Innehållsförteckning för Issue 148 från Prog

Legendary proggers Pallas have been purveying their unique brand of powerful melodic progressive rock since the late 70s all the way through to their current tour de force, The Messenger. On Bandcamp, they have curated a comprehensive set of digital downloads that include demos, rough mixes and live versions of material from their formation through to exclusive releases of their most recent albums. This exclusive sampler features a unique insight into the development of the band with tracks taken from many of these digital albums. On it, Pallas showcase demo versions and rough mixes of tracks from the Arrive Alive and The Sentinel periods right through to Messenger MegaMix from their latest album, The Messenger, which is out now on CD and digital download. Scan here to download or follow…

Oliver Wakeman has teamed up with vocalist Hayley Griffiths and Nightwish’s Troy Donockley for his first solo album in almost 20 years. Released on May 17 via Spirit Of Unicorn Music, the celtic-inspired Anam Cara is the first LP to be billed under the keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist’s name since 2005’s Mother’s Ruin. It follows collaborations with the likes of Gordon Giltrap, Rodney Matthews (on the Trinity project) and Arena/Pendragon keyboard player Clive Nolan, as well as a stint in Yes between 2008 and 2011. “I see it as a sort of spiritual sequel to The Three Ages Of Magick [his 2001 collaboration with Yes guitarist Steve Howe], even though it’s a completely different type of record,” Wakeman tells Prog. “On that one I used whistles and a violinist and…

Damo Suzuki, former lead singer for pioneering German band Can, has died of cancer at the age of 74. His passing was confirmed on February 10 on Can’s social media pages. He had been fighting colon cancer for a decade and had been given a 10 per cent chance of survival. “It is with great sadness that we have to announce the passing of our wonderful friend Damo Suzuki, yesterday, Friday 9 February, 2024,” the post read. “His boundless creative energy has touched so many over the whole world, not just with Can, but also with his all-continents spanning Network Tour. Damo’s kind soul and cheeky smile will be forever missed. He will be joining Michael [Karoli], Jaki [Liebezeit] and Holger [Czukay] for a fantastic jam!” Born Kenji Suzuki in…

Six By Six return with their“harder kicking” second album, Beyond Shadowland on April 16 after the supergroup shrugged off worries about a difficult second album. Following on from the 2022’s well-received selftitled debut, keyboardist/vocalist Robert Berry says the three-pice, completed by Saga guitarist Ian Crichton and Saxon drummer, Nigel Glockler, became a stronger unit through heightened collaboration. “When the band got put together, the chemistry worked right off. It was magical. So, the hardest thing was thinking about the success of the first album,” Berry reveals. “The only parameter was to not make the same album again, retain who we are and we move it forward. The big change was that Nigel brought some songs in. I wish I could say that we learned a lot and we struggled a…

Over the first five years of the new millennium, Coldplay went from nobodies to one of the world’s biggest rock bands. Naturally, they were expected to continue cranking out radio-friendly hits with their fourth album, but instead, they sought to separate themselves from their opening trio of albums by enlisting the left-field production talents of Brian Eno. From their flirtations with Afropop and tribal rhythms to immersive electronic ambience and patient song structures, his sonic fingerprints are all over the record. Interestingly, Chris Martin’s vocals don’t often sit as icing on top of this sonic cake. Rather, they’re buried in among its reverbsoaked sponge, giving it an almost psych-rock flavour. Each song is allowed to rest and rise in its own time, rather than rush to that first chorus –…

“Phaedra is of the greatest importance,” says Edgar Froese’s widow, Bianca Froese-Acquaye. “It was a groundbreaking album in every respect: it opened up a completely new sound experience for the listeners, broke old listening habits, heralded a new musical genre and opened the door to a world career.” The artist, author and painter, who was married to Tangerine Dream’s founder for 13 years until his death in 2015, and now manages the current incarnation of the band, also co-authored Edgar’s comprehensive 2017 autobiography, Force Majeure. She isn’t surprised that Phaedra’s popularity has endured for so long. It marked, she says, “a listening experience of the extraterrestrial kind. And even today, the music with its sequences, rhythms and melodies sounds so incredibly unique and timeless that it is almost impossible to…

With two new albums released in recent months and plenty in progress, it’s safe to say Bill Nelson remains, at 75, as inspired and prolific as ever. One reason for this may be that he came from a devotedly musical family. “The day I was born, December 18, 1948, my mum was starting to go into labour, but knew my dad had a gig at the town hall in Wakefield for the Lord Mayor’s Christmas Ball,” he chuckles. “So she didn’t tell my dad she’d started – it was an important gig for him and she knew he’d not go. She packed him off to the gig, and only then called the midwife!” “I don’t perform live any more because of health issues, but recording I can still manage to…

“I’ve already learned so much from this album through writing and recording it, and it’s been such a wonderful guide for me. I look forward to what else it has to teach me.” Chelsea Wolfe began work on the harrowingly beautiful She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She back in 2020, when she and her band were unable to get together in person to write. “We sent ideas back and forth and the songs began to collage together,” she explains. “And as time went on we were eventually able to gather together to finish the demos.” Despite the album’s construction beginning in 2020, it wasn’t until early 2022 that Wolfe and her band managed to get into the studio with producer Dave Sitek (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bat For…

It’s a frigid January when Prog video-calls Ihsahn. Outside, our hometown of London is enduring a particularly harsh winter, with temperatures hovering below freezing and ferocious winds only strengthening the bite of the chill in the air. However, we’re on the phone with a progressive metal musician who’s lived his whole life in Norway: we don’t get any sympathy. “It’s around 0˚C?” Ihsahn asks rhetorically, sat in his home while wearing a jet-black turtleneck jumper. “That’s springtime!” Ihsahn grew up looking the extreme potential of Norwegian nature dead in the face. When standing right outside the farm he was raised on in the rural town of Notodden, he could see snow-capped mountains and icecold rivers. Indoors, he spent most of his time shielded from the elements playing piano and guitar,…

In 2008, drummer Chester Thompson was honoured with the Sabian Lifetime Achievement Award by American body the Percussive Arts Society to mark a career that began in Baltimore in the 60s when he was in his early teens. He honed his skills playing along to jazz records and went on to formally study flute, percussion and composition. He was about to embark upon a four year degree course but instead joined Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention in 1973, reckoning, “Well, this is what I’m trying to get ready for anyway.” Thompson played on a number of albums, including Roxy & Elsewhere (1974), One Size Fits All (1975) and Bongo Fury (1975). He left Zappa to join Weather Report, with whom he recorded Black Market (1976). Around this time, Weather…

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US progressive/electronic duo Zombi will release their next full-length album, Direct Inject, via Relapse Records on March 22. The follow-up to 2020 (issued in 2020) and mini-album Liquid Crystal (2021) was written in a more collaborative and spontaneous way than its immediate predecessors, thanks to the end of the pandemic. “This album was good because we were able to sit down in the same room and just roll tape, play and dissect it all after,” drummer Anthony Paterra tells Prog. “2020 and Liquid Crystal, those were done composing on our own, sending ideas back and forth. Steve [Moore, synth/bass] writes something, I put drums to it, maybe I add something else – that whole file-sharing kind of set-up.” Direct Inject’s title is an homage to the improvisational spirit that Zombi…

Finnish prog metal act Wheel return with their third album, Charismatic Leaders, which promises to be their angriest and most “out there” recording yet. Releasing on May 3 via InsideOutMusic, it finds the band with plenty to say. “Over the past few years, cult leaders have been appearing in the strangest ways,” says guitarist/vocalist James Lascelles of the record’s loose lyrical concept. “We see them wherever there’s a subset of followers and an ideology, and they a huge impact on today’s society.” From searing rage at Rupert Murdoch (Empire) to helplessly watching disaster unfold on the other side of the world (The Freeze), the follow-up to 2021’s Resident Human is iced with an outraged freneticism. “Empire is me venting my frustrations at the world,” Lascelles says. “It repeatedly finds new ways…

Nick Beggs – bassist and vocalist with prog fusion supergroup Trifecta – has given an insight into the creative process behind the band’s second album, The New Normal, which is released through Kscope on April 12. “I’ve got a list of titles of songs to be written and I’m always adding to them,” he tells Prog. “I went, ‘Oh yeah! I haven’t said nearly enough about stroboscopic fennel.’ And it went on like that. I just picked the titles and before we knew where we were in a worrying cul-de-sac. I said to the guys [keyboardist Adam Holzman and drummer Crag Blundell], ‘I don’t know if the record label are going to go for this because this [new music] is just too weird.’ And do you know what? I think it’s…

I first heard Hawkwind when I was at school and Silver Machine came up on my radar. That was just the most unlikely hit from a band that’s not meant to have a hit. I don’t know who was more surprised: them or their audience! And suddenly they’d made it, which did bring about additional pressures; you could trace Lemmy’s eventual exit from the band because of that massive hit. They just seemed like a gonzoid version of glam rock: how would you know about underground squat culture and free festivals growing up in Blackpool when you’re 11 years old? But there was always a clutch of older kids you’d get the bus to school with who wore green or blue army greatcoats and they’d write the names of the…

If anything has come to define Finnish prog metallers Psychework, then it has to be the undercurrent of optimism that runs through their music. Across three albums – The Dragon’s Year (2016), Karelian Hills (2018) and 2023’s Spark Of Hope – the sextet of singer Antony Parviainen, guitarists J-V Hintikka and Juha Takanen, Otto Närhi (keyboards), Konsta Vehkala (drums) and bassist Ville Koskinen have constantly come up victorious despite circumstances having the potential to dictate a very different outcome. Hailing from the south-central city of Jyväskylä, Psychework formed following the split of Parviainen and Hintikka’s former band, Machine Man. “I got really sick with leukemia,” says Parviainen, “and when I was in hospital, I got the idea for the new band. I called J-V and asked him what he thought about…

The Pineapple Thief’s latest album, It Leads To This, was described by our reviewer as “a classy and very sombre collection”, but don’t just take our word for it: we’ve got a copy of the very limited, deluxe four-disc set to give away to one lucky reader this month. In addition to the studio album – the story of which you can read all about on p40 of this issue – the set contains the bonus CD Y Aqui Estamos, which contains alternate versions of all the tracks. You’ll also get a Blu-ray and DVD containing Bruce Soord’s 5.1 stereo mixes of both the original and bonus albums, and it’s all packaged with an exclusive 52-page book giving you the chance to experience the art-proggers’ 25th-anniversary release in style. To…

A two-time Grammy Award nominee, composer Steve Roach is one of the most influential ambient artists working today. In 2023, he was personally invited to join the current line-up of Tangerine Dream onstage for two dates of their North American tour. He’d been a fan since the band’s earliest days. “As a young guy,” he says, “I was already immersing myself in those long-form pieces that so many of us connected to in the 70s. It had such a feeling of mystery. The allure of it was just fascinating. There’s an expansiveness that affects your consciousness. It was something you imbibed.” Roach cites Phaedra as a particular landmark. “It’s one of the pillars of electronic music. I think the fact that it was coming out when it did and it…

It’s 11am and mayhem on the other side of the Zoom call. Tuning in from the former’s home studio in Buckinghamshire, Adam Wakeman and Damian Wilson are in fits of giggles, fauxbickering, and have set up an elaborate show for this interview where Wakeman asks if he can move Wilson’s acoustic guitar as he’s concerned about its preservation, which he then picks up and tumbles onto, behind Wilson, with much comedy clanging. Wilson, meanwhile, has a radio cassette-player that he’s fiddling with and keeps pressing play on a tape titled The Best Of Rick Wakeman, a prop for upcoming live shows that’s designed to irk his bandmate. Prog is having flashbacks. At Cropredy in 2019 the duo were postshow and tiddly, this interviewer playing a Mary Poppins role in bringing…

“For me, a good gig is when I can look out and see a grown man crying one minute, and then with a big smile on his face a few minutes later.”Greg Spawton One night in Germany, during Big Big Train’s last tour, Greg Spawton found himself in the middle of his own audience. Bandmate Nick D’Virgilio had suggested they spice things up by taking their usual pre-show ritual to the fans – quite literally. For Spawton, a softly spoken man with a house full of history books and a career spent largely in studios, it was the latest in a series of unexpected turns: Gigs across the world; a record deal with progressive super-label InsideOutMusic; the recruitment of a singer from Italian prog royalty PFM, who became a creative…

It can feel a little clichéd when a band, returning with a new album, cite it as their best work yet. Yet, after a decade and a half of writing progressively angular but lofted, pop-iced compositions, Chicagoan quintet District 97 can’t be accused of such lazy marketing tactics with Stay For The Ending. From its glinted production to Leslie Hunt’s stunning vocals and the record’s deft balance between accessibility and adventure, their fifth album finds the band reaching lofty new levels. So, what has changed? “We’ve been listening to some of the feedback that we’ve gotten thus far having been together for 15 years,” says Hunt. “Our fans have been excited for us to explore our less technical side more, and that’s resounding feedback. It allowed us to bring in…

When It Bites folded in 1990, Francis Dunnery quickly left his own past behind him. But this supremely gifted, mercurial and sometimes perplexing musician’s initial dismissiveness and coolness towards his former band didn’t last. A brief reunion in 2003 came to nothing, leaving his ex-bandmates to continue with replacement singer John Mitchell, but Dunnery began introducing their songs into his solo sets and, from 2009’s There’s A Whole New World onwards, sporadically re-recorded their songs under his own name. With the future of the Mitchell-fronted It Bites unclear, a gap opened up in the market, to be filled by It Bites FD. They made their recorded debut on 2023’s Live From The Black Country double live album, though Dunnery has since dispensed with all of the musicians who played on…

VENUE 229, LONDON DATE 01/02/2024 A few songs into tonight’s show, keyboardist Ryo Okumoto takes the microphone. Alongside his consummate musical skills, Okumoto is equally known for his showmanship and zaniness. Indeed, tonight he has already unleashed a couple of dazzling solos and been air drumming enthusiastically when otherwise unoccupied. The audience await Okumoto’s announcement, perhaps expecting a quip. But when he speaks, he does so somewhat wistfully, introducing his stage manager son Sage and recalling Spock’s Beard’s June 2001 show at London’s celebrated and long since demolished Astoria venue. That night Spock’s seemed on the cusp of a significant commercial breakthrough. But, of course, within months Neal Morse departed and what had previously resembled an inexorable upwards trajectory came to an abrupt halt. That Spock’s endure almost 23 years later…

Prog supergroup Transatlantic have announced what is allegedly their final record. Live At Morsefest 2022: The Absolute Whirlwind comes out via InsideOutMusic on April 26. Available as a limited five-CD and two-Blu-ray artbook, the album contains both of the band’s sets from their own Morsefest event in 2022 and weighs in with almost four-and-a-half hours of music. Enthusing about the release, drummer Mike Portnoy says, “This release of Transatlantic at Morsefest 2022 represents the most epic and mammoth of all Transatlantic’s live releases. Two nights, two completely different sets, two Transatlantic concept albums done in their entirety and accompanied with strings, horns, percussion and female vocals. We’ve always been about ‘more is never is enough’, but this is the ultimate live Transatlantic experience.” See www.transatlanticweb.com.…

Emerson, Lake & Palmer drummer Carl Palmer is to have a career-spanning box set released through BMG on April 5. Fanfare For The Common Man will be available on a three-CD and one-Blu-ray set. The new anthology explores Palmer’s time as one-third of ELP, but also stretches back to include freakbeat band The Craig and features tracks from Palmer’s period with Chris Farlowe, Atomic Rooster, as well as post-ELP bands such as PM, Asia, 3 and working with Mike Oldfield, The Buddy Rich Orchestra and both Carl Palmer Band and Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy. The visual side of the set includes The Rhythm Of Life, a documentary narrated by Palmer himself with live and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage featuring ELP, Asia, Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Carl Palmer Band and more.…

November 1973. Frayed bell-bottoms were the height of fashion; Pink Floyd culminated their Dark Side Of The Moon tour and the Mariner 10 spacecraft blasted off on a mission to send back the first-ever photos of Mercury to an eagerly awaiting Earth. Meanwhile, in the little Oxfordshire village of Shipton-on-Cherwell, three visionary musicians armed with cutting-edge technology were about to alter the musical landscape forever. Edgar Froese, Peter Baumann and Christopher Franke – otherwise known as Tangerine Dream – flew from Berlin in Germany to Richard Branson’s The Manor to record an album that would change their lives and that of the many people who would hear it. It was a record that was to achieve great things, blowing minds with its sheer invention and inspiring decades of electronic music.…

He’s the remixer du jour and spacial audio specialist of choice for left-field artists, but even Steven Wilson found it a challenge to remix Phaedra. In 2018, the No-Man and Porcupine Tree leader was invited to revisit the album using the original master tapes and, as he tells us, it was a very rewarding process. How did your involvement in remixing Phaedra come about? The guy who was curating for the Tangerine Dream box set [2019’s In Search Of Hades] is a lovely chap called Mark Powell. He knew I was a big fan and asked me. He said: “We’ve got some multitrack tapes for Phaedra.” Actually, they didn’t have it all, they only had side one, but they also found some other tapes that had never been mixed from…

There’s a slight air of world weariness about The Pineapple Thief. The band have been in Gavin Harrison’s studio, rehearsing for their upcoming tour to support their new album, It Leads To This, and there’s the sense that it’s been an elongated, potentially mildly frustrating day of missed cues and occasional bum notes. “Gavin doesn’t sugar-coat anything,” reveals frontman Bruce Soord, referencing the band’s drummer with a knowing smile. “So we’re in the studio now, we play a song, record it and gather around the speakers and listen back to it. The first time you play it through, it’s quite brutal. We have this dynamic in the band where we have an ordered section and a chaos section, but I’m not going to tell you where the chaos section is.…

Rising from the ashes of the Goon Show-inspired Griptight Thynne and morphing from Stackridge Lemon to just Stackridge, by 1973 the knockabout Bristol pop-proggers had racked up some serious milestones in four years of existence. Initially comprised of Andrew Cresswell-Davis (sometimes credited as Andy Davis) on guitar, keyboards and vocals; James Warren on guitar and vocals; James ‘Crun’ Walter on bass (Crun was also a Goons name); Michael ‘Mutter’ Slater on flute and vocals; Mike Evans on violin; and Billy ‘Sparkle’ Bent on drums, the bandmembers had met in the clubs and bars of Bristol such as Acker Bilk’s Old Granary and The Dug Out. The players’ chemistry went from performing pop and blues covers to original songs infused with a Bonzo Dog Band playfulness and eclecticism, taking in classical…

“The realisation that we can do whatever we want and no one will stop us is kind of magical,” says Kyros’s Shelby Logan Warne, and who are we to disagree? The British-based, pop-meets-progmeets-metal quartet have furrowed a unique path of individuality in recent years, and on their fourth studio album, Mannequin, it appears the dial has been nudged even more. Keyboard player and vocalist Warne points to styles and sounds like new jack swing, which pop up among the 10 new retrotinged tracks. This musical melting pot never forget about the melody, though, and that’s a key part of how Kyros have created a record that could well take them far. “I don’t think we’re a band that’s ever been too overly conscious about our quote/unquote ‘sound’,” drummer Robin Johnson…

Six albums into their career, multinational prog band Fish On Friday may well have just served up their finest effort to date. 8mm is a superbly crafted set, its expansive soundscapes shot through with beguiling hooks and sparkling melodies. Speaking from their respective homes in Belgium and England, Frank Van Bogaert (vocals, keys and guitars) and Nick Beggs (bass, Chapman Stick, vocals) are clearly excited about the band’s latest project. “It was a pleasure to make,” enthuses Beggs. “It’s very hard to get music over in this day and age, because everybody’s making music. The media is saturated with new artists. But Fish On Friday have got a core fanbase, which seems to be growing, and I think this album will really help.” Many readers will be familiar with Beggs’s…

VENUE UNDERGROUND ARTS, PHILADELPHIA, PA, USA DATE 01/02/2024 SUPPORT EARTHSIDE Caligula’s Horse are one of Australia’s premier modern progressive metal acts so seeing them in concert is inherently awesome. That said, tonight’s show is particularly special for two reasons: it finds them celebrating their superb new studio album – Charcoal Grace – and, perhaps more importantly, it’s a part of their first-ever North American headlining tour. Luckily, the quartet make the most of the opportunity. Bolstered by charming banter, engaging visuals, and a stellar opening set from instrumental prog rock ensemble Earthside, Caligula’s Horse’s remarkable performance demonstrates why they’ve always deserved the spotlight. Earthside quickly take the stage and dive into about 50 minutes of exceptional compositions. Their long-awaited second sequence (2023’s Let The Truth Speak) receives much of the attention, with four…

Where’s home? The wilds of east London, via the Badlands of Northamptonshire. What’s your earliest prog memory? Pulling out my dad’s copy of Tarkus thinking – based on the cover art – it was going to be by some super-heavy thrash band, and being distraught at the lack of hi-gain chugging guitars. Never judge an album by its cover… The first prog album you bought? A second-hand copy of Between Nothingness & Eternity by Mahavishnu Orchestra. Our local guitar teacher lent me and Matt [Stevens, TFATD guitarist] his copy of Apocalypse, which of course blew our tiny minds. So I picked up any other albums I could find. And the latest? Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s new album, V. Such an inventive band. An identifiable sound but always pushing different sounds, structures…