Gazpacho, March of Ghosts

Following Friday's posting, we continue logically to Norwegian post-progger's album March of Ghosts (Kscope), which was created in a white-heat burst of inspiration following their tour and the resultant double CD London (see Friday's post).

This is a thematically unified package of some brilliance: art songs of a high caliber, nicely wrought arrangements, melancholy, vocals and musicianship of distinction. It's symphonic, it has some Euro-Mideast folk elements to brighten up the program and it shines with a kind of largess. High art, this is.

Based on this and the previous live album, I would have to sat that Gazpacho plies some of the most creative and interesting post-prog music today. March of Ghosts has a one-vast-work flow to it that triumphs. It's very beautiful...

Gazpacho, London

Gazpacho is a noteable Norwegian post-prog outfit. Their double-CD release from last fall, London (Kscope), affords you an in-depth listen to the band and its many facets in a live setting.

They play a sound-scape orchestrated sprawl-carpet of ambitious, somewhat melanchology music that excels in song form, arrangements, great vocal presence and instrumental skills. I accidently skimmed a review that compared them to Radiohead. Maybe so. I hear also a little of the Steve Wilson influence plus perhaps Jeff Buckley and the recent band Ours. Though it's possible that Gazpacho never even heard the latter. But there is a resonance.

What's going on here has teeth. It is formidable post-prog. It is impressive. It is moody. It is very, very good.

It's another rather extraordinary band in the Kscope stable. Find this one, keep it, and listen to it if you want something really worthwhile in this vein.

Information Superhighway, Definitely Not the Ending!

Information Superhighway is a Chicago-based advanced rock outfit (post-prog? prog?). They are distinguished by the very engaging vocal style of Leslie Beukelman and the musical vision of composer/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Rob Clearfield. Their second album This is Not the Ending (http://informationsuperhighway.bandcamp.com) has been playing in my space for about a week and I must say I am taken with it.

They draw on the longer forms that prog rock traditionally addresses, but there are contemporary strains in there, some space, odd meters and other influences that are skilfully integrated into their own personal amalgam.

Leslie sings like a songbird; Rob writes and arranges with a flair; the four-person lineup delivers a sound with musicianship and drive. The original drummer left after this album was completed. The new lineup has a free live download recording you can get at the bandcamp address listed above. I have not listened to that yet.

This is Not the Ending has much to like about it. They are a free-ranging outfit and they clearly have talent. You can grab the album at CD Baby and you should if you'd like to hear something new and exemplary in the prog to fusion to alt nexus. Seriously good.

Trey Gunn Retrospective: I'll Tell What I Saw

Trey Gunn, integral later King Crimson member, touch guitarist and musical composer-conceptualist has created some important music in the last two decades. He has made eight solo albums (1993-2010) and collaborated with many artists. Some of the fruits of those efforts can be heard in his new 2-CD retrospective I'll Tell What I Saw (7dMedia 1012).

The cumulative effect of repeated listens to the more than two hours of music on this set is impressive. There are world-music-meets-Gunn-progressive-music excursions with musicians and singers from Mexico, Italy, Russia and elsewhere. There's the progressive rock-funk that relates to and extends what he was doing in his King Crimson days. There are soundscapes of a deep sort. And much more besides.

What strikes me listening to the back-to-back highlights of his solo career is the sheer musicality and sonic originality of it all. It's a style that needs your attention because the soundstage is commonly packed with musical colors and events. The time spent is rewarded with much to savor and linger over. There is wonderful guitar and bass work, there's the orchestral conception and the layering, there is compositional brilliance.

Trey Gunn may well be rock's premier sound-artist of the past 20 years. Certainly he is one of the very select few at the very top of the game.

Revel in this one. Highly recommended.

Julie Slick Talks About Her New Album, Her Music & Playing the Bass

Julie Slick is a much-in-demand bassist and stylist of importance in the advanced rock worlds out there. She has been working as a member of Adrian Belew's power trio among other things. Her debut album (Julie Slick) just came out and it's a stunner. We'll be reviewing it in a few days but today I post a most interesting conversation we had via e-mail concerning her music and the making of the album.

GREGO EDWARDS: What brought you to take up the bass guitar? Did you have any model players that inspired you?


JULIE SLICK: My whole family is comprised of musicians and music lovers. My grandfather played trombone in many great jazz bands (including Buddy RIch's and Billie Holiday's) and my dad collects vintage guitars - we have over 30 in our quaint Philly row house. My brother Eric was always a drummer, so growing up, I'd just pick one of his awesome axes up and mess around.... Eventually one day (when I was 11) I picked up his fretless Gibson Ripper and thought to myself "Hmm, I don't have to learn chords, or solo, and I can just hide in the background..." I was a really shy kid, and it was the first time Eric would allow me to jam with him and his friends. My parents also collect vinyl records, so once I started to get serious about playing bass, my Dad would play me the music of some of his favorite bass players - Jack Bruce, Paul McCartney, Chris Squire, Stanley Clarke, John Wetton, Greg Lake... the list goes on...

GREGO: You’ve played with an impressive assortment of alt/prog masters. Was it a matter of one set of associations leading to another or a kind of musical logic based on what you yourself heard in your mind’s eye? Or both?

JULIE: Hmm. . . well, coming up through the School of Rock, I got to meet and play with Ann Wilson, Alice Cooper, Stuart Copeland, Eddie Vedder, Napolean Murphy Brock, and Ike Willis, among others - it was amazing! Two years passed and I was going to Drexel University (for their new Music Industry program), when one day I got a call from Paul Green (the founder of the school) and he asked me "How are your chops? I'd like for you to fly down to Nashville next week and audition to be in Adrian Belew's new power trio." I was stunned - I had been such a HUGE fan of Ade's growing up. I even bought my first serious condenser mic - a Shure KSM32 - because he endorsed it in their ads. Obviously touring with a luminary like him, I got to meet and perform with a lot of incredible artists like Pat Mastelotto, Tony Levin, Robert Fripp, Bela Fleck, Umphree's Magee, Les Claypool... I know - I am unbelievably lucky!

GREGO: Do you keep your chops up with a regular practice routine or is it a matter of just playing as much as you can?

JULIE: I pretty much play every day, from anywhere to ten minutes to several hours. Sometimes I'll practice one of Adrian's songs, or a Zappa riff to keep my chops up, and other times I just improvise. There are days where I don't play at all though, just to remove myself from any routines I'm getting into. I like to think it keeps my ideas fresh. Or I could just be more in the mood to cook that day, haha!

GREGO: Haha! Food is good, to paraphrase the (Young) Frankenstein movie. Your first album is a keeper! Is it a kind of first step, a culmination of where you’ve been and where you are now?

JULIE: Thanks!!! I recorded as I wrote, using Logic and my Roland VB-99 as tools to compose. I'd come up with an idea, track it, and build it up from there. So I suppose it's more of a collection of my influences - bassists, composers, and producers. I wanted to make a cool-sounding album that could be easily digested, not just a self-indulgent frenzy of bass chops. Of course I love progressive music, so obviously the compositions have that quality to them, but I also enjoy electronic and simple pop-rock, so I think one can hear those impressions on my style as well.

GREGO: Your bass sounds great on the tracks. Did you mostly record by miking off your amps or was some of it recorded direct to the console?

JULIE: Actually I have a really awesome old Ampeg B15 - but it was getting repaired when I was making the album, so I just put the bass directly into my Keeley compressor and Sebatron VMP-4000. I had all of these intentions to re-record or re-amp my direct tracks, but I often mix as I record, and the process went pretty quickly, so once the amp was ready, I was pretty much already finished and satisfied with the sounds!

GREGO: How did you come to use such a varied grouping of musicians from piece to piece? Did each combination suggest itself via a sound you were after?

JULIE: Well after writing the first couple of songs, I realized I needed real drums desperately on certain tracks - others I could get away with just using Logic's Ultrabeat. So I wrote to Marco Minnemann, and he sent me his drums for "Many Laughs" overnight. Once I saw how quick and easy the process could be, I started asking some of my favorite players (who have home studios) to see who'd be interested in helping me out. I was in shock when Robert [Fripp] wrote back, allowing me to sample any of his soundscapes. It was a lot of fun to explore that library, and figure out ways to incorporate them into my pieces to provide new textures (and for some, new directions). The first track, "Mela" has the most contributors because it has the most complex arrangement - and it sounded really cheesy with just software samples!

GREGO: It seems that post-prog or whatever one calls it has really blossomed further lately into new and exciting avenues. Of course you are a part of that. Is there something in the air? Is it just a matter of a good time for creative work?

JULIE: Honestly, I was just trying to figure out how to work some of my new pedals (specifically the Roland VB-99). One day in late January, I was getting some cool sounds looping my bass, and playing it as guitar through the '99. I thought it sounded pretty neat, so I set up some mics and next thing I knew, I was starting to compose what would become "Shadow Trip." The process was exciting and new for me - I hadn't written anything in years. I became addicted to it, and we were getting a TON of snow in Philly anyway, so I just stayed inside and worked on it for several hours everyday. I'm still amazed at how quickly it all came together - I had the CDs in my hands by early May!

GREGO: Where do you go from here? What’s coming up for you in the near future?

JULIE: Well, as said, I'm pretty addicted to the process now, so I hope to create another album soon. For the next one, I'd like to work with some vocalists so that it's not totally instrumental, and I think it would be a lot of fun and different for me.I'd also be interested in getting some of the music licensed for use in TV or film. And of course I love touring and performing, so perhaps I'll put some more shows together... I'm already opening for Adrian June 30th (at Mexicali Blues in Teaneck) and July 1st (at World Cafe in Philly).

GREGO: Thanks Julie!

Tuner Weaves Complex and Fascinating Musicscapes

February 26, 2009—We seem to be on a roll. Today’s CD is another gem, continuing an unbroken string of goodies lately.

Tuner’s latest brings a brainy sense of adventure to the progressive genre without slighting the sensual side of things. Muut—Live in Estonia 2007 (Unsung) takes some of the innovations in sound and approach that came out of earlier musics—Miles Davis’s psychedelic period, Terje Rypdal’s large-eared psycho-romanticism, King Crimson’s keen sense of sound texture and sprawl—and synthesizes them to generate something altogether different. Add an all-important, thoroughly developed knack for producing electronically altered orchestral-sized musicscapes and incisive live playing. There are no wasted musical moments.

Tuner is the very musical drummer Pat Mastelotto (a fixture in King Crimson—we met up with him earlier this month on the Live Crimson set) and guitarist, mastermind and producer Markus Reuter (who studied with Robert Fripp and his Guitarcraft learning system). These two musicians generate intensely interesting music that stays with you and does not pander to the infantile expectations that most pop-slop generates in the casual listener. That’s because it is NOT pop-slop. It is genuinely innovative sound forging and one of the best progressive CDs so far this year. The fact that it was recorded live makes it all the more impressive. Keep going, Tuner. You sound great!!

Trey Gunn's "Modulator" Breaks Ground in Advanced Electric Music

As was discussed in our interview with Trey Gunn several days ago (see below), Modulator (7d Media 1011) was created in novel circumstances. Marco Minnemann recorded a 50-minute drum solo with his own rhythmic muse guiding him. It's free ranging and very exciting drumming. He challenged multi-instrumentalist, touch guitarist and musical composer-conceptualist Trey Gunn to create a musical work based on the solo, using only Gunn's quite fertile imagination and the flow of drumming from the original track.

Trey responded with some of the most ambitious, interesting and satisfying music I've ever heard in the post-prog mode. Using guitars, touch guitars, bass guitars, keys and samples, he painstakingly built up a piece of orchestral dimensions. The stream of consciousness aspect of the drumming helped lead to a work that traverses an enormous amount of territory: rocking passages, incredibly complex rhythmic-melodic segments of rare beauty and interludes of reflective charm. It's not easily described because it has so much going on musically.

This is the kind of complex yet directly accessible music you could listen to for years and still get more out of each time. Every listen for me hits my ears in a different way than before; I hear more connections and underlying pattern and so enjoy an ever more rewarding listening experience. I would have to say that this one is a masterpiece of sonic sprawl. And there is some incredible guitar work, too. It's just fabulous!

Mariusz Duda and "Lunatic Soul": Almost Goth, But No Goblins

Originally posted on December 11, 2008

In the contemporary world of neo-progressive or post-progressive rock there is a fertile inventiveness that may be under the radar for much of the mass audience, but bears scrutiny for those whose main concern is worthy music. Take today’s review CD, Lunatic Soul (KScope), a project from lead singer Mariusz Duda, the creative force behind the group Riverside.

It’s telling that all guitars are acoustic, and yet there is an electricity in the power of the group sound. All ten tracks have a haunted, haunting quality and a mood that has a touch of goth in its darkness without resorting to facile hobgoblin imagery. Each cut is its own musical world, and like Porcupine Tree or Pineapple Thief, there are those horizontal planes of sound prosody that envelop and engage the listener. There is musical substance to all this. It has ravishing passages that lack the lightweight quality of something like your typical new age music. It’s what new age would be if new age had any lasting value. New age always has been a kind of bastard child of the progressive scene and also of ECM-style jazz. And perhaps it is all-but-dead in any way that matters.

If so it is because there are new groups of artists such as Duda who have a clear vision of how to create moody sound sculptures devoid of claptrap and contrivance. The best qualities of classic period Moody Blues productions had a certain empty-longing-for-the-something-missing in the everyday life of the time, and the best of this post-progressive sort of music does all that but more subtly, with a better feel for the long form.

In our increasingly private lives filled with solitary TV watching, internet surfing, and ipod enclosures in personal cocoons of sound, we are like the Victorians--with the gulf between public and private ever widening--except there is perhaps an increasing emptiness, and nothing to hide worthy of mention, a generic privacy of exposure. While community dissipates and degenerates, we wait for the inevitable in solitude--death, or foreclosure or just further coffin-like isolation. Now that is not especially cheery, but these post-progressive folks seem to capture the Zeitgeist we all experience in some form today with something akin to true art. Generations in the future may look to music like this as clues to what we were like, what the 21st and 22nd century felt like to live in. Maybe.

Listen to the cut “Adrift” for a lyrically cosmic ambiance that is not beholden to anyone but hearkens backwards and points forwards simultaneously. Lunatic Soul has that. It engages without pandering to mawkish taste or plundering the flotsam of ready-made, formulaic “product.” It’s very good, and a very encouraging sign for those who watch and listen, who wait for something worthwhile from our rock brethren. Or more of it at any rate. Off to make coffee. . .

Porcupine Tree Climbs Post-Progressive Heights

Originally posted on November 21, 2008

The English phenom Porcupine Tree and its various offshoots have created a genre of their own by combining various influences in the prog rock family, transcending them and doing something unique with that.

Their April release Fear of A Blank Planet (Atlantic) continues their saga with strong, moody music, on a regular CD and a 5:1 version DVD with stunning photography projected from your TV screen. The vibe is you are starkly alone but you’ve got this great music to help you through it. Steve Wilson and company are one of the truly good things going on out there, and they have been for a long time, even though I’ve missed some of it. They have that sprawl, the long form song that follows its own path and gets there in a most satisfying way. They are one of the best, most talented groups in the field. If you don’t have this one, and you have the money for it, by all means check it out.

No-Man's Live DVD A Big Winner

England’s No-Man has crept up on me and grabbed me. Their last album Schoolyard Ghosts (K-Scope) (which was their sixth) reviewed earlier on these pages, took me by surprise. The combination of art-quality songwriting by co-leaders vocalist Tim Bowness and guitarist-arranger Steve Wilson with a decided individual ensemble sound and ravishing vocals hit a high watermark for the best post-progressive music in the last several years.

Now they return in a two-DVD set Mixtaped (K-Scope). One disk is a 90-minute-plus concert captured at Bush Hall, London. The other disk puts together a kind of retrospective history of the group’s ups and downs, with very lucid interview footage by Bowman and Wilson and others associated with the band since their advent in 1990, as well as some choice videos covering each period.

The narrative disk forms an excellent way to understand what Bowness and Wilson endured before ultimately returning to their original sound, expanding and perfecting their craft and their style. The pressures of initial notoriety forced their music in a direction that they came to abandon in the last decade. The 85 minute narrative brings together a wide view of No-Man over time. You come away from it enriched and impressed with the articulate vision of the leaders.

As they themselves imply in the interview segments, the live tour and that Bush Hall date further the evolvement of No-Man to a new level of sublimity. They perform songs associated with various phases of their career. But with a working band for the first time in many years, there is a musical enrichment, a harder element, an immediacy to their music that combines the movingly introverted expression of loss and melancholy with a hard-edged power and a presentational dynamic that hits you in the gut, mesmerizes, enchants, haunts and exhilarates, all at the same time. Many of the versions done here are seemingly THE definitive ones, others are different enough that they make an impact far and above that of the typical live band set of greatest hits. The sound is fabulous and, in 5:1 surround, tactile in the best sense.

No-Man’s Mixtaped redefines prog rock and transcends it simultaneously. The band has reached a high level that goes far beyond the pop-rock medium in which they are intertwined. They probably are THE English band to follow in this decade. Based on this set and the last album I am a strong supporter and a fan! I could add a few more superlatives but the music must simply be heard, after all. There is a seriousness of purpose to No-Man. The best response is probably an awed, thoughtful silence. Then a keen anticipation to know what their next move will be.

The Debut Recording by blld

Today, blld's debut recording. Called Materia Prima (IAPETUS), it is a fertile collaboration between drummer, range bassist and vocalist 05Ric and touch guitarist/producer Markus Reuter.

Beyond those basic facts blld comes up with an EP that combines soundscapes, drumscapes and total-world musical spaces that are dramatic, alternatively blazing and contemplative, and always very interesting. They are in the lineage of musicians that build on the legacy of King Crimson and related groups.

There is some incredible drumming, musically enriching vocal passages and spatially expansive cosmic guitar work. It all molds together as a total gestalt that moves the mind and heart decidedly into the new decade.

A short but very fascinating musical program! If you like progressive/post-progressive channels of musical creativity, you’ll find this a very good listen. I look forward to their second.

Say Yes to Nosound: Listening to "Lightdark"

Originally posted on October 14, 2008

The dreamscape qualities of some of the new progressive-alternative rock can be quite haunting, like a dream of your first love filtered by time and the mist of the passing blur. Nosound’s new album lightdark (Kscope) is like that. The band is the vision of Giancarlo Erra. One cut has No-Man’s vocalist Tim Bowness. The whole thing lays out long and leisurely, lingering over ambient textures that flow evenly and directively, slowly making their way like the water in a small brook.

Lyrics evoke memory-images in the mind, and there’s a hint of the psychedelic, mellotron laced music of an earlier era, a kind of sensitive, musically more savvy Pink Floyd, a King Crimson for today’s jaundiced world. There are some lyrical guitar solos and echo-rich vistas of sound. The mini-epic "From Silence to Sound” has moments that can only be described as beautiful, a word I do not often use. Lightdark is a real treat for the musical senses. It is a band that must be a trip to catch live. Grab the CD to get the studio magic that results when they layer sounds with musical care. It’s a good one.