Table of contents for Issue 99 in Prog

Victorian history, culture and art are the main sources of lyrical inspiration behind iamthemorning’s forthcoming recording The Bell, which is out on Kscope on August 2. “It all started with my obsession with the Pre-Raphaelites [artistic movement]. I began digging further into the background of what was happening at the time, how those artists lived and what they were inspired by, and a whole new world unravelled!” reveals vocalist Marjana Semkina. The album is named after the coffin bells that were used to help prevent premature burial, and some macabre themes lurk among its 10 tracks. Also included is a new version of Blue Sea, which originally appeared on last year’s Ocean Sounds Blu-ray. “The album is about people being buried alive and wax models being melted down,” says Semkina.…

BRAZIL MIGHT BE best known for giving the world samba and the Bossa Nova, but four young musicians from São Paulo look set to put their country on the prog map. Brothers Gustavo and Ricardo Santhiago started playing music with their cousin Giovanni Lenti when they were just kids, displaying talent beyond their years on Brazilian TV shows. The line-up was completed by the addition of Gabriel Golfetti, son of Gong’s guitarist Fabio Golfetti, in 2017. While the band range in age from 17 to 21, they embrace prog’s heritage. “When I started playing the keys, my main inspirations were guys like Jon Lord and Rick Wakeman,” says Gustavo. “We’ve all been fans of progressive rock from a very early age, and trying to learn those complicated pieces is a…

FORMED MORE THAN A decade ago, Parisian post-rockers Lost In Kiev will be familiar to anybody who’s kept an eye on the European post-rock scene. For their new album, Persona, they’ve taken an evolutionary leap forward, reconfiguring their instrumentals to fit their cinematic, multimedia concept, and signing to Pelagic Records, home of post-rock giants Mono and God Is An Astronaut. “Motions [our debut record] was released on the Dunk! label, and this is how everything started. So thanks to the Dunk! label for believing in us – I think it’s important to say that,” explains bassist and synth player Jean Christophe Condette. “We were always close to the Pelagic family and bands, as we toured with Labirinto, we toured with Pg. Lost, and were fans of The Ocean for a…

Russian Circles release Blood Year via Sargent House on August 2. The seven-track was recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio Studios and explores a new side of the US postrockers’ sound. It follows on from 2016’s Guidance. Gandalf’s Fist (left) release The Clockwork Prologue on July 1 via Nightkeeper Productions. The double album is designed as an expansion pack to 2016’s The Clockwork Fable and includes TV actors Mark Benton, Tim Munro, and Bill Fellows. Next year’s Winter’s End Festival will take place between April 23-26 at Chepstow Drill Hall. The line-up will be announced soon but in the meantime fans can buy discounted ‘leap of faith’ tickets from www.winters-end.co.uk. We Are Kin release Bruised Sky via Bad Elephant on July 12. The Manchester band’s third album is their first…

SEEMINGLY BEAMED FORWARD in time from that magical era when guitar-less, three-piece bands bestrode the Earth, Brazil’s Caravela Escarlate are about as prog as it gets. Infused with the indulgent spirit of ELP, King Crimson and the most opulent of Italian prog, the trio’s eponymous second album is a celebration of our beloved genre. But despite their debt to the past, they have struck upon a distinctive formula that is theirs alone. It is, as keyboard wizard Ronaldo Rodrigues explains, a simple matter of chemistry. “A local producer called Claudio Fonzi put David [Paiva] and I in touch in 2011,” he says. “We both wanted to play eclectic prog rock with multiple influences. When we met we discovered that we shared many things in common – a taste for prog…

“Hello Paris in the springtime!” says an animated Phil Collins during Seconds Out, the live double album released by Genesis in October 1977. Recorded mostly over four nights at the Palais des Sports in June – technically not spring, but let’s not spoil the moment – the record documented the band’s Wind & Wuthering tour (though it includes only Afterglow from that then-too-recent-to-fillet album). With Collins comfortably ensconced as frontman/vocalist and Chester Thompson drumming, the music hit the sweet spot between the group’s old and new identities, as they showcased a blend of their classic prog – Supper’s Ready, Firth Of Fifth and The Cinema Show (the last was actually taken from a 1976 show with Bill Bruford in the drumstool) – and more focused favourites from the dawning of…

Lasse Hoile is a big man. With his coal-black attire, solemn features and deep Danish mumble, he towers like someone you’d expect to meet in a dark forest – and looks even taller sitting at the low table in the Greenwich cafe where we meet. He drinks an oat milk latte, seemingly a hipster hallmark but it’s actually more reflective of his ongoing struggle with Crohn’s disease. Following the death of his (British) father in December, Hoile has been at his house dealing with the aftermath – which, through numerous admin and communication breakdowns, has been “a fucking nightmare”. He’s open and good-natured in conversation, but his present situation weighs heavily in his voice. “He [my father] died of an aneurysm in the stomach that burst due to hypertension… so…

Identity GONZO Floyd’s “Quiet one” and his noisy 1984 synth-pop excursion. When Pink Floyd first materialised, it was Rick Wright’s Farfisa organ providing space age edge before he became the band’s key sonic architect after Syd’s departure. Known as “the quiet one”, Wright’s sublime contributions were pivotal as Floyd ascended to global domination, but when Roger Waters was building The Wall he felt sidelined, exacerbated by family concerns and encroaching depression. Wright left during recording, playing its tour as a hired hand before departing until Waters had left. “Sticks two fingers up at megalomaniac conceptualising.” Driven by anger at his shoddy treatment, Wright created a polar opposite to Floyd’s rock-wired bombast by recording Identity as Zee with singer-guitarist Dave Harris from New Romantics Fashion. Wright had acquired the hugely-expensive Fairlight…

Prog news updated daily online! progmagazine.com Vote online at: www.loudersound.com/progawards LIMELIGHT (Last year’s winner: Midas Fall) Coldbones Exploring Birdsong Frequency Drift Gwenno Lost Crowns Jo Quail Quantum Pig The Paradox Twin Valis Ablaze Wheel EVENT OF THE YEAR (Last year’s winner: Space Rocks) A New Day Festival Camel Royal Albert Hall Show King Crimson London Palladium Shows Marillion Weekends Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets Tour Prognosis Festival Ramblin’ Man Fair Prog Stage RosFest Roger Waters Hyde Park Summer’s End VIDEO OF THE YEAR (Last year’s winner: Orphaned Land – Like Orpheus) Antimatter – The Third Arm Cellar Darling – Insomnia Daniel Tompkins – Limitless Devin Townsend – Spirits Will Collide Exploring Birdsong – The Baptism King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard – Fishing For Fishies O.R.k. – Black Blooms Rikard…

The Flaming Lips’ King’s Mouth is out on July 19 via Bella Union, and it grew from an art installation inspired by wild gatherings. Frontperson Wayne Coyne explains, “We’d throw these elaborate, insane, druggy, adult parties at The Flaming Lips’ gallery in Oklahoma City, and we sort of fashioned this face which became known as ‘the King’ which people could crawl into.” The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore had the idea of turning these happenings into a more family-friendly exhibition with The Flaming Lips’ music and visuals. A surreal immersive installation followed in 2015 and Coyne’s narrative-led artworks eventually became the inspiration for new songs. A punk legend was even invited to collaborate on what would become the album. “I think when we got Mick Jones to do the…

“Record Store Day is the one day of the year when over 200 independent record shops all across the UK come together to celebrate their unique culture,” proclaims its website. The annual celebration commemorated its 12th anniversary this year, but there are those that grumble the releases are too expensive, the original idea has been taken over by the majors, releases are merely being bought to flog on and, importantly, that ‘every day should be record store day’. And are they justified? Perhaps. Here’s a disclaimer: I’m not a neutral party. I worked in record shops as a young man, prepared records for release, have written about records, participated in Record Store Day and, most importantly of all, I’ve bought records. Lots of them. Especially on RSD. I have an…

Esoteric Recordings have just released a brand new, remastered, limited-edition box set of Van der Graaf Generator’s 1969 debut album, and we have one to give away. The deluxe 2CD, 1 x LP and 1 x 7-inch single limited-edition box set features: ▪ A CD of rare and previously unreleased tracks including two previously unreleased demos from 1967, the BBC Radio Top Gear session from 1968 (including the ‘lost’, previously unreleased version of Octopus) and the single tracks People You Were Going To and Firebrand. ▪ A facsimile 180 gram vinyl LP of The Aerosol Grey Machine housed in the withdrawn UK gatefold sleeve design (cut at Abbey Road studios). ▪ A 7-inch single of the very rare withdrawn release People You Were Going To b/w Firebrand. ▪ A book…

Like many of the great progressive rock stories, the Van der Graaf Generator saga began with a meeting of unsuspecting kindred spirits. Both arriving at Manchester University in the mid-60s, aspiring young musicians Peter Hammill and Chris Judge Smith could easily have never met, but fate had other ideas. A sign on the Students’ Union noticeboard asked whether anyone was interested in forming a rock band. Hammill had been writing songs and harbouring creative ambitions for years, while Smith had just returned from an enlightening trip to California at the height of the psychedelic movement. Forming a rock band was exactly what they both had in mind. “About 30 people turned up in response to the ad,” Smith tells Prog. “Peter was there, on the floor, playing a guitar. I…

In 2010, Fredrik and Mattias Norrman should have been feeling at the apex of their career. The two brothers were, respectively, the guitarist and bassist for the Swedish masters of melancholy, Katatonia, who were then experiencing critical and commercial success with their 2009 album Night Is The New Day. Instead, the increasing number of heads that they were turning and the escalating demand to tour and promote began to prove too much. So as the 2000s became the 2010s, they stepped away, leaving a group that had defined their lives for a decade. “It all just got too intense for them,” remembers Alexander Backlund, the singer for the Norrmans’ new aural venture, Thenighttimeproject. “They both decided to leave and, at that time, Fredrik had a lot of material that he’d…

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. So goes the saying. In the case of the Third Ear Band, this is very much the case: surely there are few other prog bands with such a miasma of myths circulating them. Is it true they took their name from an obsessed fan who carried around Van Gogh’s severed ear in a bag? Is it true that the bandmembers were heavily involved in alchemy practices and were pagan worshippers? Is it true they became an acoustic-oriented band because all their equipment got stolen? And is it true that Glen Sweeney, regarded as the band’s main wellspring of creativity, fought in the Second World War? “They took risks in a way that was highly progressive. I loved them for it. In some…

“I think we’re a little bit like Rush, in their musicality and treating each other with respect.”Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen If you’re a fan of boundary-pushing, genre-shredding music (and as a reader of Prog, that goes without saying), then you can’t have failed to notice the astonishing stream of bands that Norway has produced over the past 10 years, many of them released by the Rune Grammofon label. Initially spearheaded by norsk rock stalwarts Motorpsycho, and quickly followed by the likes of Bushman’s Revenge, Elephant9, Fire! and Krokofant, a loosely affiliated scene has developed that mixes jazz, prog, metal and psychedelia to create a new type of challenging but accessible avant-rock. Yet as the promo blurb for their latest album says, it could very well be Hedvig Mollestad Trio that ultimately…

Jane Weaver’s latest transmission from the void is a journey both back through time and into the future, featuring songs from her previous albums The Silver Globe and Modern Kosmology remixed and reimagined into a seamless whole. The inspiration for it comes from a series of shows she did last year where she set herself the challenge of performing sans band using just drones, tape loops, custombuilt vinyl discs and her voice. As the sole creator of the music she makes in the studio, she wanted to assert her authorial vision in a live setting as well, lest anybody think she was merely the frontwoman for other’s ideas. This was entirely in-keeping with the modus operandi she’s followed for over 20 years now as a solo artist, eschewing the path…

VENUE THE DRILL HALL, CHEPSTOW DATE 04-07/04/19 It’s interesting to note that talking at gigs is one subject that is usually guaranteed to send prog fans into a rage. Prog is more than aware that the majority of attendees at Winter’s and Summer’s End are those who expect to enjoy their live music unencumbered by chat. So it’s equally interesting to note that this year at Winter’s End, more so than any other, an abundance of chatter is evident when a band clearly not to the liking of the otherwise silent chatterers is on stage. A little more distressing is to overhear one berk openly mocking the foreign accent of one of the artists. One would hope this especially is down to festival fatigue, being Sunday, and over-indulgence, and is…

Follow us on twitter.com/progmagazineUK ALAN REED @3hobbits Thanks to everyone @TrinityLiveUK2 for a great gig. Great to see you all clapping along, and hope you enjoyed the new songs ** Alan Reed will return with ‘Grey Sky Thinking’, due October 2019 ** MARJANA SEMKINA @marjanasemkina I just talked @kscopemusic into making the initial run of digipaks for the new album that doesn’t have plastic. Because environment it’s a drop in the ocean but it’s something! MATT STEVENS @mattstevensloop Gutted @theborderline is closing. Was hoping to do our 10 years of @tfatd show there next year. It was a venue I always wanted to headline. Had some good times there. GREG SPAWTON @bigbigtrain Bluebells at Joan’s Acre Wood today. KAVUS TORABI @Knifeworld The response to the new Gong album, The Universe…

Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi have teamed up with Guapo’s Michael J York for a project called The Utopia Strong. And they release their self-titled debut on September 13 via Rocket Recordings. “Because we love hanging out, we thought, wouldn’t it be nice to make some music together? Mike recorded it, although we didn’t know he was doing it to begin with, and when we listened back to it all we went, ‘This is amazing!’ We thought we could make it into something relevant instead of just three blokes messing around,” Davis tells Prog. “We’ve had so much fun making this album. The funny thing is as the tracks unfolded, we kept on saying, ‘I’d buy this! This is great!’” The nine-track is mostly instrumental and contains the snooker star’s…

SMASH-PROOF GUITAR For some, the act of smashing up a guitar is the ultimate expression of humanity’s ongoing struggle. For others, like me, it’s just a bit of ludicrous attention seeking (my apologies to Townshend, Hendrix and Blackmore). Anyway, Sandvik, the Swedish firm known for its mining tools, set itself the task of making an un-smashable guitar out of 3D-printed hyper-duplex steel. They then shipped it to Yngwie Malmsteen and challenged him to smash it. He couldn’t. Of course, the whole thing was merely done to generate publicity, and I’ve fallen for it hook, line and sinker. www.home.sandvik NURANOW Some subscriptions make perfect sense, for example Prog. But these days everything is going down that route: computer software, socks, razors, music streaming, and now headphones. Nura, who featured in this…

District 97’s singer Leslie Hunt describes Screens as the band’s “most collaborative and most accessible album to date”. The new nine-track, out on September 27 via Right Honorable Recording Company, explores the disparity between real life and the way people present themselves in public. The album’s official trailer delivers a taste of things to come with a section of Ghost Girl. The spooky track, also the longest on the album, was inspired by something that happened to drummer Jonathan Schang in 2017 while on Cruise To The Edge. “I had a very fascinating dinner conversation with someone who told me she’d been haunted by ghosts, spirits and demons throughout her childhood. It was probably the most bizarre, but also most engrossing dinner I’ve ever had,” he reveals. “[The section in…

Choosing the right name for your event can be just as tricky as selecting the right line-up, but when three Seattle-based musicians came up with the idea of showcasing their community’s finest sounds, they didn’t shy away from the p-word. “We decided to own it and say, ‘This is what it is and if you don’t like it, be that way!’” says Seaprog co-founder Jon Davis. “Prog isn’t a second-class form of music, and it doesn’t have to be a retrospective thing either.” The initial idea was hatched around 2011 and the very first Seaprog opened its doors at the Columbia City Theater in 2013 with Thinking Plague and miRthkon among the acts performing. Since then, the event has grown along with the team behind it – the so-called Central…

IT’S NEVER TOO late to be featured in Prog, as Rennes-born musician Yann Tiersen proves. Now 48, Yann released his first album, La Valse Des Monstres – a series of enigmatic accordion sketches – in 1995. But his music has transmogrified over the last decade or so, taking on a more wild, rustic edge, with long sonic meditations that you could loosely describe as post-rock. It’s music that reflects his environment: Ushant, a small, weather-beaten island in the Celtic Sea. Tiersen’s latest album ALL evokes the ruggedness and beauty of Brittany, and of neighbouring Cornwall. If you listen closely, the drones and incantations may even conjure up druid-led rituals on tenebrous moorland, consolidated by the use of a Brythonic dialect throughout: “You know, my album is in Breton, which is…

“TesseracT is always going to be the number one thing, everything revolves around TesseracT. But I’ve already started working on my second and third solo albums”. “Putting a record out under your own name is a statement. There comes a lot of responsibility with that and I didn’t feel like I had enough pull or stature within the music industry.” Four years ago, Daniel Tompkins wrote and recorded his debut solo album, Castles, and then put it on ice. In part, the decision was a practical one. At the time, the vocalist had only recently rejoined prog pioneers TesseracT, after quitting in 2011. The band had released their third album, Polaris, and headed off on a world tour. Logistically, it meant Tompkins’ solo material had to be left on the…

Nothing screams prog like a great concept album. Black Mountain’s approach is a little different, however. Rather than weighty narratives or complex song cycles, the Canadian space rockers’ latest album is a fast-moving hymn to the exhilarating freedom of the open road. Named after a vintage 80s muscle car, Destroyer came about after singer/guitarist Stephen McBean got a driving licence. “It definitely had a fair amount of influence on the songs and the recording,” says the LA-based McBean, who finally took to the wheel a couple of years ago, aged 48. “When you’re making records there are different ways of taking yourself out of the process and analysing the songs. I used to do things like sit on a park bench, get really stoned and listen to a Walkman. But…

It can’t be easy being John Arch. His short-but-sweet period with Fates Warning positioned him as progressive metal’s ultimate could-have-been contender. The US group’s first vocalist and co-writer had an astonishingly wide-range and seemingly ever-developing power, but left the band in 1987 after the release of the tantalising fan favourite Awaken The Guardian. A year on, his former bandmates, led by guitarist Jim Matheos, would recruit replacement Ray Alder and go on to release their breakthrough record No Exit, cementing their place alongside Dream Theater and Queensrÿche as part of progressive metal’s founding trinity. Matheos stayed in touch with his former collaborator, but Arch never toured again and instead busied himself with life in the real world – as a partner, a father, an employee. Music became a hobby, and…

“Florian was more interested in how, over the history of mankind, people gathered over religious lifestyles and then created music. And so he studied Buddhism, Hinduism, he also studied the Bible.” Out of all the groups active in Germany in the so-called ‘krautrock’ scene of the late 60s into the 70s, Popol Vuh were the most mysterious and enigmatic. With their exploration of the transcendental in electronic and acoustic music they had little overlap with rock, and stylistically found themselves set apart from their peers. The group’s founder and sole constant member, keyboard player Florian Fricke, was musically active until his death in 2001, but he had rarely been interviewed for the UK music press and many releases flew under the radar. But now BMG are beginning a reissue campaign…