The Idler magazine will be discussing Todd Rundgren’s overlooked 1973 masterwork A Wizard, A True Star as the next instalment in their Albums Club, co-hosted by Rock’s Backpages on March 14 at the Idler Academy.
Luke Haines and Barney Hoskyns of RBP will be talking over the album, which they describe as an "album of vaulting techno-musical ambition", adding: "A dizzying rollercoaster ride of emotion and genre mutation, the album was substantially the work of Rundgren himself, pieced together in late ’72 at his own Secret Sound studio on NYC’s West 24th Street. Where its immediate predecessor, the more fondly-regarded Something/Anything?, was choc-full o’ good choons, Wizard was the sound of Philly’s finest rabbit-toothed soulboy going into interstellar prog-psych overdrive, taking the listener on a seamless sonic journey whose map was written substantially by hallucinogenic drugs."
They’ll also be playing the album in vinyl in full "as an antidote to the digital MP3 compressed age". For details, head to The Idler‘s website; in the meantime, here’s ‘Zen Archer’ from the album, in the guise of a decidedly compressed symptom of the digital age:
