and feel cold and distant the next. I needn't have worried.