Italian progressive rock legend Arturo Stalteri presents a brand new album filled with interpretations of works by Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Sigur Rós and, surprisingly, King Crimson’s In The Court of the Crimson King done in sublime fashion.
Arjen Lucassen’s Supersonic Revolution – Golden Age of Music Arjen Lucassen is peerless in the Dutch progressive rock scene. His latest album is yet another conceptual opus with not only the sound that made his ban Ayreon legendary, but you can hear influences of peak-era Deep Purple as well.
As I will be busy on Sundays for the forseeable future, I will be posting articles on other blogs, or podcasts I find on Youtube, for your entertainment. Today’s installation comes from the blog Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! / Off the Charts: 60s Rock Revelations, a great read for those of you who like weird psych music. Today’s installment covers Omega, Hungary’s greatest progressive rock band. You can read the article here.
Of all the scenes I’ve always felt was neglected in prog, it was the Canterbury scene. That sub-genre which gave us Soft Machine, Caravan, National Health, Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers is of course big with specialist fans, but as the years have passed, it seems fewer and fewer listeners are hearing that wonderful sound. Thankfully, there is Amoeba Split, a Canterbury-inspired band who hail from my ancient paternal homeland of Galicia in Northern Spain. The band mix jazz fusion and progressive rock expertly, and the sound is so authentic that I had to remember the release date of this…
Marin Škrgatić was a singer and bandleader of Croatian extraction whose work here should have been given a wider audience during the 1970s. If you can believe it, according to Everland Music’s Bandcamp site, some of these songs were too progressive, if such a thing could ever exist. The tracks are not only influenced by prog, but you can hear jazzy and operatic elements in some of the tracks. This is an undisputed gem of Yu-Rock.
This is a heavy, near-monstrous release involving Japanese singer and bassis Junko Ueda and the French avant-prog group PoiL. From their Bandcamp site: “PoiL Ueda is the result of a collaboration between Junko Ueda, a vocalist and satsuma-biwa player from Japan, and PoiL, a French rock/contemporary music band. The creation is based on the 13th-century Japanese epic tale “Heike-Monogatari.” The composition is based on traditional epic singing accompanied by the satsuma-biwa and Buddhist Shomyo chant. Through the fusion of an ancient Japanese traditional music with a hyper modern European musical formation, this project offers the opportunity to discover a unique musical…
Etron Fou Leloublan are (were?) an avant-guard rock band out of France whose main claim to fame was being one of the early bands who would end up forming the genre Rock In Opposition, a loosely-knit group of bands who opposed the business which refused to recognize their music, according to a Wikipedia article. This album was released some time between 1981 and 1982, had Fred Frith producing it, and it’s as skronky and noisy as one would expect. For those of you who like a more free-jazz spirit to their prog rock, consider giving this a listen.
I suppose one can call this post-rock with Chinese characteristics. Zhaoze are a progressive rock/post-rock band out of Guangzhou, China, and this is the first I’ve heard of them. Their sound is mellow, almost dramatic in a TV-theme way, yet the music, though soothing, is also engaging, especially after about the 5 minute mark, where guitars begin to shimmer.
As we celebrate Christmas on the Julian Calendar this day, I thought it nice to share with you an album I found from a Portuguese composer called handwrist, working in the medium of psychedelic, progressive and drone rock, perhaps with lo-fi touches, basing his compositions on the aforementioned Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, whom St. Basil the Great wrote about in the 4th Century. Merry Christmas to one and all.
Jokamies (‘Everyman’ in Finnish) is a collection of tracks for a television series of the same name composed by the Finnish bassist Pekka Pohjola. After his work with the hard-rock/progressive outfit Wigwam, he ventured into jazz fusion (perhaps New Age as well) and made some of the most impressive albums in the genre during the 1970s and 1980s, culminating, in my estimation, in this album.