Previously a quintet featuring keyboards and sax, now a trio, Xavi Reija’s band does things a drums/bass/guitar line up should not be able to, creating splendidly intuitive avant jazz rock suites that do not suffer the loss of those aforementioned…
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You can’t make an album based around the Warr guitar without it sounding like the last incarnation of King Crimson, can you? Well, not necessarily, as this fine release proves. Spoke of Shadows is Herd of Instinct Warr guitarist Mike…
View More Spoke of Shadows – Spoke of Shadows
Languishing in my pile of “to do” CDs since the turn of the year Field Day Rituals, the fourth album by Norwegian trio Splashgirl, released in February last year is a little outside my usual remit of left field and…
View More Splashgirl – Field Day Rituals
Messenger are a multi-national troupe who came together in London in 2012. Led by guitarists and vocalists Khaled Lowe and Barnaby Maddick, they hooked up with producer Jaime Gomez Arellano, who has worked with Ulver amongst many others, and shut…
View More Messenger – Illusory Blues
Swiss minimalists Sonar were formed after guitarists Stephen Thelen and Bernhard Wagner had attended Robert Fripp’s Guitar Craft classes. The pair recruited drummer Manuel Pasquinelli and bassist Christian Kuntner and Sonar was born. Inspired by the Crimson line-ups of 1972…
View More Sonar – Static Motion
We are delighted to publish this interview with Gayle Ellett, co-founder of Californian prog legends Djam Karet, who this year celebrate their 30th anniversary with the release of the cunningly titled Regenerator 3017, reviewed recently by yours truly on these…
View More Gayle Ellett – Djam Karet
I was only half joking when I introduced this album in a recent edition of “Something For The Weekend”, a blog which seeks to point the inquisitive towards the new releases we scribblers consider worth a spin, with the phrase…
View More Djam Karet – Regenerator 3017
These two deluxe reissues by American label Cuneiform – Triskaïdékaphobie and Le Poison Qui Rend Fou – shine a light on one of the original Rock In Opposition bands, the Belgian collective Présent. In 1979 having left Univers Zéro after…
View More Présent – Triskaïdékaphobie & Le Poison Qui Rend Fou
O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London Wednesday 12th March 2014 Having reviewed the recently released Live In Tokyo by The Crimson ProjeKCt on these very pages, it now falls to your intrepid correspondent to report from the front… well, row D…
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Jack Bruce’s only album between 1980 and 1987, the year the Somethin Els project was started, was the atypical electronica oddity Automatic from 1983. During that time, although touring occasionally Jack was doing battle with his personal demons, a battle…
View More Jack Bruce – Somethin Els