Innehållsförteckning för Issue 135 från Prog

Located in Bergen, Norway, Apollon Records was founded in 2015 and has grown to be one of the country’s biggest independent record labels in less than a decade. Apollon is mostly genreless, and we work with all kinds of music, as long as we find it interesting enough. A lot of what we do can be filed under “progressive” and our current rostra includes Major Parkinson, Laughing Stock and Caligonaut. Scan here to download or follow the instructions on the right What’s on your free Apollon digital album Discovering Download the 21-track sampler from www.bit.ly/apollon_records 1 Caligonaut Emperor Taken from Magnified As Giants 2 Flying Norwegians Wounded Bird Taken from Wounded Bird 3 Professor Tip Top Shining Taken from Lanes Of Time 4 Ring Van Möbius The Möbius Ring Taken…

Peter Gabriel will tour the UK and Europe next year. The prog god’s 2023 outing, i/o The Tour, will mark his first shows in his home country and the continent since his two-year Back To Front Tour, which ran from 2012 and concluded in Dublin in December 2014. The 22-date tour will open on May 18 at the Tauron Arena in Krakow, Poland, with dates following in Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. The run is currently set to close with four UK shows in June: Birmingham’s Utilita Arena (17), The 02 in London (19), Glasgow’s OVO Hydro (22), Manchester’s AO Arena (23). The final date will be, once again, in Dublin, at the 3Arena on June 25. Gabriel’s core band will feature some of…

US progressive metal champions Periphery have been announced as the first headline act booked for the third Radar Festival, to take place in Manchester next summer. Also on the bill are British prog metallers Haken, who will be performing a set marking the 10th anniversary of their reputation-sealing 2013 album The Mountain. German post-rockers Long Distance Calling have also been named among the first raft of acts, as have Greek band Playgrounded, Germany’s Unprocessed, and guitarists Owane and Jack Gardiner. There will be 42 acts playing the three-day festival, which will be held from July 28-30 at The BEC Arena in Manchester. This is both a geographic leap and a step up in scale for this relatively new event, which in its two previous years was held in Guildford, Surrey. Haken…

Enigmatic post-rock duo Nordic Giants will be the Saturday headliners at next year’s Portals Festival, taking place in London over Saturday May 27 and Sunday 28. The venue for the 2023 event will be EartH in Hackney. This will be the fifth iteration of this proudly experimental music festival, with other acts on the bill including Belfast instrumentalists And So I Watch You From Afar, Korean avantgarde rockers Jambinai, Swedish post-rock group Ef, Bristol post-hardcore unit Svalbard, UK psych-doom band Elephant Tree and ambient post-rock act VLMV. Over 30 more performers will be announced in the run-up to the prog-friendly weekender, which is organised by Portals, a London-based promotions company that aims to “showcase new, exciting music to those of keen ear and enthusiatsic mind”. Their first festival was in 2018…

“When I was in uni around 2006, I had a mate who was into Porcupine Tree. I’d hear him playing their music and some songs stuck with me, like Trains and Blackest Eyes. Then I learned that Steven Wilson was at the core of that band, and there was this massive, rich back catalogue for me to go and dive into. Some of the early stuff is a little too out-there for me, but I liked a lot of stuff on Lightbulb Sun [2000] – fantastic, hooky songs like Four Chords That Made A Million and Shemovedon. I think In Absentia, Deadwing and Fear Of A Blank Planet are all masterpieces. I like the new one [Closure/Continuation] but, for me, those three albums are Porcupine Tree at their peak. A few…

“Here in Hungary prog’s not really that popular,” admits János Stefán, bassist and co-founder of Ghost Toast. “It’s mostly underground and, even then, it’s not ‘classic’ prog like Pink Floyd or Jethro Tull. Alternative rock and metal are currently the base of a lot of bands doing this kind of thing here.” In a sea of melodic rockers and Tool wannabes, Ghost Toast stand out. The quartet formed in 2008 in the town of Debrecen, and across their four albums to date they’ve become experts in polyrhythmic instrumental prog. On this year’s Shade Without Color, they blast out incalculable time signatures, the intricacy and lunacy interrupted by post-rock segues, cellos and samples. “When Ghost Toast started, we had the idea that we wouldn’t sound like anyone else,” says Stefán. “We didn’t…

MEYRICK DE LA Fuente exudes modesty as he admits he was only asked to fill in because an early iteration of Exist Immortal needed a clean vocalist for a college project done by Kurt Valencia (guitar) and David Billote (bass) in 2011. “I did one show, and I was like, ‘Okay, this is quite fun actually,’” he says. He goes on to explain that when his old band, Decodes, fell apart as the members matured, he was “adamant to not get a real job” and took the role of steering Exist Immortal after the original guitarist and drummer left. Finding himself suddenly at the forefront of the band, de la Fuente made the decision to deliberately guide the band away from its origins in technical death metal towards a more…

“One night, after our set at the Fiesta club in Stockton, one of the crowd came and knocked on our dressing room door. It was a man who said, ‘I’ve brought my wife for a night out and you’re the worst band I’ve seen in my life. You’re crap.’”John Lodge It’s 1966, and pop culture is in transformation. Fashion, art, spirituality and politics make up the UK’s Swinging 60s scene where societal norms are shifting and minds are expanding on a yearly, monthly and weekly basis. In the music world, boundaries are being busted thanks to acts such as The Beatles’ and The Beach Boys’ imaginative compositions and voracious appetite for new recording techniques and equipment. But one band in particular aren’t swinging. One band, who’d been riding the crest…

“I’m going back to the US, doing some gigs and a cruise, and then I’ve got some more gigs in Canada. But right now I’m doing some stuff in Italy with my recording partner, Alberto Parodi. We create for pleasure and something will always come from it. “The most important thing for me has been Living For Love, a new record that I’ve put out on BMG, that’s been the most important thing in my life. It goes back to being a teenager, living for love with hope and optimism. It’s a theme and a feeling I like; I’ve only ever done stuff from the heart, that turns me on. “During lockdown I was on YouTube making a Tuesday Afternoon series of performances with Alberto. That was great, I loved…

“It would be nice to do the Royal Albert Hall. There might only be about 100 people in there, but it would still be nice to do something there. You never know.”Christine Booth Forget eye of newt, toe of frog, wing of bat and tongue of dog, the magic ingredients in The White Witch – A Symphonic Trilogy were nagging and a restless hankering for something new. With their ninth studio record, Magenta have embraced the symphonic, crafting an album with an orchestra assembled from instruments both real and sampled to tell the story of witches through the ages. “I always get bored doing the same thing over and over again, really, so I wanted to try something a little different,” says Robert Reed, who wrote the music that’s accompanied…

For their second album, post-rockers VLMV, pronounced ‘Alma’, have taken a different tack. Their first record, Stranded, Not Lost, was a guitar-heavy affair that relied on loop pedals to build its ambient soundscapes. For all their richness and complexity, most of their songs were still playable by two musicians with guitars. “Writing-wise it started as a solo thing,” explains primary songwriter Pete Lambrou, “and I persuaded Ciaran [Morahan] to join, because I was always a fan of his screwdriver guitar-playing antics from [the pair’s other band] Codes In The Clouds. So I think he elevated the songs that were there. He turned them from maybe being a bit too wet into something a little bit darker, but certainly more interesting.” However, Ciaran has taken more of a back seat on…

Storytelling duo’s first film score is cinema unto itself. After stumbling across the records of a 19th-century seafarer hunting for treasure off the coast of an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, British surfer Matt Knight decided to continue his searching, but with a different aim. Along with his wife, Suzanne Hobbes, he traversed treacherous waters to find the mysterious location and the leviathan waves which crashed on its shores. Their dream was to surf the towering walls of water they had read about and the journey he embarked on has since been made into an award-winning documentary film, Savage Waters. “It‘s both grand and personal, more than a documentary score.” This immersive and inspiring soundtrack is a marvel of cinematic scope in its own right. Created by…

Finger-picking maestro goes multimedia. In what the progressively inclined folk guitarist has described as “the most significant and important project of my career thus far”, Gordon Giltrap’s new album with regular sidekick Paul Ward is billed as a “multimedia affair”. So not only have the pair made an 18-track record of instrumental compositions (bar one exception with spoken-word accompaniment), but they are also releasing a book of artwork and short stories to accompany Scattered Chapters, as well as a YouTube video on the creation of the project. “Threads of melody will win over all but the snootiest of fans.” The book, from the slightly naff handwriting font on the cover to names misspelt on the credits, has the feel of a self-release, and it proves a curious affair. It features…

Early 80s Crimson get the heavy duty vinyl reissue treatment. It’s hard to imagine now the impact and confusion that Discipline – the first album of this otherworldly early 80s King Crimson trilogy – would have caused among the fannish cognoscenti when Robert Fripp reanimated the group in 1981. Crimson had ‘ceased to exist’ in 1974 as their talismanic leader pursued his spiritual studies at Sherborne House, though when he did finally re-emerge with only Bill Bruford from the Red album line-up, the regenerated version bore very little resemblance to its lean and heavy predecessor. “Sounds like nothing else in the King Crimson canon.” Discipline, Beat and Three Of A Perfect Pair sound like nothing else in the progressive rock canon or the King Crimson canon for that matter; a…

Superior summary of spectacular talent. Bert Jansch’s influence is justly celebrated. His presence on the British folk scene from 1960 onwards as a solo artist and later, as one of folk-jazz supergroup Pentangle, led to him being in the line of artists that at one time were christened the ‘British Bob Dylan’. His influence on guitarists such as Jimmy Page, Mike Oldfield and Neil Young was enormous. Bert At The BBC is an eight-disc, 147-track overview gathering all Jansch’s existing material recorded for the BBC from 1966 onwards. Compiled chronologically, it offers glimpses as to how reverentially folk music was once treated, and no matter how disarming, Jansch only seemed truly comfortable when playing. All of his classics are here, including Blues Run The Game, Angie, Fresh As A Sweet…

Reissue of seven classic concerts from kosmische Berlin’s favourite sons. Back in the early part of this century, Tangerine Dream fans demonstrated what could be achieved with a little cooperation online. The Tangerine Tree collective brought together myriad bootlegged live recordings with the blessing of the band, cleaned them up, and then distributed them among themselves. Some were sanctioned for official release via Sanctuary, with the second volume in and 2004. Now this collection gets a re-release thanks to Cherry Red, and it still sounds like the future even 19 years further down the line. Bookending this collection are a legendary Nottingham show in 1976 and the memorial concert for German film auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1983, both keepers. There’s something palpable about the former show from of Froese,…

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Steven Wilson has curated a collection of songs representing the more forward-thinking side of music in the 1980s. Intrigue: Progressive Sounds In UK Alternative Music 1979-89 will be released on February 10 on Edsel/Demon, in a 58-track edition (four CDs or seven LPs) and 19-track, double vinyl LP. Along with some familiar names – Wire, XTC, Ultravox, Japan, Tears For Fears, Kate Bush, Twelfth Night and Cardiacs among them – Wilson also draws on some post-punk bands you might find in Prog’s ‘It’s Prog Jim’ column, such as Gang Of Four, The Durutti Column, TheSpecials, The Cure and A Certain Ratio. The Porcupine Tree star says that Intrigue is “my personally curated attempt to perhaps introduce any 80s-sceptics out there to the idea that conceptual thinking and ambition didn’t suddenly…

The Tangent’s new live release, Pyramids, Stars And Other Stories, is out on January 27 via InsideOut. Available as a triple vinyl collection and also a CD set, it draws on three concerts from various line-ups of Andy Tillison’s band. Captured in Germany in 2004, the Pyramids And Stars concert features The Flower Kings’ Roine Stolt and Jonas Reingold, as The Tangent play music from debut album The Music That Died Alone, released the year before. The other performances come from a 2011 bootleg recording of the band during a UK show in support of the COMM album, and a 2017 set featuring current members (including guitarist Luke Machin) in actioninthe US. “A triple live LP is the stuff of bucket lists,” Tillison enthuses. “I dreamed of doing one of…

“MY INTRODUCTION TO music wasn’t necessarily out of love,” Tim Henson confesses. “My mom had me on violin at age three and it was just something that I did, I didn’t really care for it.” It wasn’t until hearing rapper Bow Wow on a McDonald’s commercial when he was nine that Henson, born to a Chinese mother and American father, began liking music. By the end of high school he was hooked, religiously, on Animals As Leaders and Periphery, inspiring him to turn his lifelong friendship with schoolmate Scott LePage into a musical one. From them, the nucleus of Polyphia was conceived. “Scott and I grew up together,” says Henson, “but it wasn’t until we were in high school that we first jammed together. We only knew how to play…

“WE DON’T HAVE lyrics, but we still have songs,” says D_Drive guitarist Seiji of his band’s mantra. “Each member is an expressive person, so we always play with the same emotion that a singer would.” For Seiji, guitar playing is an all-consuming love affair born from teenage lust and threaded right through his life and career. “I came across an acoustic folk guitar in junior high school when I was 13, which made me crazy for the guitar,” he remembers. “There were no instructors in our town so I had to teach myself. Six months later, I played in front of an audience for the first time: That was the moment I knew that I wanted to be an artist.” Fittingly, Seiji then became a guitar instructor to help others…

INSPIRED BY THE harsh Icelandic landscape, theremin virtuoso Hekla entrances listeners with her haunting second album, Xiuxiuejar, her music takes on an eerie quality, drawing listeners into a dark and unsettling world. “The album’s title comes from the Catalan word to whisper,” Hekla Magnúsdóttir begins, “but the music was January-inspired. There is no sunlight in Iceland in January, so it’s not very cheerful.” The album’s 10 tracks employ a range of sounds but the haunting tone of the theremin sings throughout. Hekla’s music tells a captivating story, transporting listeners from a peaceful place into a world of nightmares. “I wrote [opener] The Whole first and it became the theme of the album,” she explains. “The song wraps my voice at the start with His [a monster] at the end in…

Back in the technologically primitive days of the mid-20th century, the musique concrète movement was truly revolutionary. It was instigated by engineer and musicologist Pierre Schaeffer and his colleagues at Club D’Essai, a studio based within Radio-diffusion-Télévision Française (aka RTF), France’s national broadcasting agency, in the 40s. Based on the premise that sounds could be collected, manipulated and turned into music using the nascent recording technology of the era, musique concrète was an intrinsically progressive endeavour, and one that has had a profound and enduring impact on music of all stripes. For Jean-Michel Jarre, Schaeffer and his most notable collaborator and composer Pierre Henry are the starting point for everything that he has conjured from his machines over the last 50 years. Notably, Henry was Jarre’s mentor during his studies…

Autumn is upon us. The clouds are gathering, the breeze is picking up and the air is pregnant with a tangible moisture. And in a central London beer garden one weekday morning, Prog has just sat down with art-rock duo Sweet Billy Pilgrim to discuss Somapolis, their latest release, which is based around vignettes from an imaginary city. Just as the album has a keen sense of place, the recording of our conversation is intermittently drowned out by police sirens, passing binmen and the squawk of scavenging pigeons. Teaspoons clink on porcelain, cigarette papers rustle and a lighter clicks unreliably as three coffees are placed on the table in front of us, while Tim Elsenburg and Jana Carpenter relax into telling the tale of how, and why, they followed up…

I think I’m going to die! My heart is beating so fast it’s almost certain to burst through my chest, leaving a messy sea of bodily effluent all over the floor of Oslo Airport, while my brain, currently struggling to process even the tiniest item of information, joins it, dribbling grey matter out my ears, nose and eyes… No. I’m certain I’m going to die. I’m gasping for breath, while a torrent of sweat cascades down my face and back that would give Niagara Falls a run for its spume and spray. Prog has just run further and faster than since school, some 40 years ago. And, as we slump forlornly in our seat at Gate 10 at Gardermoen, and the walls close in around us, the reason for our…

It’s time again for the Prog magazine writers’ albums of the year. As always, the criteria for the main list is that the album has to be a new studio release and reviewed in the magazine over the last 12 months. Here, then, are the results. We look forward to reading your thoughts… “A big thank you to the writers of Prog Magazine for voting Closure/Continuation their album of the year! It was a long time coming, but we feel we managed to remain faithful to our past while also taking the PT sound into some new areas. It was a joy to make, so it’s been fantastic to see it going down so well.”Porcupine Tree 1 PORCUPINE TREE CLOSURE/CONTINUATION (MUSIC FOR NATIONS) WE SAID: “The DNA of their classic…

Gordon Giltrap is one of the most respected and influential guitarists of his generation. Ritchie Blackmore has proclaimed him “One of the best acoustic players in the world” and even Jimmy Page has cited him as a major influence. Born in 1948, Giltrap became a highly regarded teenage singer-song-writer and guitarist on the London folk circuit, signing to the Transatlantic label and releasing his self-titled debut in 1968. By his third album, 1971’s A Testament Of Time, arranger Del Newman’s strings had given his work a more orchestral feel and after Giltrap (1973) he switched from being the lead singer to making instrumental music. Although a latecomer to progressive rock, Giltrap made his name in that genre – and proved that it was not killed off by punk – by…

Doomsters no more, US longhairs embrace the cosmic. Elder leave no room for doubt as to their evolving musical intentions with Innate Passage. The band came from the US stoner/doom scene but with 2019’s The Gold & Silver Sessions and 2020’s Omens, they voyaged further out into the waters of psychedelic rock and prog. With their sixth full-length album, they have the wind in their sails, embracing their most expansive instincts. “With five tracks, it’s a case of quality over quantity.” Innate Passage marks the Massachusetts band’s second album with drummer Georg Edert, cementing the line-up with Nick DiSalvo on vocals and guitar, Mike Risberg (who joined in 2017) on guitars and keys, and bassist Jack Donovan. The album has a natural, open sound without any of the suffocating compression…

FALL INTO THE SUN AND EXPLODE FOREVER (chemicalmother.bandcamp.com) is the second LP from Chemical Mother. As the all-caps in the title hints, the band have taken the post-prog, mathcore intensity of their first album and somehow managed to shift up a gear. Where their debut Hypnic Detour was a math-prog workout with a lo-fi, garage rock feel to it, FALL… is sleeker. There’s a more psychedelic feel to the drums and nods to art-metal with the guitars. Listeners who want to dive straight in at the deep end should try And Etcetera or A Rainbow Smeared. For something more ethereal, by their standards anyway, check out Pause To Doze or You And I Are Eternally Strangers. Swedish post-rockers EF are back after four years of silence with We Salute You,…

Prolific Norwegian jazz guitar great amps up the ambition. In 2020 the London Jazz Festival replaced its normal programming with a series of pandemic-friendly livestreams. Amid the YouTube performances, the première of Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad’s Maternity Beat – filmed at the Molde Jazz Festival in Norway that July – was truly something to behold. There was an actual crowd in attendance, which seemed like some sort of miracle, but there was also an amplified breadth to Mollestad’s new material, as if the enforced claustrophobia of lockdown had forced her to expand her music upwards and outwards. “Frequently exhilarating, occasionally terrifying, and ultimately rewarding.” Nothing’s quite that simple, of course. Maternity Beat – written with Mollestad’s experience as a mother in mind – began to take shape in 2019, and…

Classical frolics and swinging reimaginings on vinyl reissue of 2004 live set. Ian Anderson had never been shy about later with Jethro Tull – The String Quartets in 2017. What’s surprising about The Orchestral Jethro Tull – recorded live in December 2004, and previously issued on here as a double vinyl album – is the absence of Martin Barre, as this predates Tull’s temporary dissolution in 2012. Instead, Anderson is joined by guitarist Florian Opahle, who would reformed without Barre in 2017, alongside drummer James Duncan, bassist David Goodier and keyboard/accordion player John O’Hara. And not forgetting the Frankfurt Neue Philharmonie Orchestra. Anderson takes a different approach to most symphonic rock albums. Many of the arrangements in the first half of the programme make scant use of the orchestra and…

Icelanders’ most cryptic cascades return two decades on. Sometimes now referred to by band members as ‘The Brackets Album’ or ‘The Untitled Album’, the record named by means of parentheses is every journalist’s nightmare to type. What reviewers did love about the third Sigur Rós album, upon its 2002 release, was the record itself, with one American publication claiming it had “the depth, resonance and humanity of a Brueghel landscape”. Its 20th anniversary is marked by a Ted Janson remaster and the addition of five demo versions and B-sides. These rough workings aren’t massively different to those which made the cut: it’d be a hardcore fan who found any radical twists other than a track being played slightly shorter or longer. Their value lies in confirming that the Icelanders knew…

The erstwhile Ms Driscoll’s neglected gem rediscovered. It’s slightly puzzling to reflect on why Julie Tippetts’ name isn’t better known among fans of 70s progressive music. A few years before her solo debut 1969, she had fronted a landmark hit of the late 60s. Maybe the fact that the song in question, a cover of Dylan’s This Wheel’s On Fire, stormed the charts as Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity, is a clue: under her married name her profile was – perhaps deliberately – not maintained. In some ways that’s a shame because her second solo album, from 1975, is a seductive affair, drawing on the jazz stylings she had been exploring with Auger and as a session singer for the likes of Robert Wyatt, Carla Bley and with…

VENUE EVENTIM APOLLO, LONDON DATE 30/09/2022 What’s the saying, better late than never? Half a year after its release, Marillion finally get to play their acclaimed An Hour Before It’s Dark live. Not even a royal death – which briefly pressed the pause button on the tour’s opening night – can break the spell of this Dark magic. Stepping out of the shadow of F.E.A.R. was always going to be a near impossible task, and, in that way, Marillion have made themselves an incredibly hard act to follow. But as F.E.A.R. decried these times and still managed to blossom beautifully live, so too does An Hour Before It’s Dark ring ominously out like a bloody, oddly alluring beacon that reminds you that help might be coming, but nothing’s guaranteed. Not least as…

PLAY ON! I always look forward to my new copy of Prog magazine. I love opening it to discover new bands, new sounds or reminders of old memories. It was such a shame that I came across Barry Smith’s email [Time For A Rethink?, Prog 134]. It really brought me down. I respect his right to have a point of view and obviously he’s more musically minded than both Steve Hackett and Steve Howe. Curiously, though I haven’t noticed any music composed, performed and promoted by Barry over the last 50 years. I did wonder, however, what he hoped to achieve: did he want Prog to castigate these poor-quality musicians? Does he advocate that they should retire and stop? I have just started an internet radio show and suddenly everyone…

Barely a year after the release of their Caravans To The Outer Worlds EP, Norwegian progressive metallers Enslaved have announced their next long-player: Heimdal will be released on February 17 through Nuclear Blast. The seven-song collection is a concept album inspired by and named after the Norse god that guards the mythical Bifröst bridge. It’s also intended to belatedly celebrate the 30th anniversary of Enslaved’s formation, in 1991. “We couldn’t do much last year in terms of fooling around with birthday cakes and eating them off each other’s faces,” Enslaved’s guitarist, co-founder and songwriter Ivar Bjørnson jokes, “so it seemed like a good idea to just make an album instead.” Enslaved started up in Haugesund, and over the last four decades and 15 albums they’ve dabbled in post-rock, psychedelic, folk,…

Former Sound Of Contact members Simon Collins and Kelly Nordstrom continue their long-standing partnership with their new band, Emolecule. Their debut record, The Architect, releases on InsideOut on February 10, and Collins describes it as a “dynamic, left-field album.” “It’s hard to nail it down to one genre,” he tells Prog. “We’ve co-written a lot of music together over the years, but this is on a different level.” The pair first met 18 years ago when working on Collins’ second solo album, Time For Truth, and The Architect will be the fifth record they’ve worked on together. “What we each bring to the table is very different,” Collins explains. “Kelly brought in a lot of the progressive metal side of things, which I love, and I came up with a…

Swedish dark prog quintet Katatonia will release their 12th studio album, Sky Void Of Stars, on January 20. The LP is their first with Napalm Records, and contains more concise songwriting than their previous material, according to the band. “This new album is very straight-to-the-point,” singer and composer Jonas Renkse tells Prog. “It’s pretty upfront for us, and there are a lot of songs on this album that will go down well live. I think, subconsciously, I wrote this kind of material because of the lack of touring during Covid. I think there was a longing to get back on stage.” However, the frontman’s quick to add that the music is “still experimental, with a lot of progressive stuff. I usually write all the drums and our drummer [Daniel Moilanen]…

TEENAGE ENGINEERING PO-80 A few years back we featured a cute compact record cutter that produced neat little 5” vinyl discs on a budget. Japanese in origin, it was, we said, due to land on UK and US shores imminently, but that turned out to be a little optimistic. It’s here now though, having been taken under the wing of Swedish synth wizards Teenage Engineering. Bright orange in hue, it might look like a kids toy, but under-12s are apparently not to mess with it for some reason. We’re also told that the 5” discs it cuts are “ultra lo-fi”, which makes a change from being told about vinyl’s supposed “warmth”. www.teenage.engineering GUITAR PEDAL LPS Nobody has ever wished that a vinyl LP was also a guitar pedal, or vice…

(ZTT/Island, 1984) If there were awards given for high-concept messing about (which sadly there aren’t) then a clutch of them would have been scooped by the ZTT label around the years 1983-85. Records by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda, Anne Pigalle and Grace Jones came complete with absurdly luxurious production, grandiose packaging and impenetrable sleeve notes, which were either infuriatingly pretentious or highly intriguing, depending on your point of view (and possibly how old you were). The most glorious example of this nonsense came courtesy of The Art Of Noise, a studio collective which then featured Gary Langan, JJ Jeczalik, Anne Dudley and producer Trevor Horn. Langan was a sound engineer on Yes’ album 90125, and recalled how drummer Alan White’s kit was set up to create a sound that…

What got us all grooving this month… Take a break from all the busyness of the festive season with this month’s creative competition prize, which contains four items that celebrate the work of sci-fi and fantasy artist Rodney Matthews. For more than 50 years, he’s been behind some of prog and rock’s iconic album covers, and we’ve got a bundle of goodies themed around some of them to give away to one lucky reader. Piece together his vibrant artwork for three classic covers – Asia’s Arena and Aqua, and Eloy’s Time To Turn – with these 500-piece jigsaws from Black Crow Puzzles. They’ve been manufactured to gatefold LP size so can be stored among your vinyl collection when not in use. But that’s not all, because we also have a…

“Days Of Future Passed is when we realised, ‘Hey, record artwork is really important.’ It was done by David Anstey from Decca, and we had a meeting in the pub to tell him what our songs were about, but had no say in what was going on the cover. Looking at it, there’s some smudges and stuff and a funny interpretation that was a rather odd thing that the Decca art department did, where it was kind of meant to be psychedelic. We were inspired by Holst’s The Planets suite and The Zodiac by Cosmic Sounds, but for me, with Days… there was just too much stuff going on. “We knew an artist called Phil Travers from Decca’s art department, who hadn’t worked on Days Of Future Passed. But we…

Despite what the old cliché suggests, there’s an awful lot to be said for meeting your heroes. After introducing themselves to the world with their glacially beautiful debut Flown, written during the lockdown of 2020, recorded in remote isolation, and released digitally and independently, Norwegian art-rock trio Dim Gray impressed Big Big Train enough to find themselves on the road throughout Europe in support of the international collective, learning the ropes, getting a feel for the whole tour machine, and serving an apprenticeship that has set them on the path to explore and ensnare their own grand ambitions. Today, as they log on to Zoom from their respective homes in Oslo, Oskar Holldorff (vocals, keyboards), Håkon Høiberg (guitars, vocals) and Tom Ian Klungland (drums, vocals), are still buzzing from the…

Possibly the greatest myth surrounding rock, pop and all points in between is that music moves in a strictly demarcated linear fashion with distinct boundaries and cut-off points. Indeed, these are the narratives that push the notion that established musical ideas and forms become obsolete the moment the Next Big Thing arrives. But as anyone with a keen eye on popular culture will attest, the development is more akin to the flow of a powerful river; while it moves ahead towards the sea, it contains within it currents, tides and patterns of flow that frequently overlap and mingle without one, single dominant force at play. So it is that there are those whose ideas might be out of kilter with prevailing trends or even looking several generations ahead. Ergo Bill…

“We’re comfortable in our own shoes. We’re not trying to be something we’re not or do what other people think we should do.”Stu Nicholson An autumn mid-afternoon finds Galahad vocalist Stu Nicholson and keyboardist Dean Baker in a reflective mood. Nicholson is the Dorset-based band’s sole ever-present. While the singer has toiled away in the Galahad trenches since 1985, Baker is comparatively a mere stripling, having served only since 1997. Galahad are not far shy of their 40th anniversary and their new album, The Last Great Adventurer, is their 11th studio release (not including the scores of tapes they issued earlier in their career). It’s a record that largely belies not only their longevity but also their early 1980s roots. Following in the wake of early 80s prog bands such…

prog.reviews@futurenet.com Never underestimate the amount of willpower required to keep a band in touch with the muse. Money helps, of course, but without the spark, the vision and the drive to engage in the creative act that transforms ideas into actual dots on paper or real sound punctuating the air, there’s little else to prevent any long-lived band to become a walking, talking, all-singing ghost in the greatest hits machine. Consider then, the reserves and effort needed to maintain the pulse and credibility of one of progressive music’s most unlikely cohorts. Having created a new genre in the shape of Zeuhl and bringing along legions of devoted fans through all its numerous changes, Christian Vander has been Magma’s brooding heart for 50 years. In more recent times, his dark charisma…

Further explorations in modern music from stalwart British proggers. As both veterans of the 80s British neo-prog wave and keen adopters of elements of more modern pop and rock music, Galahad have enjoyed a productive few years. This, their 11th full studio album, follows in the wake of 2018’s Seas Of Change – given that the latter was so widely well-received and hailed by some as one of their best albums, the bar is set quite high. “Thoughtful subject matter and focused performances.” With the core band still intact from Seas Of Change and the addition of bassist Mark Spencer (Twelfth Night/Alan Reed), The Last Great Adventurer explores familiar Galahad musical territory. There’s powerful, anthemic rock with a contemporary slant in opener Alive and the title track, both of which…

The Welsh band strike up the orchestra on album nine. Robert Reed has a proven ear for symphonic arrangements beyond standard rock boundaries. Magenta aside, look no further than his Mike Old-field-channelling Sanctuary series, or Beneath The Waves, the sole album from his Kompendium project. For Magenta’s ninth album he’s gone all in: The White Witch – A Symphonic Trilogy is an orchestral suite, with performances from a handful of classical musicians sweetening Reed’s ambitious arrangements, painstakingly composed in his studio using state-of-the-art orchestral sample libraries. “The arrangements are grand in sweep, rich in dynamics.” Opener Sacrifice is a 22-minute remounting of The White Witch from Magenta’s 2001 debut album, Revolutions. Here, a medieval white witch called Sarah heals villagers throughout the plague- and war-riddled 17th century, using herbs and…

Somnambulant, ambient 2014 set reissued on vinyl. While his profile as a comic actor on TV series such as The IT Crowd, Toast Of London and What We Do In The Shadows has risen over the past decade and a half, so has Matt Berry’s work as a quietly prolific and versatile singer-songwriter. But while he has dabbled in bucolic folk, chamber pop, psychedelia and even covers of TV themes, on this 2014 album he opted to put down the mic for what he’s described as a tribute to his analogue synth-wielding heroes from the 70s. As the title suggests, it’s also dedicated to “insomnia sufferers everywhere”, and this two-track album periodically offers a soundtrack to sweet dreams. But given the restless nature of Berry’s mind, it’s unlikely to provide…

Two releases from two incarnations of the adventurous outfit. While there are plenty of big-name bands around that still fight the good fight with no founding members left on board, it’s rare to find one who changed 100 per cent of their line-up within two years of forming – let alone one who then went on to find great success in their subsequent incarnation. But Renaissance managed it, with the result that their newly reissued, self-titled debut album, originally released in 1969, and the also repackaged Azure d’Or made in 1979 at the peak of their commercial success, are essentially the work of two different bands. The music within, however, does have some key qualities in common. “The same in name only, but both worthy of investigation.” Keith Relf and…

Four-disc box celebrating the diversity of one of prog’s pivotal years. There’s always going to be friendly disagreement about which year in music stands out as being especially emblematic of a particular movement or creative watershed, the beauty being largely in the ear of the beholder. What’s not in dispute, however, is how enjoyable these year-themed compilations are, acting at one level as persuasive advocates for their chosen 12 months, and also as vivid reminders of the rapidity of musical evolution. “The unifying force is the willingness to push expectations.” The five hours gathered over these four discs in which Family, Traffic, Curved Air, ELP, Caravan, Yes, Greenslade, Man, Procol Harum, and many others of a progressive persuasion are all the more remarkable considering that only 10 years previously The…

VENUE THE O2 ARENA, LONDON DATE 14/10/2022 Roxy Music may well be regarded as second only to David Bowie in the influencer stakes but that margin was always separated by only the thinnest of rolling papers. And while Bowie finally broke through in 1972 after years of reinvention with his fifth album, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, Roxy Music – who released their eponymous debut album on the very same day – arrived fully formed with a manifesto and aesthetic wholly their own. Moreover, with guitarist Phil Manzanera sporting his bug-eyed glasses, Brian Eno’s outrageous feather boas, singer Bryan Ferry resembling a 50s greaser emerging from an explosion in a glitter factory flanked by sequined saxophonist Andy Mackay and drummer Paul Thompson, this was an…