Table of contents for Issue 104 in Prog

Pendragon will release their first studio album in more than five years in February 2020. Love Over Fear can be pre-ordered from the band’s website from December 1, when the artwork and a teaser video will also be released. “Over the last five years, the ideas have been formulating and I started to think that a lot of music has been political or has [contained] social comment,” says guitarist, singer and writer Nick Barrett. “We’ve done it too, but sometimes you’ve just got to write something uplifting. Love Over Fear is about going back to something more beautiful. That’s the vibe of it, although underneath there are some fairly dark messages.” The band celebrated a significant anniversary this year with the release of Pendragon – The First 40 Years, a…

Marjana Semkina releases her debut solo album, Sleepwalking, via Kscope on February 14. Inspired by the Victorian poet Tennyson, it’ll be packaged under the alternate spelling of Mariana Semkina, and she says its lyrics are more personal than anything she’s written for Iamthemorning. “I’ve had enough of all the concept albums; I wanted to make an album of honest songs about things that worry me and not just profound concepts with deep meanings,” says the Russian singer-songwriter. “It’s a dark album, with a lot of dark and traumatic themes, and I wanted to transform all the negative energy and life experiences into something pure. I decided the best way I could put traumatic experiences to use was to make art, and hopefully it will help other people too.” The 43-minute…

Jack Hues is set to release Primitif, a double album and the first under his own name, via The Dawn Chorus Recording Company in March 2020. A debut solo single and video taster Whitstable Beach was released in mid-November. Hues, who won the Outer Limits accolade at this year’s Progressive Music Awards, reveals how the album took shape: “One of the pivotal things that happened was in 2014, when my wife passed away, which provoked massive changes in my life. Around October 2017, I started writing some poetry, but by January I’d started to get ideas for songs, and I had a period between January and April 2018 where I wrote most of [the album]. It triggered a whole lot of things in me. In the past I’ve usually struggled…

“I grew up in cold and rainy Normandy where soup was served for every meal from October to March. I was all over veggies growing up but sometimes we’d throw a gigantic sausage in the pot to give the soup a smoked, or fumé, flavour. My mother handled day-to-day meals, but on special occasions my father would spend hours marinating wild game for traditional dishes. I started doing my own thing to drift away from the few recipes that were rotated in our household. I wanted to go crazy with my favourite ingredients and see if I could reach nirvana through my taste buds. Normandy cuisine revolves around butter and cream, and I really enjoy making dishes that are rich and flavoursome, such as carbonara. This delicious risotto uses some…

Although it was a commercial flop at the time, The Kinks had already dipped their toes in the water of concept albums with their excellent, Britpop-influencing Little England commentary The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society in 1968. With Arthur the group flung themselves in the deep end with the most ambitious record of their career. Ray Davies often found source material in his family life and north London neighbourhood, and this time around was no different. Ray’s much older sister Rose had emigrated to Australia in 1964 under the government’s Ten Pound Poms scheme and Ray had been pining for her and her avuncular husband Arthur since. Granada TV approached with a commission for an ‘experimental’ programme collaboration with playwright Julian Mitchell. Ray had an idea that centred…

We’re in the middle of an environmental crisis and need to take action — that’s the message from climate scientists and campaigners. Peter Gabriel, Marillion, and Anna Phoebe are among those who’ve put their concerns to music, but how green is prog? And what can we do to lower our carbon footprint? Reduce, reuse and recycle has become a modern mantra, but billions of unwanted CDs and vinyl are still being sent to landfill. However, Revive Innovations have found a way to turn unwanted CDs into a versatile material, RE-CD, that can be used to manufacture furniture and even turntable bases. The project is still in the early stages but the future is looking greener. We all have favourite pieces of merch, but if your best King Crimson tee or…

JUST WHEN YOU thought it was safe to start compiling your albums of the year list, something truly extraordinary has arrived from Boston, Massachusetts. Conceived just over a decade ago at the city’s famed Berklee College Of Music, Wilderun are the brainchild (in more ways than one, it turns out) of virtuoso multi-instrumentalist Evan Anderson Berry and his inordinately gifted pals. Their third album, Veil Of Imagination, is simply mind-blowing. Like an exquisite but unhinged hybrid of all your favourite forward-thinking prog rock and metal bands, it’s the kind of record that fans of Opeth, Between The Buried And Me, and Devin Townsend will instantly embrace with bug-eyed fervour. Endearingly, Berry himself explains his band’s synapse-detonating sound with a humble shrug. “I just get bored easily, that’s probably most of…

WHEN HUW LLOYD-JONES was 10, his older brother bought a second-hand Triumph 2.5 PI that came complete with an eight-track player and two cartridges left behind by the previous owner – a Fleetwood Mac album and Genesis’ Trespass. “I became absolutely obsessed with that album, even at 10 years old, and have been a prog fan ever since,” says Lloyd-Jones. After a brief flirtation with drumming, he answered an ad from a band looking for a singer, “without having any idea at all if I could sing”. But he got the gig and has been singing ever since, forming Midnight Sun almost three years ago with guitarist Andy Gelband, whom he met in Unto Us, and former Also Eden bandmate Ian Hodson on keyboards. “We wanted to get the prog…

“Suddenly we went from being some home-county area band to having an audience all over the country.”Mark Kelly We know the script by now. It’s the late 70s. Progressive rock has had its day in the sun, and now its bloated carcass lies dying in the street, kicked into the gutter by the nascent fury of thousands of punk rockers. In a few short years it has risen majestically, daring to challenge perceived convention, ripped up the rule book and owned arenas around the world. But it has become the victim of its own success; a cumbersome beast in thrall to its own peccadilloes. And then along came punk rock… Except no one thought to tell Marillion! In truth, punk rock was already almost an afterthought when a young Buckinghamshire…

“I’m a frontman, I love the spotlight,” Magic Pie vocalist/guitarist Eiríkur Hauksson says with some amount of vigour, giving you absolutely no reason to doubt him. “My mum told me that when I was four years old she had a little chair, and when she was having guests I would get that chair, place it in the middle of the living room, and stand on it and sing. If she didn’t think it fitted too well and she asked me not to, then I’d just cry until I could perform.” Hauksson has come a long way since standing on chairs at his childhood home in Iceland and singing for visitors. His audience in 2019 largely consists of fans of Magic Pie, the Norwegian prog rockers whose stock continues to rise…

Einar Solberg didn’t intend to write a long song. He doesn’t even like them. Yet, sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, laptop perched on his legs, the Leprous singer and main songwriter began composing what became the 11-minute, avant-garde epic The Sky Is Red. On it, his high-pitched wails drift precariously over complex percussion, as the music builds towards clipped choral bursts which sound like doomed souls protesting in Hell. Hearing it, an outsider might conclude that Leprous had decided to go full prog. “I was trying to do the opposite, actually, but it seems there’s still too much in my blood!” Solberg laughs. “Because I don’t like long songs, even. I think they’re usually filled with way too much stuff that could have been thrown out. I…

Following the release of Land Animal in 2017, Bent Knee played their biggest ever tours, had their first experience of travelling in a bus rather than a van, and took their marvellous, genre-morphing music to more listeners than ever before. So it’s a little surprising to find that their new album, You Know What They Mean, is the most acerbic, if not downright angry, record the Boston sextet have ever made. Both singer/keyboard player Courtney Swain and guitarist Ben Levin attribute some of the extra bite in their sound to the impact of touring with the likes of Haken and Leprous, although there’s more to their evolution than tapping into a fresh wellspring of prog metal fury. “We made a choice to have the album be performed only by the…

Like any kid growing up at the height of glam rock, almost as soon as 14-year-old Stephen Batt formed a band with elder brother David and his south London schoolmates Richard Barbieri and Andonis Michaelides, they knew they needed cool names. Barbieri could just about cut it as a rock’n’roll surname, but not Batt, so their singer became David Sylvian, bassist Michaelides became Mick Karn, and young Stephen on drums became Steve Jansen. “I was going through a big New York Dolls phase,” he explains, “so I went to the phone directory, looked under Johansen and I ended up with Jansen.” The band named themselves Japan, having “no idea what it meant other than a place far away”. Initially heavily influenced by adventurous avant-glam such as Roxy Music, and the…

Screens MINDSCAN Ten years and four albums in, the Chicagoans display their uniqueness. Since their 2010 debut, Hybrid Child, Chicago’s District 97 have steadily carved their own niche on the prog scene. Welded to clever, catchy songs, their Crimson-referencing heavy prog is given 21st century pizzazz by sassy singer Leslie Hunt. Their fourth studio album, Screens isn’t a world away from 2015’s brilliant In Vaults, but this is a refreshed line-up, and it shows. Hunt and drummer/leader Jonathan Schang are joined again by guitarist Jim Tashjian, plus recent recruits Tim Seisser (bass) and Andrew Lawrence (keys). “Ghost Girl is like a Jim Steinman-Robert Fripp co-write.” Big opener Forest Fire is packed with some of the band’s trademark melodic tics and signature odd chord progressions. Hunt’s ‘If you wanna do all…

Hold Our Fire KSCOPE Live album reworks recent studio release. Twenty years into their career, The Pineapple Thief are still climbing the ladder, slowly but surely. Last year’s Dissolution album cracked the UK Top 40 and frontman Bruce Soord’s recently released his second solo album. If things continue like this, casual observers might even stop getting them mixed up with the similarly initialled Porcupine Tree, whose seemingly permanent hiatus has opened a position for an accessible British prog outfit. For some of us, Soord’s songs have never matched the range and unpredictability of Steven Wilson’s, and this live album doesn’t provide any shocks. Where it does deliver is in the energy department, because it feels as if the band are more liberated away from constructing studio flawlessness. ‘You were never…

VENUE CHEPSTOW DRILL HALL DATE 04/10/2019-06/10/2019 Summer’s End Festival reaches its 15th edition, something to be celebrated in its own right. And, as always, prog fans are flocking to it from all over the globe. With Norway’s Wobbler and The Windmill on the bill, as well as Swedes Hasse Fröberg & Musical Companion, there’s a healthy contingent of excitable Scandinavians adding perpetual smiles to proceedings all weekend. It’s interesting to note that it doesn’t seem to be just the usual suspects arriving in Chepstow either. New faces are noted, some younger than before, and more women to boot. We don’t know if it’s just us, but the genial atmosphere that always pervades Summer’s End seems in even more plentiful supply in 2019. FRIDAY There’s a very busy audience in an…

VENUE THE UNION COUNTY PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE, RAHWAY, NEW JERSEY DATE 11-13/10/19 We’re only 20 miles from Manhattan, but Rahway could be another planet. Both the town and the venue have seen better days, but the 1,300-capacity space provides a solid home for ProgStock, and numerous nearby eateries compensate for UCPAC’s very limited facilities. FRIDAY Phideaux open proceedings on the first afternoon, focusing on their The Great Leap, Doomsday Afternoon and Infernal albums, and with a 10-piece live line-up the band signpost ProgStock’s considerable ambitions and deliver a strong ensemble performance. ProgStock 2019 has plenty of veteran bands, but younger talent is in shorter supply. Tennessee quartet Salem Hill have toiled away for limited rewards for more than 25 years. Theirs is a solid set, with keyboard player/guitarist Carl Groves…

Where’s home? Sandøya, an island in Oslofjord [Norway]. We moved here two years ago and I love it. Earliest prog memory? On my 12th birthday a friend gave me a copy of Genesis’ Duke on cassette. That was in 1983, and it totally changed my life – there was no way back! First album you bought? Fragile by Yes, on vinyl. And the last? II: Sojourn by Wytch Hazel. It’s like a mix of Thin Lizzy and Jethro Tull. Really cool, catchy stuff. First prog gig? Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe in 1989, at Skedsmo Arena in Norway. It was an amazing experience. And the latest? 10cc in Oslo in February 2018. I didn’t know what to expect, and it was shockingly great – the harmonies were pitch-perfect. Your latest prog…

NAD-TACULAR! Over the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to catch some great groups: King Crimson, Marillion, the Space Rocks event, Muse and Shinedown, to name but a few. But to catch Steve Hackett twice in 13 months has been remarkable. Last year, he made my heart swell when I caught the Festival Hall show and heard Supper’s Ready and Musical Box live for the first time. Then last night in Folkestone, the complete Selling England… I’d hope that Nad Sylvan realises just how much his performance is appreciated. I know that it’s Steve’s show, but Nad comes on and delivers perfectly for each part. Yes, I know that he’s not Peter Gabriel, but for a music lover who didn’t catch Genesis first time round, Nad gives me what…

Sons Of Apollo will release MMXX (pronounced “Twenty Twenty”) on January 17 via InsideOut. The follow-up to their 2017 debut, Psychotic Symphony, sees Dream Theater exes Mike Portnoy and Derek Sherinian, Guns N’ Roses ex Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal, Journey ex Jeff Scott Soto, and Mr Big’s Billy Sheehan in an assertive mood. “We made the record that we wanted to make,” keyboardist Sherinian tells Prog. “We’re very blessed to have a record company that allows us to maintain creative control.” The musician cites the band’s busy touring schedule as the reason they were able to find a stronger creative connection this time round. “Everyone shines on MMXX,” he states. “Jeff wrote all the lyrics and did a great job. Ron’s a brilliant player, arranger, composer, and always brings great riffs…

Glass Hammer release their 18th studio album, Dreaming City, in March 2020 — but the plot to their latest concept LP isn’t as positive as the title suggests. “The city is a place where dreams are stolen,” co-founder Steve Babb tells Prog. “There’s a hero, a magical object, a sorcerer and someone who has to be rescued. My anti-hero represents a state of despair, the magical weapon stands for hope, and his lover, who he has to rescue, represents the joy which has been taken from him.” However, there is an upbeat element to the music, colleague Fred Schendel reports. “We wanted a rock album. In prog rock there’s an essential word, ‘rock’, and I think sometimes we forget that. So there’s a faster pace — it’s even in the…

Here Comes A Man From The Council With A Flamethrower is the cryptically titled debut album from Southampton avant-rockers A Formal Horse. Although the quartet, who formed in 2013, have released three acclaimed EPs, the last of which was 2017’s Made In Chelsea, it’s taken them a while to pull together a full-length record. “That’s because for human beings with jobs and family making 20 minutes of music for an EP is pretty easy,” explains guitarist Ben Short. “However, making 45 minutes of music is not pretty easy, which is probably reflected in the fact that it’s taken us well over two years to put this together. We write together over email and the messages will bounce backward and forwards. If they stop bouncing back and forth, it means one…

I love sport and I love technology, but the introduction of VAR, aka video assistant referee, in football has wrecked the Premier League for me. I can no longer watch live matches on TV, as this kind of intervention spoils the flow of the game. It takes away the controversy, which in turn takes away all the immediacy. However, it has got me thinking: should we have VAR at prog concerts? It could put a lot of band arguments to bed. Here’s an entirely fictional example: it’s the opening night of the Amazing Five’s new tour. Halfway through the first number, something goes wrong and the song collapses into a mess of notes. The band stomp off stage and a massive argument kicks off in the dressing room. Bassist Tom…

“I found out about Mahavishnu Orchestra in the early 1970s when I was a freshman at the University Of California. At the time, I was listening to Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Pentangle and a fair amount of Jethro Tull – I really liked Thick As A Brick – but someone was playing The Inner Mounting Flame in their dorm room and I just thought, ‘Wow, what is this?’ Growing up in the 60s, I listened to The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and the early Mothers Of Invention stuff, but I wasn’t really that exposed to jazz fusion. That changed when I went to college, it was like discovering a new vocabulary harmonically, rhythmically and sonically. It had the sound of rock: it was very powerful and loud but it was…

“Yekaterinburg is often compared with Manchester,” says Qusto guitarist Ilya Maltsev. “It’s got a huge amount of industrial facilities, and lots of musicians. One in every five people plays an instrument!” Rock, pop and jazz are all well accounted for in this Russian city high up in the Ural Mountains, but prog not so much, which makes Maltsev and his bandmates unusual. Qusto (named after oceanographer Jacques Cousteau) formed there in 2016, dishing out a chimerical blend of desert/stoner rock and prog. Maltsev, bassist Maxim Shein and drummer Roman Varaksin started out in Aican, an instrumental post-rock outfit largely inspired by (another Manchester connection) Mike Vennart’s Oceansize. “After circumstances crushed that band, we started to play more stoner rock kind of music. But prog holds our guts tightly – long…

“Moshpits are best when they’re in 7/8!” Marina Organ says, with much laughter. Marina is no stranger to what she playfully describes as “weird-arse music”, having fallen in love with prog as a child. In the 80s she discovered a scene of likeminded music fans, and by the end of the decade, she had met her partner Sean and helped set up the underground music and art zine The Organ. Marina and Sean have been familiar faces around London’s gig circuit for many years, but it was a chance conversation that brought the sometime animator to the airwaves. She reveals, “I bumped into an old friend at a gig and told her, ‘I just wish I didn’t have to write about music, it’s driving me mad. I wish I could…

Such has been the long and frequently bewildering career of Gong that it can be as difficult for the aficionado as it is for the novice to agree on where to start when to comes to their epic canon of work. Anarchic, improvisational and sometimes just plain silly, the band have been through so many incarnations as to qualify for its own TARDIS, while the many offshoots and side-projects that make up the Gong Family could keep a genealogist busy for several generations. And yet for all that, Gong are one of those bands that occasionally slip down the back of the historical sofa. While they may not be mentioned in the same breath as some of prog’s more heavyweight names, their influence is arguably more keenly felt in the…

Neil Innes has a personal definition of what constitutes prog. “I would argue that by fusing any style of music with comedy, dissonance and poetry – in order to challenge the growing menace of monoculture in music – puts me right at the cutting edge of whatever ‘progressive’ means nowadays,” he says. “But what do I know?” Quite a lot, as it happens. Since joining The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band in 1963, Innes has made a successful career by assimilating the worlds of music, satire, performance art and comedy over a number of disciplines. He was one half of the Bonzos’ songwriting team (alongside the irrepressible Viv Stanshall), before entering the 70s as the ‘I’ in poet-rock pranksters GRIMMS, and becoming the unofficial seventh member of Monty Python through a…

The evergreen Wayne Coyne might not be too many years away from claiming his free bus pass, but his band The Flaming Lips are still making music that’s fresh, vital and alive. This year sees the release of the band’s 15th studio album, King’s Mouth, a majestic musical fairy tale with plenty of heart, lots of customary weirdness, and even some cathartic moments that touch upon bereavement. While their output has been less fully realised and more experimental in recent years, the new record represents a return to what they always did so well: beautifully crafted concept albums that run the gamut from the silly and surreal to the moving and melancholic. What’s more, it features ex-Clash legend Mick Jones narrating a story about a king from a ye olde…

Edited by Jo Kendall jo.kendall@futurenet.com Never mind the contents, just feel the bloody weight of the thing! Gentle Giant have certainly taken their time in providing devout fans with a suitably comprehensive box set, but if you drop Unburied Treasure on your foot, it won’t just be the band’s music that lingers on in the memory. Those lucky enough to have obtained recent box sets for Steve Hillage and Family will know what to expect: an absolute, ankle-shattering motherlode, designed to satisfy even the fussiest completist. It’s a beautiful thing, too: 30 discs deep and augmented with a lavish 136-page coffee table book and a host of brilliant extras, all housed in a robust box and with the official blessing of all members of the band thrown in as a…

An Evening With John Renbourn + Jacqui McShee FLED’GLING Two prog folk legends on top form, compiled by Renbourn’s son, Joel. Listening to this live version of My Johnny Was A Shoemaker, the combination of Jacqui McShee’s finely poised, achingly sad vocal that shapes the account of a lonely wife whose husband has chosen a life at sea, combined with John Renbourn’s dancing acoustic picking and silvery ornamental filigrees, the neck hairs start to prickle. The album is a lot more than just a guitarist backing a singer. “Hearing My Johnny Was A Shoemaker, the neck hairs prickle.” As an instrumentalist, John Renbourn was most closely associated with Bert Jansch, with whom he first recorded in 1966 and was his bandmate in Pentangle, when they were two of the hippest…

Love You To Bits CAROLINE INTERNATIONAL Wilson and Bowness return with mirrorball concept epic. Defiantly retro yet brazenly experimental, No-Man’s first album since 2008’s Schoolyard Ghosts finds Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness injecting new romantic disco dazzle into bleak modern times, emphasised by the mirrorball in an alley cover photo. In essence, the pair have returned to their earliest foragings around 30 years ago, exploring electronica, dance beats, synthpop and orchestral manouvres. As Wilson puts it, creating “music that sees a return to our roots as a synth-pop band, albeit with the conceptual sweep of our more recent albums.” “A seductively astonishing giant step.” Spread over two vinyl sides, Love You To Bits chronicles “the aftermath of a relationship from different perspectives” by subjecting the same synth-pop ditty to 10…

The Later Years 1987-2019 PINK FLOYD RECORDINGS Post-Waters final stretch stretched into hefty motherlode. After 2016’s magical The Early Years 1967-1972, Floyd’s next mega-box leapfrogs those “Middle Years” between The Dark Side Of The Moon and The Final Cut for obvious Waters-related reasons. Despite just 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason and 1994’s The Division Bell to work with, they still manage an (almost) consummate, vaults-raking account of that third and final stretch that ended with 2014’s The Endless River offcuts reconstruction. “The Division Bell retains its 2014 mix — but no Big Spliff.” 1987 had seen Floyd return with sole remaining founder member Nick Mason and Syd replacement Dave Gilmour after four years of ugly court battles with Waters. Mainly recorded on Gilmour’s houseboat, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason…

VENUE THE PALLADIUM, LONDON DATE 29/10/2019 Originally planned back in 2015, only for a calendar clash to force them down the road to Drury Lane’s Theatre Royal, Opeth finally take their bow at London’s celebrated Palladium. In the interim they’ve released two fine albums, 2016’s Sorceress and this year’s sublime In Cauda Venenum, and shifted ever further away from their original metal roots. It’s also worth noting that the Drury Lane show was marred by one of the most disruptive of Opeth audiences. Boorish fans demanding the band play more metal is nothing new but it’s interesting to note that the previous show in Norwich was unsullied by such petulance, and although Prog didn’t actually hear any disruption at the Palladium show, we were assured by those sat further back…

VENUE HACKNEY EMPIRE, LONDON DATE 02/11/19 SUPPORT SWEET BILLY PILGRIM “Spotlights!” come the cries from the top of the hall, as a baffled-looking Sweet Billy Pilgrim peer into the dark. It’s a brief moment of confusion in an otherwise jolly set from the pair (Tim Elsenburg and Jana Carpenter make up this truncated version of the band), but once the problem is resolved – poorly sighted beams are blinding the theatre’s upper echelons – normal service is resumed. Elsenburg describes the duo as the “Terry and June of prog”, although their robust harmonies suggest that a more suitable nickname might be ‘The Progclaimers’, and a jaunty version of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer rather proves the point. This band are more confident than the one that completed the Kings Place shows in…

Follow us on twitter.com/progmagazineUK STEVE HACKETT @HackettOfficial Mini band! JAY POSTONES @jaypostones 7 planes, 43 total hours in the air, 8 hours by road and 6 days travelling for me to perform 60 minutes of music with @tesseractband at @nh7dotin festival in India — and what an amazing crowd it was. CLIVE NOLAN @operafanatica Arena promo photo session last night — I guess we need a new album #newalbum #rock #progrock #tour HEATHER FINDLAY @HeatherFindlay7 Well this is getting exciting… Kick drum skin for the HF tour. Check! @drummerdave01 Printing: hellcatgraphics Design: Hugh Gilmour #ontoursoon #heatherfindlay #wildwhitehorses #newalbum #tour #tickets #onsalenow #singersongwriter #fullbandtour #startsnextmonth DAVE KILMINSTER @DaveKilminster I am EXTREMELY happy to announce that the incredible Marco Minnemann is playing drums on my new album!! I really can’t wait for…

Jethro Tull’s proggiest moments will be under the spotlight next autumn when Ian Anderson heads out on what he’s calling The Prog Years Tour. He’ll be accompanied by Tull band musicians David Goodier (bass), John O’Hara (keyboards), guitarist Joe Parrish and Scott Hammond on drums. “I have a detailed setlist but some things a gal has to keep to herself until the night of nuptials,” Anderson teases. “Some of the songs we did back when they were released and never played again due to factoring in the material for themed tours in the last decade. Some are old friends, some are distant relatives.” The setlist is expected to comprise material from albums including Aqualung, Passion Play and both parts of Thick As A Brick. In addition to the full band…

Opeth, TesseracT and Ihsahn are among the first wave of bands announced for next summer’s ArcTanGent Festival, which takes place at Fernhill Farm on August 20-22. It’ll be headliners Opeth’s only show in the UK, and sub-headliners TesseracT’s only UK festival appearance for 2020 as the British band are taking a break from the road to begin work on a new album. “We had such a great time [when we played at ArcTanGent] in 2017 – the crowd and the vibe were great, the line-up was interesting and eclectic, and it’s also in a beautiful setting,” says guitarist James Monteith. “We’re looking forward to bringing out a new production and are hoping to have some new material to include by then.” The prog-friendly boutique event also features Alpha Male Tea…

Godsticks are set to release Inescapable via Kscope on February 7. The band’s vocalist and guitarist Darran Charles tells us, “Melodically this album is much stronger than the previous ones.” He adds, “We spent a lot of time on the vocals and we’ve experimented with different guitar sounds and different textures. The key from the beginning for us was: will this song still be a strong song if it’s stripped down to guitar, vocals, bass and drums, without all the overdubs?” Lead track Denigrate has just been released. Charles didn’t feel he could sing the backing vocals with enough power and aggression in the high register, so he sent the files over to Dan Tompkins of TesseracT. “What he sent back just blew me away,” he says. “It lifted the…

WHEN SHE WAS growing up in Heerlen, Holland, Maartje Dekker would never miss Cultura Nova, the city’s theatre festival. She was enthralled by the amazing parade of floats, the people in strange, otherworldly costumes, the circus vibe of it all. Today that influence can be clearly seen and heard in the world of Dekker’s cinematic pop ensemble, Mayra Orchestra. “When I was in arts school in Maastricht,” she tells Prog, “you couldn’t study art and music, you had to choose between the two. Which I thought was strange. I chose music, but really missed art. I loved circus, and painting and drawing and making films. When I was writing songs I always had visual ideas too.” World Of Wonder, Mayra Orchestra’s 2013 debut album/DVD, is a sumptuous, fantastical artistic statement.…

IF PROGRESSIVE ROCK is about always demanding more from music, Soulsplitter are proudly on-message. Formed at university in Mannheim, Germany, this esoteric quartet style themselves as more of an artistic collective, endlessly open to collaboration, than a straightforward rock band. Meanwhile, their debut album, Salutogenesis, is simply one of this year’s most striking and idiosyncratic debuts: a sprawling, wildly cinematic modern prog concept piece (its theme: “a medical approach to how health can be maintained, even through stress and hardship”), it represents the culmination of three years of meticulous hard slog for a band that are audibly on a mission to enlighten and inspire. “We all met at school and for Simon [Kramer, guitarist] and my Bachelor’s degree, we founded this band,” explains drummer Fenix Gayed. “I always wanted to…

Wobbler (right), Jennifer Clark Band, and Grand Tour are among the acts playing at Abel Ganz’s annual Prog Before Christmas in Glasgow on December 7. This year’s charities are Maggie’s and Scottish Huntingdon’s Association. Novena will release their as-yet-untitled debut through Frontiers early next year. The London-based sextet, which features Haken vocalist Ross Jennings, released debut EP Secondary Genesis in 2016 and promise their album will “cast the net wider”. 3RDegree’s Live At ProgStock 2017: The Ones & Zeros Show is out on Blu-ray and DVD on December 2. The recordings are a companion to the two-part Volumes albums and their release comes ahead of the US band’s decision to go on indefinite hiatus. EsOterica are giving fans a taste of their new album with the single In Dreams. The…

Gentle Giant release their impressive Unburied Treasure box set through Snapper in December. The 30-disc set contains all 11 of the band’s studio albums, along with 15 live concerts — seven of which have never previously been released, while a further seven have never been officially released, and a Steven Wilson remix of the debut album on Blu-ray. Plus a host of memorabilia including a 136-page hardback book, a 96-page tour history, replica posters, signed photos, a Giant For A Day mask, Playing The Fool booklet and Missing Piece jigsaw. The box set is limited to just 2,000 copies. For your chance to win one of these rare boxes, visit www.bit.ly/GiantComp and answer the following question: The Gentle Giant character that features on the band’s 1970 debut album and from…

“The band meant a great deal to me and to Steven. It’s one of the reasons we’ve continued to work and never thrown it away.” It’s been 11 years since the duo of Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson released their last album under the No-Man banner. In that same year, Wilson released Insurgentes, his first solo statement and the doorway into a whole new career. Since then there’s been a smattering of No-Man live shows and a concert DVD, but no new material, mainly due to scheduling reasons. “When we did the tour in 2012, we created this quite distinctive variation on what No-Man did,” Bowness explains. “It was a much harder rock sound, but it was also much more influenced by classical minimalism, so we almost had this post-rock-meets-minimalist…

“I never thought of my own playing, and certainly not my singing, as being particularly brilliant.” “Perfect timing!” says Anthony Phillips, on answering the phone to Prog. “I’ve got the tea bag out of the tea, I’ve got the olive oil off the nails – I’ll explain that later – and I’m ready to go.” Phillips has just released Strings Of Light, a set of richly melodic solo guitar music, and his first new recorded work for seven years. The 24 tracks are almost entirely acoustic and range from ruminative still-lifes, to haunting, song-like vignettes, to elegantly structured creations, to dazzling exercises in finger picking. Most were written within the past few years, but a couple, Winter Lights and Shoreline, date back to just after he left Genesis in 1970.…

No Ordinary World PLANE GROOVY Karnataka man’s Celtic-tinged new project. When Ian Jones announced that Karnataka, the band he had led and played bass for two decades, were going on “indefinite hiatus” at the end of 2017, it was tempting to wonder if there was more to it than that. Especially since he announced a few months later that he was reforming the band with a new line-up – minus vocals, which turned out to be news to dismayed erstwhile singer Hayley Griffiths. Strange behaviour. “Strong hooks, powerful melodies, emotional resonance.” He has since belatedly announced a new vocalist and plans for a new Karnataka album, but maybe that break partly served to let Jones focus on long-mooted other projects Chasing The Monsoon and The Illuminae, the first of which…

The Robot Woman Trilogy MADFISH Feminist epics on CD for the first time, in a lavishly packaged box set. Recorded between 1981 and ’87, The Robot Woman Trilogy was written by Gilli Smyth and her partner Harry Williamson and grew out of the values of 70s counterculture, particularly Smyth’s feminism. It portrays women as literally dehumanised while she calls for us to ‘Burn down the tired old walls of the Big Daddy world’, and all this is set during the late Cold War – including developments in cyber intelligence that portended a dystopian Orwellian future, in which computers might turn on their creators. “Serious points made with imagination and humour.” It starts off with Williamson proclaiming that, ‘I want a comfortable quiet life with my Robot Wife and my house-trained…

VENUE ELECTRIC BALLROOM, LONDON DATE 10/10/2019 Between The Buried And Me’s near-twodecade career has seen a series of step-ups that have transformed the North Carolina quintet from misunderstood music nerds with their roots in death metal to pristine prog innovators. First with their third album, 2007’s Colors, and then their heralded 2012 release, The Parallax II: Future Sequence, pushed BTBAM into thrilling unexplored spaces where gorgeous radio-friendly choruses meet swing cabaret weirdness for a psycho-circus of prog metal. But if you saw them supporting TesseracT last year, their lacklustre set would tell another tale. Tired and incoherent, it felt like they couldn’t be bothered. Tonight however, with the opportunity to do what they do best – selfindulgence – this two-set show is a triumph. Kicking things off with the awesome…

VENUE 100 CLUB, LONDON DATE 17/10/2019 There’s a moment towards the end of Interplay when Kirby Gregory and Sonja Kristina look at each other with knowing smiles. Because both guitarist and vocalist – old stagers in the band – realise that this is turning into a special night. The returning Gregory – part of the line-up in the early days, and again briefly until 2016 – has given them power and poise. Moreover, he’s already developed a crucial relationship with new violinist Grzegorz Gadziomski and keyboard player Robert Norton. Kristina, meanwhile, radiates an earthy charm and theatrical nuance, as her voice remains uniquely expressive. It all makes this incarnation of the band among the finest in their history. And the healthy turn-out here tonight clearly appreciate what they are witnessing.…

VENUE KESWICK THEATRE, GLENSIDE, PENNSYLVANIA DATE 12/10/2019 Renaissance are experiencing their own renaissance. The storied band have reached a milestone of five decades as a recording and touring unit, and this evening’s show honours that. Long-standing Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty formed the group in 1969 with his bandmate Keith Relf, and tonight’s special show sees the founder member celebrating in style with his former band. He joins them on stage for a performance of Island, the song Annie Haslam sang at her audition. It’s a fitting tribute to their origins and perfectly encapsulates the moment and their legacy. Renaissance in 2019 are Haslam on vocals, musical director Rave Tesar on keyboards, Mark Lambert on guitar, Geoffrey Langley also on keyboards, Frank Pagano on drums, and Leo Traversa on bass. Their…

VENUE SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE, LONDON DATE 26-7/10/19 Just like the many regal Henrys of yore, HRH Prog VIII is reoccurring, and in the wedding-cake interior of the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in old London Town. SATURDAY The sonic sensory menu of mind-expanding music begins with a tintinnabulation of ambient ringing keybords and guitar. Creating a woozy pillow of sound, Soft Machine take a highly expectant audience on an intellectual jazzprog journey. The complex time signatures of Hidden Details, The Man Who Waved At Trains and The Relegation Of Pluto ensures that the grey cells of the audience keep working overtime. Caravan then take over the controls of this musical convoy, playing a peerless set of back-catalogue Canterbury favourites. Instantly capturing the attention, founder member Pye Hastings whisks everybody away on a…