Born in the 1970s as the Penguin Café Orchestra through the initiative of Simon Jeffes, a classically trained English guitarist, and cellist Helen Liebmann, with creative support from Brian Eno, the ensemble was “reborn” as Penguin Café thanks to the founder’s son, Arthur Jeffes. Over time, the “Penguin Café” ensemble has continued to offer a captivating and hard-to-define repertoire.
Baroque music, neoclassicism, ethno-folk rhythms, and pop flavors coexist in a project that, from the early 1980s, captured the desire for “new” music among audiences sensitive to experimentation and resistant to genre boundaries.
In Rain Before Seven (2023), the latest recording by the new formation, Jeffes once again elegantly engages with the ghosts of the past, paying tribute to masters of contemporary music such as Philip Glass, John Cage, Harold Budd, as well as the duo Michael Nyman/Peter Greenaway, blending strings with electronics and percussion with guitars.
Their approach is full of chiaroscuro, dense and evocative—sometimes melancholic like the English countryside, sometimes lighter and brighter. Always fascinating.
