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Tom Penaguin — Beginnings
(Bandcamp aMarxe, 2020/2025, CD / LP / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-08-14

Beginnings Cover art

As often happens, an artist will seemingly surface from nowhere whose skill and chops surprises everyone who listens to them. Such was the case with Tom Penaguin’s self-titled album released in 2024 and reviewed in these pages last year, an album of compositions and arrangements that astonished everyone who heard it and left listeners asking “where did this guy come from?” Beginnings is an archival release of demos from the pre-2020 timeframe that attempts to answer that question. Prior to his aforementioned debut release he did play with a couple different bands: in Djiin (a psychedelic rock band) as the band’s guitarist, and in Orgöne, an avant psych space-rock group, mostly in a production capacity, but Beginnings focuses on his development as a solo artist and self-contained multi-instrumentalist one-man band, playing guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, and whatever else the production requires, going back as early as 2012, when he was just a teenager on a sharp learning curve. What you hear on Beginnings was created during the years 2012-2020, and although it probably won’t top anything from his eponymous debut, it will answer a lot of questions about how he arrived there, and in fact it’s all quite excellent. “Hamburg’s Heaviest Pebble” is a sixteen-minute tour-de-force from 2020, the most recent piece on the album, and shows his interest in lengthy enveloping suites that are at once engaging and intense; one can easily tell that a lot of work went into it on every level. “Long Suite No.1” appears here twice, the 2013 version (twelve minutes-plus) was Penaguin’s first attempt at a ten-plus minute piece, bearing some basic resemblance to something that The Soft Machine might have come up with back in ‘69 — it’s okay to let your influences show, especially when you’re just starting out. “Long Suite No.1 – Five Years Later” is of course a full 2018 re-recording of it that shows an amazing amount of growth, both in the production and the arrangements, more engaging and energized, plus it’s about five minutes longer. The shorter pieces like “Two and a Half,” “The Tap Dancing Millipede Grew Tired,” “Several Clocks,” and “Ominous Bathtub in April,” from various points along that eight year timeline also have a lot to offer any discriminating listener.

Filed under: Archives, 2025 releases, 2020 recordings

Related artist(s): Tom Penaguin

More info
http://amarxe.bandcamp.com/album/beginnings

 

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