Some great Kate Bush images today from the Pulp Librarian…
Category: progressive rock
Andy Tillison/The Tangent News
Andy posted this two days ago on Facebook. My apologies for not getting it up on Progarchy sooner. My excuse: I’m on spring break!
So here’s where we are right now.
“All is safely gathered in” as the great English harvest hymn proclaims. Just over a week ago Theo Travis was up here in Yorkshire having a lot of tea and recording all his parts for the new record… the final bass sections arrived from Austria where Jonas is currently recording and the record is now in the mixdown stage.
This time it’s gonna be completely different in procedure. I decided that it was time to have a change in how we produce our records and after Luke’s excellent work for us on “A Few Steps” decided that it was time to hand over the reins to a guy who has been a colleague and friend of mine for nearly a decade now. Luke threw himself into helping me with the production of “Comm” and in the years since then I think that his talents in the production department have advanced so much that it would be senseless to ignore them in favour of satisfying my own desire to do the work myself.
Rather than do a kind of “shared” production, I decided that Luke should totally “have the Conn” as they say in all good submarining films and “Star Trek.” That was, of course, if he accepted the job – and I’m very pleased to say he did.
The album has been composed for months now and was all put together here in Yorkshire on my PC system (other than guitars, basses and Marie’s vocals) A couple of months ago, everything was normal… but then came the major task… we had to migrate the whole session, lock stock and barrel from a PC in Yorkshire to a Mac in Brighton running a totally different recording system. I’ll just take some time to explain what this involves….
One way we COULD have approached this was by me submixing a Drum track, bass track, keys track and guitars track etc… so that Luke could do a mix of – well… er… what i had already mixed. After a few discussions we decided that this isn’t what we wanted to do – we wanted Luke to have the whole enchilada available to him so he could actually do a real mix as is if had the whole multitrack archive..
So – the procedure started – of taking every single instrument, every sound, every vocal line, every drum, cymbal, hi hat and sound effect an making a full stereo or mono file of just that. In the case of Slow Rust this meant generating a 26 minute long 24 bit wav file for more than 60 instruments or microphones. Then sending these 60 half gigabyte files over the internet.
This would have all been a lot easier if I’d been a Mac user, but that’s not the case, so this way was the only way to give Luke the true freedom of the mix.
For me it’s been a weird and unsettling experience. It’s the first time that I have ever taken my hands off the wheel in one of our projects. But now, as the results start to come in, I am delighted with the way it’s all sounding – and indeed am forging a relationship with the music of this album that isn’t as tainted by my frustrations of having had to mix it. Luke understands my ideas so well, knows what I’m after yet introduces new techniques and ideas that were beyond my normal experience.
Of course I am still involved in the mix – I suggest tweaks, modifications, like ideas, reject ideas… ask for things to be done etc… but this is more of an “executive” role than the one I have played since the beginning. It’s allowed me to spend more time on the composition and playing and keep my head clear right to the end of the process.
Couple of weeks from now it will be all done.. and in July – hopefully you’ll hear the fruit of our labours. The content of the album is very much “an album I wanted to make” rather than a career move or an attempt to solidify our position in global rankings. I started writing it in 2014 while on tour with The Tangent and Karmakanic. A lot has happened since then – both to me and to the world. When it’s finally done. I’ll tell you more.
Happy Pi Day from Kate Bush
Happy Pi Day from Kate Bush, even if she does sing it incorrectly:
Real Pi: 3. 1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 Kate Bush Pi: 3. 1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 58231974944 5923078164 06286208 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223
Harken to the Night Siren
Steve Hackett The Night Siren
Now I’ll be honest the latest Steve Hackett album I have heard is 1994’s Blues With a Feeling, which is not your typical Hackett record, and whilst I have the premonitions set, with the lush 5.1 remastering of his early solo works, despite having heard him guest on other albums, and seen him live several times, cost and life getting in the way have stopped me getting some of his more contemporary work.
Still, he is the only former member of Genesis who is putting out new material on a regular basis, advancing and expanding his sound, and he is widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarist in prog, and this album, as it should be is a mighty impressive contemporary prog record.
Let me bring you strings from the crypt
Jethro Tull: The String Quartets
No stranger to classical arrangements and the fuller sound that an orchestra or string quartet can bring to his music, former Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson and long term collaborator John O’Hara having seen the Carducci Quartet decided to get together with them and rearrange a selection of classic Tull songs for string quartet, with Ian Andersons instantly recognisable flute weaving through some of the tracks, and John O’Hara playing piano on a couple of them, Ian even adds his distinctive vocals to a few of the tracks as well.
With the striking artwork this splendid addition to the canon is released on 24th March.
Some of you out there might think that releasing an album of old material slightly rearranged is a holding exercise (or a cynical exploitation exercise), after all Ian’s last album Homo Erraticus was released in 2014, and whilst he’s taken his Ian Anderson/ Jethro Tull live show on the road, there’s been no new material since then.
A rare and beautiful collaboration with Kate Bush and David Gilmour…
This fine track comes from Roy Harper’s 1980 album, The Unknown Soldier, with Kate Bush also on vocals and David Gilmour on guitar:
soundstreamsunday: “Sowiesoso” by Cluster
Keith Jarrett‘s success in his tours of Germany in the early 70s owed some debt to the burgeoning, radical art scenes taking over that country’s larger cities. German audiences supported a fiercely independent free rock culture that drew heavily from American jazz — particularly the extended, disciplined jams of In a Silent Way-era Miles Davis — and that pushed Hendrix‘s electric sorcery into giant drifting icebergs of sound (Tangerine Dream) on the one hand or an infinitely dissected, atomized funk (Can) on the other. In between lay the devotional music of Popol Vuh, the blues-less Zep power of Amon Duul II, the world jazz of Embryo, the enormously influential “motorik” tic-tic-tic of Kraftwerk, and the organic electronic excursions of Cluster. With its origins in the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, Hans-Joachim Roedelius’s and Dieter Moebius’s Cluster shared roots with Berlin’s Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, but, in collaborating with guitarist Michael Rother in the group Harmonia in the mid-70s, also had close ties with Dusseldorf bands Kraftwerk and Neu!. Cluster wore these associations — along with very fruitful collaborations with Brian Eno — meaningfully but lightly, maintaining in its mid-period albums a distinctly warm electronic-ism flush with melody.
With 1976’s Sowiesoso, Cluster hit its stride, creating in its sunny, languorous intimacy a 37-minute treatise on laid-back ambient techno whose mood echoes across the work of Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Air, Tortoise, and most recently Schnauss and Munk. The title track’s soft pulse and gently looping themes conjure in music the album’s cover: Moebius, Roedelius, dog, countryside, sprays of sunlight. Where Kraftwerk consciously and brilliantly used electronic music to cast in relief the human/technology divide, Cluster on “Sowiesoso” shows that separation to be meaningless. Electronic music of the heart.
soundstreamsunday presents one song or live set by an artist each week, and in theory wants to be an infinite linear mix tape where the songs relate and progress as a whole. For the complete playlist, go here: soundstreamsunday archive and playlist, or check related articles by clicking on”soundstreamsunday” in the tags section above.
“Ascension” from Voyager’s forthcoming Ghost Mile (May 12, 2017)
The previous Voyager album, V, made my Top Ten list for 2014 of the best prog albums. Click the link to read my review.
Now here’s the awesome video for “Ascension” from Voyager’s forthcoming new album Ghost Mile (release date: May 12, 2017). Can’t wait!
LEAH Working on Next Album
Got this email in my inbox this morning:
Well, hello, hello! I hope all is well in your neck of the woods 🙂
I wanted to give a quick update on all things music, including a surprise coming up!
OK, it might not be that quick, but I promise it’ll be good!
NEW ALBUM:
It’s very funny… I started out last year, thinking I was going to write a non-metal album. The idea was to keep it in the Celtic and Fantasy vein, similar to some of my non-metal tracks I’ve already put out. That was my intention.
Let’s just say I’ve strayed from that idea quite a bit!
You might know I’ve been working with producer Oliver Philipps (Phantasma, Everon, and he does a lot of work with Delain, and many, many bands).
The cool part about working with him is he’s really encouraged me to just let the music come out however it needs to, and to not try and force it into a certain box. This has been very good for me.
And you know what came out?
A lot of metal! 😆
I guess you can take the girl out of metal, but you can’t take metal out of the girl.
Well, I’m looking at the 8 songs we have completed pre-production for, and so far there’s a really nice balance of more ambient, mellow or mid-tempo tracks, and higher-energy metal songs.
Also, I didn’t mean to, but a lot of my little prog tendencies have come forth from the depths of Leah-land, haha!
Oliver is just now finishing the orchestration for what, at the moment, is an 11-minute beast of a track! And the interesting part is, neither he or I ever get bored of this song. He told me — “It’s the good side of prog without the evil” (or annoying parts)! 😉
My goal is to have 10 tracks for this album and keep it shorter (though I’m not helping the situation with 11-minute tracks!), so I have a couple more songs to go. I have at least two that are contenders, which I need to finish writing, so that is my objective in the coming week.
Continue reading “LEAH Working on Next Album”
Marillion: OUT OF THE BOX
I often believe that Marillion is as much a mood or a state of mind as it is a band. I try hard to keep up with band, but, frankly, it’s hard at times. The band does so much and so often that I sometimes realize months later that they’ve released this or that DVD, blu-ray, CD, or download. Clearly, this is a first-world problem, and it’s a joyous one.
Only about a month or so ago did I realize that the band had released a blu-ray set of its three nights playing in the Netherlands in March, 2015. One disk per night.
Disk one: “Waves and Numbers,” March 20, 2015
Disk two: “Marbles in the Park,” March 21, 2015
Disk three: “Singles Night,” March 22, 2015
A mood, a state of being. The essence of Marillion?
I have few regrets in life, even after 49 years, but I do regret that I have yet to see the band live. I hope the Good Lord grants me the time still to make this a reality.
Progarchy 