Emerson, Lake & Palmer must be the biggest group in the world. It's not just that all their albums are chart sensations. What really makes ELP a dinosaur potentate is the sheer scale of the noise they emit. With ELP we're swatted into the new age of totally Technologized Rock. This is robot music mixmastered by human modules who deserve purple hearts for managing to keep the gadgets' reined at all.

The sight of the massed ELP arsenal would chill the follicles off H.G. Wells. Synthesizers, donchaknow, up the bung: "keyboard wizard" Keith Emerson's has not only its requisite computer but very own TV set. Carl Palmer has the world's first synthesized drum kit, which (but natch) he himself conceived with p'raps a little help from Keith's personal friend Rob Moog (inventor of samenamed instrument). This martial array of percussion also includes a libertine bell and two Arthurian-table sized gongs upon which a Chinese dragon cavorts leering in phosphor. As for Greg Lake, he mostly just switches tween his guitar and bass, but he's got enough amplification behind them two mantas to blow the Pentagon to Patagonia.