The short version
- Expreso Imaginario was a magazine launched in Buenos Aires in August 1976. The first issue mixed music, poetry, comics and a recipe for bread.
- Page 14 in the contents is "Música progresiva". Whoever uploaded the issue to the Internet Archive added the names Sun Ra and Tangerine Dream to that entry.
- The Archive scan runs to 15 pages, and page 14 is not among them. What the magazine said about Tangerine Dream can't be read today.
- In the pages that survive, the synthesizer shows up in Piazzolla's band and at a rock show at Luna Park. The listings also carry one concert with tape.
The magazine's first words are about Mars. The Viking 1 lander is sending back information from the surface of the planet, the editorial says, and its pictures are spreading across millions of television sets. Then the editors set out their own course. This magazine won't aim for galaxies or exotic planets. It will travel through the parts of the mind that haven't yet set hard, the ones kept fresh by music, poetry and love. It came out in Buenos Aires in August 1976 and it was called Expreso Imaginario, the Imaginary Express. On the cover a steam locomotive with a big number 1 on its front charges out from under a winged green monster.
What we read
A scan of the first issue is on the Internet Archive. The cover price is 150. The masthead lists Jorge Pistocchi, Pipo Lernoud and Alberto Ohanian as editors, and Claudio Kleiman among the writers. The scan carries no copyright notice, so we don't reproduce any of its pages here and quote only a few words of Spanish.
The scan is 15 pages including the cover. Line it up against the contents and you get Piazzolla on page 11, then the Whitman poems from page 12, then a concert report whose page is numbered 15. Page 14 isn't there.
The missing page
The contents page sells it like this. The twentieth century has broken every mould, especially in art, and today's great musicians have room to work that Bach never dreamed of. Then: "Son libres para crear una nueva definición de lo sonoro." They are free to come up with a new definition of sound, one with room for the head, the heart and the soul.
The contents don't say who the page was about. The uploader, copying the contents into the item's description, added a bracket to this entry: "Música progresiva (Sun Ra, Tangerine Dream)". So we can say this much: a new Buenos Aires magazine presented Tangerine Dream as progressive music in August 1976. Which record it heard and what it made of it went missing with the page.
Piazzolla's "progresiva"
In the pages that remain, the man who leans hardest on the word "progresiva" is Astor Piazzolla. The interview is headed "Piazzolla y la progresiva". The caption beside his photo says he sprinkles his arrangements with synthesizer and electric pianos, and the piece reports that he played the café-concert venue La Ciudad with synthesizer, drums and electric piano.
Asked whether he knew the Argentine rock groups, Piazzolla said he knew all of them. People here got confused, he said, calling some local names progressive. "La música progresiva es otra cosa." Progressive music was something else: Chick Corea, Weather Report, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Miles Davis. Why did young people listen to him? Because Piazzolla was in the noise, in the synthesizer, in the improvising.
The interview carries on over on page 20. Complaining that you couldn't get a decent sound in Buenos Aires, Piazzolla brings up Chick Corea. When he saw him, Corea's drummer had eleven microphones. Corea himself played five synthesizers, an electric piano, a string ensemble that stood in for the violins and an ordinary piano, with a big mirror behind him so the audience could see the keys. It's the most synthesizers anyone counts in the surviving pages.
Synthesizers at Luna Park
Page 15 is Claudio Kleiman's report from Luna Park, where 11,000 people turned up on 16 July. Argentine rock groups took the stage one after another, and during the set by Crucis he wrote: "los sintetizadores llenan el aire". The synthesizers fill the air and carry you off somewhere else. On this page the synthesizer belongs to a rock band on a stage.
Tape at the Goethe-Institut
The listings on page 21 keep coming back to the Goethe-Institut at Corrientes 319. It showed young German cinema on eight evenings in August and opened a show of contemporary German prints on 26 July. Under music there's one date, 10 August at 8.30 in the evening: "TOZZI/LABERER", with "obras para piano, percusión y cintas", works for piano, percussion and tape. It's the only place in the surviving pages where tape is an instrument.
Fifty years on
The page about Tangerine Dream is gone, and the pages that are left hear the synthesizer somewhere else: as a new instrument in a tango band, as the air at a rock show, as stage furniture for an American jazz musician. Berlin's electronic music survives as one line in the contents and an uploader's bracket.
Put the second side of Ricochet on headphones. It opens on piano, then the sequencer comes in and the next 21 minutes run in one direction. Your feet find the beat first. Whatever a Buenos Aires magazine wrote about this band in 1976 was on page 14.
For where to begin with the band, see the Tangerine Dream guide. The record itself has its own Ricochet review.
Where to get it
The first issue of Expreso Imaginario can be read on the Internet Archive. Ricochet first came out on Virgin in 1975 and was remastered for the 2019 box In Search of Hades.