One of the more interesting trends in progressive rock music is the emergence of the ‘Project’ idea, whereby musicians from various bands come together, temporarily, to form a new outfit, writing and performing music outside their usual remit. A couple…
View More Pattern-Seeking Animals – Pattern-Seeking Animals
Bands need to evolve, change, move on, stay fresh (unless you’re the Rolling Stones), and I wondered what The Gift would deliver with their fourth album… A promise is a promise, and Mike Morton promised that Album Four would be…
View More The Gift – Antenna
Moscow based Lost World Band formed in 1990, comprising three classically trained students, Andy Didorenko on violin, guitar and vocals, Vassil Soloviev on flute, and pianist/producer Alexandr Akimov. Between 2001 and 2016 the band released five studio albums, a live…
View More Lost World Band – Spheres Aligned
With little or no pomp and ceremony, the core members of The Samurai Of Prog, namely bassist Marco Bernard, drummer Kimmo Pörsti and multi-instrumentalist Steve Unruh, have released seven studio albums since 2011, plus one compilation of their long out…
View More The Samurai Of Prog – Toki No Kaze
For a little over a year, I was fortunate enough to live in a flat at the edge of St. John’s Wood, living less than half a kilometre away from the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing, which I’d pass daily…
View More The Beatles – The Beatles: 50th Anniversary Box Set
“Gong is more than a band. It’s an idea. A way of life. A continuum that exists in all times, in all places, everywhere.” So says the opening line of the press release accompanying the album now firing its way…
View More Gong – The Universe Also Collapses
AKKU Quintet seem to be part of a modern Swiss tradition of cyclical minimalist music, where the beginning is the end is the beginning. Or if you will, the departure of one theme transposes the arrival of another. Led by…
View More AKKU Quintet – Depart
Intelligent Music is a Bulgarian production company, established and owned by Milen Vrabevski, MD – composer, musical producer, and patron of the arts. He has overseen the previous three albums of this ilk, which appear to have attracted some quite…
View More Intelligent Music Project IV – Sorcery Inside
The ninth studio album by Mediæval Bæbes, A Pocketful of Posies has been five years in the making for musical director, Katharine Blake. Recorded against a backdrop of tremendous loss, Katharine continued the work she started with her partner Nick…
View More Mediæval Bæbes – A Pocketful of Posies
There is an episode in The?Lie which contains one of the most emotionally punishing songs I think I have ever experienced. Certainly, on hearing it for the first time, the sheer force of its brutality stopped me dead in my…
View More Seven Steps to the Green Door – The?Lie