Sommaire pour Issue 149 de Prog

FORMING A BAND with your dad may not be on everyone’s to-do list, but for siblings Willow and Lula Beggs, it seemed like a natural next step. Nick Beggs fostered his daughters’ love of music from a young age, inspired by his own musical success with Kajagoogoo in the 1980s. The Beggs Sisters ‘emoto-folk’ trio blossomed out of their mutual passion for music and a desire to create and share experiential stories. “I was going through a tough time and my dad suggested we all do something together to help me tap into my creativity again,” Lula Beggs begins. “The idea really grew from there.” Having wowed audiences with their close harmonies and heartfelt lyrics, The Beggs Sisters, who some readers will have seen supporting Marillion at their Roundhouse show…

WHEN WOLF PEOPLE crossed Prog’s threshold in 2010, it was like discovering a long-lost Vertigo classic. Adding supernatural folk stories in for good measure, theirs was a style and sound that inspired authors such as Benjamin Myers and Tom Cox. With them on hiatus since 2020, it’s reasonable to say they’ve been missed. Luckily the band members have all been busy musically, and this is how Large Plants have emerged – the brainchild of WP vocalist and guitarist Jack Sharp. “I had a dream that my late grandmother gave me an album and told me,‘You’ll love this,’” Sharp tells us over Zoom. “It was the most amazing music I’d ever heard and the artist was called Large Plants.” A music performance lecturer by day at Milton Keynes College, by night…

THE STORY OF The Bardic Depths is entwined with that of Big Big Train. Helmed by Lanzarote-based Dave Bandana, the quintet was formed among the posts of BBT’s Facebook group. They’ve assembled three albums so far, with studio assistance from Robin Armstrong of Cosmograf and the membership of Camel and Tiger Moth Tales’ Peter Jones. “When you have a professor of history and literature writing lyrics, you can’t help but have a love of books as a theme,” Bandana says of US-based academic Brad Birzer. “The first album was about the friendship between CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. The second was a story Brad wrote about TS Elliot. The new album, What We Really Like In Stories, is a series of songs about authors and their works.” Bandana – composer,…

“I ended up going down this avenue of thinking that I knew it all, and that it was my responsibility to tell everybody in my life what they were doing wrong.” There’s a rare moment of pause from Devin Townsend. “Please try not to make this sensationalistic,” the progressive metal maverick asks, looking right down the lens of his video camera. “What I’m trying to do with expressing this is to help people who are going through something similar. If this comes across as, ‘I did this many drugs, I was a fucking crazy person and they put me in a mental institution,’ that’s really going to do a disservice to this.” You can understand Townsend’s apprehension. He and Prog are on a video-call today to talk about his 1998…

For a lot of bands, coming up with a name is an unceremonious thing. Quite often it boils down to questions as simple as “What sounds cool?” or “What rolls off the tongue well?” Such is not the case with Zombi. The Pennsylvanian synth-prog duo, made up of Steve Moore (bass/synths) and Anthony Paterra (drums), are named after the Italian title for George A Romero’s 1978 horror classic Dawn Of The Dead. And not only does it reflect their music’s similarity to that of the seminal zombie flick’s electro-instrumental Goblin score, there are also personal memories there as well. “Dawn Of The Dead was filmed in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, which is where I grew up,” Moore explains on a video-call with Prog. “I used to work at the Monroeville Mall and,…

Listening to excerpts of John Cage Shock, Yoko Ono’s 1962 performance with John Cage and David Tudor, at her Music Of The Mind exhibition in London has put us in the mood for the latest Experimental column, which begins with percussionist-composer-producer Amy Aileen Wood’s The Heartening (Colorfield). With upright and electric bass, autoharp and sax in the mix, Wood uses a wide range of instruments from trad rock kit to kalimba, gamelan and various synths in this jazzy, smoky collection that also features her collaborator, acclaimed US singer Fiona Apple, on several tracks, breathing, humming, laughing in a very Yoko way at times. At the intersection of hip-hop, electronica, jazz and rock, kindred mixing-it-up spirits are Kassa Overall and Luke Vibert. Appearing, at times, under the name Pulse Emitter, Portland…

VENUE ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL, LONDON DATE 06/03/2024 Integrity is defined in the dictionary as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles”. Tonight that’s manifested in both human and creative form by these five unassuming (offstage, at least) Norwegians who constantly refuse to take the easy path and continue to evolve into a band that inspire further with each release and every live performance. Easy would have been not to stray too far from the black-metal blueprint Enslaved helped forge in the 90s with early demos Nema or Yggdrasill. It certainly wouldn’t have been to incorporate more and more elements of their beloved progressive rock into their sound, beginning with 2004’s Isa, and which have been steadily growing as the band’s career has progressed beyond their 30th year. Easy certainly…

VENUE THE 1865, SOUTH AMPTON DATE 03/03/2024 SUPPORT RUBY DAWN Just a handful of inquisitive fans greeted Franck Carducci and his earlier band on their first visit to Southampton nine years ago. Multiply that handful into triple figures and the airy south coast venue is looking healthily full for a Sunday night. Several fans have travelled significant distances to get their fix of France’s fantastic five. Replacing Lesoir, the originally billed support, Ruby Dawn are hauntingly compelling, fusing rock dynamics and driving rhythms with mystical eastern vibes. Carola Baer sings with both delicate and gritty soulfulness, though her flowing keyboards sound muted in the overall mix. A flurry of soundbites from classic rock songs heralds the arrival of shade-swearing Franck Carducci and his four playmates for super-charged opener Slave To Rock’n’Roll.…

VENUE PROJECT HOUSE, LEEDS DATE 02/03/2024 SUPPORT NORDIC GIANTS Over the course of seven albums, Leprous have learnt to balance the vibrant but contrasting flavours that comprise their sonic DNA. Consequently, that’s helped draw an interesting cross-section of fans – from extreme metalheads to old-school proggers – to this former warehouse. Understanding this, the Norwegian art-rockers’ 14-song set has something for everyone. While each bandmember has an ability to draw the eye, Nordic Giants employ the opposite approach for their set. The feather-festooned duo hide in the shadows at either side of the screens that sit centre-stage, scoring the quirky short films that are played on them. Ostensibly, they’re a post-rock band and have all the meditative hallmarks to prove it, but live, they’re an intriguingly multimedia experience. Illuminate feels like…

VENUE EVENTIM APOLLO, LONDON DATE 10/03/2024 When Thom Yorke sings, ‘Just gotta turn myself inside out…’ on Friend Of A Friend, it’s hard to shake the feeling that he could well be referencing The Smile’s modus operandi when it comes to their songwriting. And while it’s always been so since Radiohead made the quantum leap from the alt rock of The Bends to the game-changing OK Computer and beyond, the two albums released by The Smile – 2022’s A Light For Attracting Attention and this year’s magnificent Wall Of Eyes – have also shown that this is no mere side-project but a band in their own right with a burst of creativity that leaves the day job in the shade. It takes time and effort to unearth The Smile’s recorded pearls;…

1 Coldbones The Flooding Of The World Taken from The Cataclysm 2 Kozmotron Roadkill On The Milky Way Taken from Beyond Event Horizon 3 Kozmotron O’Sidarta Taken from Beyond Event Horizon 4 Lost In Kiev A Mere Shift Of Origin Taken from Motions 5 Lost In Kiev The Day I Ruined My Life Taken from Motions 6 Le Temps Du Loup Eulerian Taken from Cardinal 7 Le Temps Du Loup Sic Semper Tyrannis Taken from Enthraller 8 Le Temps Du Loup Leteo Taken from Leteo 9 Indignu Devolucao Da Essencia Do Ser Taken from Adeus 10 Indignu Urge Decifrar No Ceo Taken from Adeus 11 Georgeson The Ballad Of The Ninety​-​Nines Taken from The Solitude Of An Empty Sky 12 Celestial Wolves Bangui Taken from Call Of The Void 13…

The prog top 30 albums March 2024 Compiled by 1 STEVE HACKETT The Circus And The Nightwhale (INSIDEOUTMUSIC) 2 BIG BIG TRAIN The Likes Of Us (INSIDEOUTMUSIC) 3 PETER GABRIEL i/o (REAL WORLD) 4 RICK WAKEMAN Live At The London Palladium 2023 (ESOTERIC) 5 THE PINEAPPLE THIEF It Leads To This (KSCOPE) 6 IHSAHN Ihsahn (CANDELIGHT) 7 TAME IMPALA Lonerism (FICTION) 8 STEVEN WILSON The Harmony Codex (VIRGIN/SW RECORDS) 9 WITHIN TEMPTATION Bleed Out (FORCE MUSIC) 10 MIKE OLDFIELD Tubular Bells – 50th Anniversary Edition (UMC) 11 JEAN-MICHEL JARRE Versailles 400 – Live (SONY) 12 TESSERACT War Of Being (KSCOPE) 13 PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING This New Noise (TEST CARD) 14 ROGER WATERS The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux (COOKING VINYL) 15 PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING Inform Educate Entertain (TEST CARD) 16…

“I HAVE A THEORY that all bandnames are bad,” says Squeaky Feet guitarist and vocalist Colin Shore. “Once you’ve heard a name enough, you trick yourself into thinking it sounds cool. But I think Squeaky Feet is deceptive: it implies a dancey nature to our music, which we have, but people are always caught off-guard by how angular we are.” Formed by Berklee graduates ingratiated in the jam band scene in Denver’s punter-packed bars, Squeaky Feet are built on surprises, even for themselves. And they were never meant to be a prog band. “Prog, in the classic sense, wasn’t on our radar,” Shore admits. “But once we started playing together it just happened that we were making prog music. A big thing for me was when I started getting into…

The Château d’Hérouville, an 18th-century house located on the northern outskirts of Paris, was one of the most prestigious studios of the early 1970s. It was there, in August 1972, that Tull began work on the follow-up to Thick As A Brick. “Cat Stevens and Elton John had recorded landmark albums there, so we assumed it’d be OK,” says Ian Anderson. “Little did we know…” Thick As A Brick’s transatlantic success had shifted things up a gear for Tull. There was talk of the band relocating to Switzerland for tax reasons, and Anderson rented an apartment in Montreux in preparation. It was there that he began writing music for Tull’s next record, centred around a broad lyrical theme. “It started off likening various traits of animals to human traits, drawing…

”This album has been about letting the song dictate when it needs something, and when it doesn’t, and letting my ears be my guide.” Jane Getter is a jazz guitarist at heart. For the New Yorker, who’s been playing guitar since she was eight years old, that means long, winding compositions rich with improvised solos come as second nature. Yet, on her latest album with her Premonition band, Getter has gone against her own intuition. She’s stripped her songs of everything but the bare necessities. “My ability to edit songs is something that has developed over the years,” she reflects. “Sometimes, especially earlier on, I would start writing a song and then I think, ‘Oh, I really want to put this in’ just because I thought it would be cool.…

Spearheading a new kind of pagan folk revival in her native Cornwall, Daisy Rickman offers an elemental take on seasonal and celestial shifts with Howl (Weird Walk). Named after the Cornish word for sun, the album finds the young artist, filmmaker and musician expertly handling various instruments – 12-string guitar, double bass, cello, bouzouki and synths among them – to create a thoroughly beguiling set of psychedelic folk songs, nourished by deep, earthy tones that recall Nico in her solo prime. Relative veteran Isobel Campbell has come a long way since her Belle & Sebastian days, having explored all things Americana with the late, great Mark Lanegan and, more recently, sung in French with Jérôme Didelot. The exquisite Bow To Love (Cooking Vinyl) is burnished with lots of subtle detail…

VENUE ELECTRIC BALLROOM, LONDON DATE 28/02/2024 Normality clearly didn’t get a ticket this evening. The moment Slift take the stage at a crammed Electric Ballroom, they open a portal that distorts expectation, reason and genre convention. The band play space rock so psychedelic it sounds like Hawkwind have just returned from Arrakis, while a video backdrop flaunts celestial images that could easily have been a 70s Doctor Who title sequence. It’s a wild spectacle in the best way. Then again, what else should we have expected? Since they formed in Toulouse in 2016, these Frenchmen have dealt in ever-expanding sci-fi maximalism. Their second album, 2020’s Ummon, quickly became a cult classic to anyone with ears for experimental, heavy and/or style-smashing sounds. Then this year’s Ilion made that behemoth seem tiny in hindsight,…

VENUE BELLEVILLE, COSMOPOLITE, OSLO, NORWAY DATE 02/03/2024 On a late winter’s night in Oslo, group of self-professed “Progheads” from a Facebook community with thousands of members are at the city’s historical Cosmopolite to celebrate their 10th anniversary. This year, the highlight is a headline set from Norway’s finest symphonic prog ensemble, Wobbler. The six-song performance lasts for over an hour and a half and opens with one of the band’s earliest tracks, Rubato Industry, from their very first record, 2005’s Hinterland. Frontman Andreas Prestmo wasn’t even in the band when it came out, but he performs it live like he’d written it; fully engaged, beating the tambourine with fervour and leading an audience clap-along. Wobbler then jump forward to 2020’s Dwellers Of The Deep, whose Five Rooms showcases Lars Fredrik Frøislie’s keyboard…

VENUE REGGIE’S MUSIC JOINT, CHICAGO, IL, USA DATE 03/03/2024 It’s a chilly Sunday evening in Chicago. Many in the city have settled into their homes for the evening, bringing their weekends to a close to gear up for work or school the next morning. However, a passionate band of music fans have gathered at Reggie’s Music Joint, a quaint South Side venue known for featuring prog bands, with an entirely different purpose in mind. They’ve come to rock! Or, more appropriately, to be rocked! Hometown heroes District 97 are here to make that possible. District 97 might be using the smaller of the venue’s multiple stages, but they take that stage with the attitude of a band playing in an auditorium or amphitheatre. They’ve recently released Stay For The Ending, their…

VENUE THE UNDERWORLD, LONDON DATE 14/03/2024 Three decades ago, no one would have predicted this. When Cynic released their full-length debut, Focus, in 1993, they were presented as the newest name in death metal, signed to Roadrunner Records and based in the scene’s capital of Tampa, Florida. However, the album was a celestial prog wormhole and the backlash forced the band to break up a year later. Compare that outrage to today. Focus has become a seminal text in progressive metal, its layers of vocoder, experimental melodies and jazz-like drumming inspiring countless acts, yet have never been emulated. Tonight, Cynic are performing a once-reviled first impression in its entirety for its belated 30th birthday, and The Underworld is sold out for the spectacle. Cynic, famously and for years a trio, have…

Hello and welcome to the latest issue of Prog. Issue 149 – one away from the big 150 – yet no poorer for it! Did you know that by 1974 Jethro Tull were selling out four consecutive nights at the at the 20,000-capacity LA Forum and two at New York’s Madison Square Garden? And a year later, five nights at the LA Forum? Little wonder Melody Maker dubbed them “the world’s biggest band” at the time! It’s fair to say that prog was very big news Stateside in the 70s, and it was Tull who led the way for the likes of Yes and ELP, and later Pink Floyd and Genesis. With stats like that, they were even primed to give Led Zeppelin a bit of a run for their…

“The first time I heard Meshuggah, I wasn’t into it; it scared me. They were one of the first bands I heard that had screaming, but I liked it because they were singing it, too. I was always in that frame of mind that if it doesn’t have singing then I don’t like it and then I heard Meshuggah. And I was like, ‘You know what? This is fine!’ I remember it was the riff for Stengah – this was the heaviest, most exciting, groovy thing that I could possibly imagine. I’ve seen them twice. The very first time was at the Wiltern in LA on the Koloss tour and it was amazing. Late ’22, we took a break from recording Mammoth II because Meshuggah were in town at the…

While not all religious experiences lead to conversion, there are those powerful enough to merit artistic exploration. Ergo Northodoxian is a project that’s been put together by Estonian promoter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Lauri Laubre after witnessing devotion so intense from followers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that it left him profoundly shaken. Visiting southern Ukraine in 2007, Laubre – then, as now, a confirmed atheist – was introduced to Archimandrite Mikail Pyanov, the rector of the Holy Trinity Dukonsky Monastery. He showed him the restricted and cloistered sections of the monastery, and then introduced Laubre to the pilgrims who’d travelled from across Ukraine. “I’d never seen anything like it before, but about 100 people were laying on the ground and praying,” says Laubre. “They’d been there for two weeks with their…

Randy McStine is a man with his fingers in a lot of prog pies. From playing live in Porcupine Tree to solo shows opening for The Pineapple Thief and collaborations with Jane Getter Premonition and Dave Kerzner, McStine is fast becoming one of progressive rock’s first call multi-instrumentalists and vocalists. “I’m not looking for tabloid fame,” says McStine. “I’m looking for a really respected body of work, a large enough audience-base to play nice venues, and to have a living, frankly.” His ambitions may be relatively modest, but his own music is anything but, borne out by his technically intimidating albums with drummer Marco Minnemann. Does playing solo gigs, opening for The Pineapple Thief and Iamthemorning, help you to reach new listeners? Definitely. When you play with a band of…

By the middle of 1971, Jethro Tull had made real inroads in North America, headlining to several thousand people every night. On June 24 of that year, they began a month-long tour of the US and Canada. Supporting them was none other than Yes – then on the rise, but yet to make the same commercial breakthrough as Tull. Yes’s long-serving guitarist looks back on a tour that saw the two bands planting the flag of progressive rock in American soil. Did you know Jethro Tull before you supported them in the US? I remember seeing them on Top Of The Pops because Ian was such a flamboyant performer. They were the kind of band who did what the hell they liked – they mixed the progressive and the psychedelic…

Sea Of Hopeless Angels (markusreuter.com) is the ‘spontaneous collaboration’ from Markus Reuter and Stefano Castagna. Touch guitar expert Reuter (Stick Men, Crimson ProjeKt) needs little introduction in these parts, and here his former mixer Castagna steps up to a compositional role, having written some grand yet sensitive ambient backing for Reuter’s cerebral, fretwork. The mood is reflective and restrained on this haunting, oblique work. Dublin’s Nebularis go all in on their none-more-prog metal debut Exodus – Shattered Earth Saga – Part I (nebularis.bandcamp.com). The album cover and songtitles (Voyager, Holocene, Tellurian) tell the tale: this is a heavy, melodic sci-fi trip with a story, about humans traversing the galaxy in search of a new home among the stars). With meaty riffs from central musician Mó Sheerin, throat-shredding, hooky melodies from…

VENUE RIVOLI THEATER, THE WILLIAMS CENTER, RUTHERFORD, NJ, USA DATE 02/03/2024 SUPPORT DAVE BAINBRIDGE Tonight’s performance from Big Big Train is quite special. Not only is it celebrating The Likes Of Us (their first studio album with vocalist Alberto Bravin replacing the late David Longdon), but perhaps more importantly, it marks their second-ever show in the United States. The collective are certainly up to the task, however, delivering a spellbinding concert that sees Bravin demonstrating his merits as their latest frontman. With opening support from beloved guitarist/keyboardist Dave Bainbridge, Big Big Train endure as one of modern prog rock’s most prestigious groups. Bainbridge gets things going with a 30-minute instrumental set comprising himself and pre-recorded tracks. It’s an impressive feat: he dishes out ethereally vibrant, menacingly gothic and/or festively celtic compositions with…

VENUE O2 RITZ, MANCHESTER DATE 24/02/2024 SUPPORT UNPROCESSED TesseracT are coming to the end of a run of more than 30 shows throughout Europe and the UK, and tonight it’s the turn of the north of England, with the quintet swinging by a dreary Manchester. Following a chaotic warm-up from The Callous Daoboys, which piques the crowd’s interest, it’s the turn of German melodic prog metallers Unprocessed, who seem to have refined their stage presence since 2023’s Radar Festival, where we thought they fell a little flat. This time around, vocalist Manuel Gardner Fernandes holds the audience in the palm of his hand. He fills the stage, pacing from one side to the other while delivering flawless, soaring vocals and executing exemplary growls that deliver a much more intense impact in…

VENUE CIVIC CENTRE, STOURPORT DATE 02/03/2024 Part of the thrill of festivals is that anything can happen. So, when a fire alarm forces everyone at the Fusion Festival out into sub-zero conditions for 15 minutes during headliner Franck Carducci’s set on Saturday night, it’s all considered part of the fun. This Stourport-based festival has carved out a successful niche for itself over five editions. Its spacious venue and relaxed vibe are hard to fault, as is the infrastructure that organisers Steve and Lou Gould have built around the event. Some last-minute organisational issues – which can happen to any event like this – do impact what happens onstage, however. While a new audio company largely copes well with a demanding schedule, the onstage sound is variable, and with changeovers tight, the…

VENUE O2 SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE, LONDON DATE 16/03/2024 SUPPORT RANDY McSTINE As a measure of the level of excitement preceding tonight’s show, an audible gasp from the stalls is swiftly followed by the kind of enthusiastic cheers usually reserved for favourite songs when two of the road crew lift the black drapes to reveal Gavin Harrison’s drum kit. Positioned away at stage-left instead of the upstage home that’s traditional for tub thumpers, the drum nerds strain their necks as they cast their admiring glances over an extended kit that includes a wide variety of rack toms, floor toms and a range of cymbals of different sizes. And though there are no such hollers for the unveiling of Steve Kitch’s keyboards, the love is undoubtedly still there. Indeed, a level of politeness…