After all these years… (Cue the deep throated voice.) Actually don’t. Last year, sometime, I received the somewhat infamous Rush album Caress Of Steel reissued on vinyl. You know that expensive reissue on 200 gram virgin vinyl. Though long ago purchased on CD, cassette and vinyl the new record was meant to fill out the […]
via Album Review: Rush – Caress of Steel (Vinyl) — Drew’s Reviews
As many of you have probably noticed, there’s no SOUNDSTREAM column this weekend.
Our beloved Craig Breaden has been posting them now for exactly 2 years–104 total, one per Sunday. They’ve been extraordinary. In fact, Craig’s not capable of doing anything halfway. He’s just as extraordinary as his posts and writing. Crisp, adventurous, imaginative, integrity–all words that describe Craig.
After 104 episodes, Craig is taking a well-deserved vacation with his family.
Happy Easter, Craig.
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. – John 15:12-13
Today, and for the past several days, Christians have been celebrating a love so overpowering that it appears absolutely foolish to the minds of man. I’m continually astounded by the fact that God Himself would lay down His life so that we don’t have to spend eternity separated from Him, if we choose to lay down our pride and submit to His perfect plan. In defeating death, Jesus has made that possible. What a magnificent love.
Easter here again. A time for the blind to see.
At Prog Report:
Damian Wilson:
One of my all-time favorite tracks, “Secular Souls,” by Damian Wilson and Adam Wakeman.
Ivar Bjørnson (from Enslaved) talks to Decibel about his favorite song from Below the Lights.
I feel we reached a new level with the band with that song. It felt like I had broken some kind of code for the band in terms of communicating something emotional, atmosphere. We kept the rawness and aggression, but we managed to sneak in something more tender, a bit more fragile into the body of destruction, aggression and madness that extreme metal is about.
Almost a year ago, an obscure post at Progarchy:
“Enslaved blends that melancholic overtones of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ with the ferocity of Viking metal….We can safely state; abstraction of the quirky melodic aspects of a ‘Selling England by the Pound’ and placing it within the context of 90s extreme metal has now been accomplished – with captivating surgical precision.”
Excuse the brazen self-promotion, but the mighty Ivar Bjørnson did sort of confirm my modest take. Or maybe it’s just my sleep deprivation and high blood caffeine levels talking — that 35000 ft perception – from a flight to the Atlantic coast for an Easter weekend with the likes of Incantation, Mayhem, At the Gates and Carcass.
Mark Judge praises Talk Talk in this remarkable piece on 80s nostalgia versus art; here’s an excerpt (with my correction of a typo):
As mentioned earlier, the poppy 80s group Talk Talk ignored the criticism of their record label to produce two albums that are now considered works of genius, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, records that could only be realized after years of practice and experimentation.
More than thirty years later, the internet and our social media addictions have changed everything. Along with helicopter parenting, the digital grid allows kids to avoid the kind of risks and hard work that was once required of artists, and that made them want to break new ground. Our goal as young writers and musicians and painters in the 1980s was to be great, and that required toil. These days, why sweat it out for years when you can just upload a half-baked idea onto YouTube?
Today, anyone with a computer can write a song, anyone with a smart phone is a photographer, and anyone with a blog is a journalist. On one level, this is wonderful. After all, too often the gatekeepers of the pre-digital era were liberal censors, or simply had too much power to decide what was art or not and what should and should not be published. Yet as the art house theaters and record stores and quirky magazines that sustained the era’s creativity have shuttered, modern writers and artist suffer no difficult time of formation.
As pop culture continues to overtake the culture at large – what’s left is an echo of a partially recalled time. There is nostalgia for the past, for the time before the dominance of our lives by Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, when people could have ditzy fun with[out] distraction or the hostile filter of social media. But this nostalgia offers a distorted view of the 80s. The irony and kitsch of the era takes prominence; left behind is the sweat that went into creating the best art the decade produced.
…
In 2018, the slightest criticism offered to a young writer, musician or journalist on Twitter is met with a napalm strafing of invective and resistance. The internet is wonderful in allowing talent to be exposed to the masses, but it has also made people lazy. Our culture is stuck, like Wade Watts in Ready Player One, bathing in a digital realm of shiny pop culture while the real world is a wasteland.
For this Good Friday, here is a 15-minute reflection on what serious music is, courtesy of Roger Scruton and the BBC. Don’t miss it; his thoughts on Bach are wonderful, and his remarks on Bach’s St. Matthew Passion are highly pertinent for today’s holiday. Progarchy is happy to disseminate this broadcast, since we are passionately devoted to all Good music.
This, today, from the master of prog opera, Arjen Lucassen.
I also want to take this moment (and opportunity) to thank as publicly as possible, Jon Bleicher of the U.S. office of Mascot, for being so gracious and generous.
| Dear Ayreonauts and other prog-loving people,
It’s finally here! 6 months after Ayreon Universe was performed in the 013 venue in Tilburg, the Netherlands, the show is available on CD, vinyl, bluray, DVD and digital (more on that later). ITEMS AND FEATURES
The DVD and blu-ray will have an extensive making of documentary, including interviews with the entire cast, and highlights from the try-out show performed a few weeks earlier. The triple vinyl is currently out of stock in our European store, so get out the door and pick it up at your local record store instead. A repress has been scheduled, but it could take some time before we have it back in stock. SIGNED BY ARJEN MERCH DIGITAL All the best, |
Progarchy 