PerKelt - Morana / Dancer in the Wind - Archeon Midwinter Fair

 PerKelt - Morana

 

 PerKelt - Dancer in the Wind - Archeon Midwinter Fair

 

There is a legend in several European countries that revolves around a white wolf. It has a number of variations, but the gist of it is this:
When the king goes on a journey, he asks his three daughters what they would like him to bring back as a present. The elder two ask for fine clothes or precious jewels; the youngest asks for something that shouldn’t exist – a singing leaf in one version. The king tries to honour the requests of all three daughters, but he searches for the third present in vain. Eventually, he meets a white wolf, who makes a bargain: the impossible gift in return for the first of the king’s daughters to greet him when he returns home.
The deal is done, and it is the third daughter who first greets the king on his return. So, to honour his pledge, the king takes the youngest of the princesses to meet her husband to be. There, they find that he is a wolf by day but a man at night, an arrangement that suits them all.
The princess and the wolf are betrothed and live in his sumptuous palace in the woods while they plan their wedding. Then, one day, the king’s eldest daughter gets married, and the princess returns to her father’s castle for her sister’s wedding. After the ceremony, she calls for the wolf, who comes and takes her home. Later, the king’s middle daughter also gets married and, again, the princess goes to visit her sister. This time, the princess stays a little longer and, when she calls for the wolf, he does not come.
For a while, the princess wanders the lands around her father’s castle, where she meets an old sorceress, who gives her three nuts to be cracked open in times of extreme need. Shortly afterwards, the princess sees the wolf with another woman, who the locals say is his fiancée. Hearing this, the king’s youngest daughter becomes determined to win back her white wolf love.
Breaking open the first nut, she finds a golden bracelet, with which she bribes her rival to let her spend the night by the wolf-man’s side, hoping to reawaken his feelings for her. But the wolf is asleep and she can not wake him. The next night, the princess breaks open the second nut, finds a golden necklace, and bribes her rival once more. But, again, the sleeping wolf-man does not wake. On the third night, cracking the last nut reveals a crown encrusted with pearls and gemstones. This time, the wolf does wake and, when he opens his eyes, he remembers his earlier promise. The princess and the wolf are reconciled and return to their palace.
Whether this was the inspiration for Perkelt‘s recently released album, White Wolf, is difficult to say. There is no reference to kings or princesses in the lyrics of the title track, just an obscure reference to “feeding the white wolf”. If you were wondering what to feed a white wolf, you might consider a beef, pork or lamb stew similar to goulash.
Perkelt is … a Croatian version of the Hungarian word pörkölt, which means – to roast. Originally a traditional Hungarian dish, perkelt is widespread in eastern Croatia, northern Serbia, as well as in Slovakia and Czech Republic. It’s a simple, quick and tasty meal.
Or, perhaps, you’d like to ensure the savage-looking beast is fully pacified before asking if he is hungry. A little guitar, recorder and didgeridoo music should do the trick. And, if that’s not enough, we can assure him that we are the very embodiment of peace and friendship – and far too tough for his cooking pot.
Perkelt, though, have no such qualms. They call their brand of music ‘Speed Folk’: sprightly tunes in the mould of traditional folk. But this is no ceilidh band; their compositions are wholly original and fully deserving of the ‘progressive’ tag offered by one reviewer. With a blend of classical guitar, Early Music recorder, Scottish fiddle, Mexican wind instruments (plus didgeridoo), and rock drumming, you won’t find a more inspiring ensemble on the folk circuit.  From: https://crotchetyman.blog/2024/05/14/white-wolf/

 

Fairport Convention - Liege & Lief - Full album

01 Come All Ye
02 Reynardine
03 Matty Groves
04 Farewell, Farewell
05 The Deserter
06 Medley - The Lark In The Morning / Rakish Paddy / Foxhunter's Jig / Toss The Feathers
07 Tam Lin
08 Crazy Man Michael 

Liege & Lief is an album about class, in more than one way. Its most dramatic song is starkly about class, but the English class system suffuses its very making. Fairport themselves were middle class kids – the Fairport house, which gave the group its name, was the big home in Muswell Hill in north London in which guitarist Simon Nicol had grown up, his GP father practising from the ground floor – enraptured first by west coast psychedelia, to which they gave a polite Home Counties makeover, and then by The Band. After hearing Music From Big Pink, they realised there wasn’t much point pretending to be American, and that they needed to find an English equivalent to what The Band had done. The arrival of Sandy Denny to replace Judy Dyble in 1968 enabled them to begin their Anglification. Denny was a regular on the folk circuit, had sung with The Strawbs, and she and Dave Swarbrick, the fiddle player who began playing with Fairport the following year, came to the group just at the time when their knowledge of the folk repertoire tied in with the existing members desire to trace their own musical ancestry.
But the English folk tradition is tied up in class, too. The building blocks of the repertoire – the songs that Fairport bassist Ashley Hutchings was assembling versions of in early 1969 for the band to learn – came from the song collections that had been built by the folklorists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who had a particular view of the tradition they wanted to preserve. As Ian Carter of the contemporary folk group Stick In The Wheel put it to me last year: "The way we see folk music now is very much dictated by how it was collected in Victorian times, mostly, when it was a pursuit of the upper classes, mostly. It’s called folk music because they wanted to hear the music of the folk. The common folk of England, of the great Empire." "Untainted by people in cities – like immigrants," added his bandmate Nicola Kearey.
"They didn’t want anything influenced by outside culture, or anything that showed any kind of artiness," Carter continues. "They didn’t want to know about it. They were looking for idiot savants. It’s like the blues boom, where you had to be a blind sharecropper who had never heard music past a certain point. And like with Leadbelly, they wanted Walter Pardon to sing at the Albert Hall, and he turned up in his suit. They said, ‘What are you doing?’ Well, I’ve come to sing at the Albert Hall so I want to wear my suit.’ They wanted him to wear his work clothes! ‘But I’m singing in the Albert Hall!’"
Carter then went back to the point that opened this piece, about how we have allowed others to seize symbols of national identity. "These days wearing a poppy is seen as a symbol of being prowar, Brexit kind of person, rightwing and nationalistic. My grandparents always used to tell me the reason it started was as a grassroots thing. They knew lads were being swept in front of German machine guns by officers that didn’t give a fuck about them, and it was an unbelievably arrogant, senseless use of people. You can dial that narrative all the way back to Boudicca – who should be used as a symbol of rebellion, but became a symbol of empire. That cycle messes with people’s identities."
And, as Dave Harker argued in Fakesong, his 1985 history of the folk song collectors, the preservation of traditional songs served to aid and abet the agendas of governments and powerful institutions around the world: "Their support for ‘folk’ culture is a small but significant part of their attempts to reinforce nationalism, and to help fend off danger of the only power which can challenge them – international working-class solidarity … It is impossible (without self-deception) to consider ‘national’, ‘peasant’, ‘tribal’ or ‘folk’ culture merely as objects of academic interest, and if we can show that these general considerations apply specifically to the concepts used by even the most progressive ‘folk’ scholars, then those who associate themselves with bourgeois ideology will have a clearer idea of the real function of their work."
Fairport may have taken from the collections of the folklorists (and they were helped and guided by one, AL Lloyd, who, though a committed Communist, had placed himself very much in the lineage of Cecil Sharp) but Liege & Lief was an act of revolution. It was not just in the electrification of folk music – Fairport had already started drifting that way on Unhalfbricking – or in the addition of drumming derived from rock, by Dave Mattacks, who had replaced Martin Lamble after the latter’s death when the band’s van crashed on the M1 on 12 May 1969. It wasn’t even in mixing traditional music with other forms – Pentangle had begun to do that in 1968.
Fairport’s revolutionary impact came in doing precisely the opposite of what the folklorists had intended when they began collecting the songs. By taking the old songs and setting them down on paper, they had largely believed they were preserving them in the form in which they must remain, ignoring the fact that songs passed through generations orally will always evolve. Fairport, though, played extremely fast and loose with the source material, matching tunes from one source with lyrics from another. As Rob Young put it in his book Electric Eden: "It threw into question the spurious ‘authenticity’ of the folk versions studiously set in stone by the Victorian and Edwardian collectors. Fairport’s electrifying act preserved and restored the guts and spontaneous vigour to the folk continuum."
Nor did it offer a sepia-tinted view of the past. Five of the eight songs on Liege & Lief were traditional, and they were not comforting hey nonny nos about calling in the harvest. The overwhelming theme of Liege & Lief is ordinary people denied agency, with dire consequences. They are people whose bodies are little more than vessels for the needs of others, be they sexual, material or military. There is always a power dynamic at work: women succumb to the supernatural, and the supernatural figures they succumb to represent power – they have castles, they own land (many versions of ‘Tam Lin’ name him as an aristocrat, enslaved in turn by the Queen of the Faeries); men succumb to the power of the state, which has no respect for the rights of the ordinary people. And so ‘Tam Lin’ tells of a woman impregnated by the supernatural titular character for trespassing on the forest of Carterhaugh; in ‘Reynardine’, a young woman is lured to a castle, where we never find out what awaits her; in ‘The Deserter’, a Napoleonic Wars-era soldier, who has been press-ganged into service, is forever trying and failing to escape the battlefield. And then there is ‘Matty Groves’.
‘Matty Groves’ brings together the threads of sex and class and power in eight dazzling minutes. Little Matty Groves is spied in the crowd after church by a noblewoman – unnamed, but the wife of Lord Donald – who seduces him. She is betrayed by a servant, and Matty awakes from his tryst in Lord Donald’s bed to find him standing over them. He murders both, but only after arranging his own justifications: insisting Matty strike the first blow, demanding his wife renounce her preference for him over Matty. And it ends with the most devastating announcement that, even in death, class trumps all: "’A grave, a grave,’ Lord Donald cried / ‘To put these lovers in / But bury my lady at the top / For she was noble kin.’"
Here, in one song, is patriarchy, class-based violence, sex-based violence. It is a song as relevant to modern Britain as anything by Slowthai or Dave. It’s a song about British history that resonates with "honour killings", with tabloid sensationalism, with lives viewed as worthless because the people living them don’t matter. ‘Matty Groves’ is as irrelevant to his rulers as those who died in Grenfell, as those who have died as a result of austerity. It’s easy to imagine Jacob Rees-Mogg on LBC, if it were a news story today, explaining that if Matty Groves had any common sense, he would not have slept with Lord Donald’s wife. Or Nick Conrad, the now departed Tory candidate for Broadland, explaining on his Radio Norfolk breakfast show that men do get worked up, and if a woman is going to sleep with someone else, well, she’s got to expect some comeback.
Of course, there’s also the music. Liege & Lief would never have connected in the way it has over the past half-century without the music. "It was radical from top to bottom," Ashley Hutchings told Rob Young. "We had respect for tradition and the material, respect for the people that had gone before, and we were radically building on it … We just leapt in and did this in a rock & roll kind of way … We weren’t concerned with being historically accurate, it was rock & roll. And it blew a lot of cobwebs away. We were kind of on a crusade."  From: https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/fairport-convention-liege-lief/

 

Curió Curió - Tô Chegando

Bill Cooper: How did you two meet, and how did this project start?

Dustin Braun: I was already living in Berlin, but I visited Ingolstadt for some family reasons—I'm originally from there. I went to a concert at an art café where a music friend of mine was playing. It was a temporary quartet playing Brazilian classics—Jorge Ben, that kind of thing. And Luiza was the singer.

Luiza Monteiro: Yeah, I used to live in Ingolstadt because I worked in the theatre there. It's a small city, but it has a nice cultural scene. I have the feeling you get to know everyone active in the arts quickly, which is cool.

Dustin: I was already in love with Brazilian music. I'd always wanted to start a project in this Brazilian-groove direction, and that was the first moment I thought, "Okay, if I get this rolling, it could actually happen." So, after the concert, the whole band went to a bar, and I joined them. After two beers, I had the balls to ask Luiza if she'd want to start recording with me.

Luiza: I was really into the theatre, but I had this crazy longing to make my own music. And then Dustin came and said, "Do you want to do a Brazilian project?" And I said, "Yeah, absolutely."

Dustin: We didn't really know each other at all then. We'd basically just met each other.

Luiza: Dustin was a bit of a legend in Ingolstadt—everybody knew him from DJing and producing. I'd heard his name, but we didn't know each other personally. Because I was very busy in theater, it took half a year to get back to Dustin after he first approached me. When I finally had time, I reached out to try and see where things went.

Bill: How do you balance the theater and your music? It seems difficult.

Luiza: Yeah, it has been a process. I love working in theatre, and I sing a lot there, too, but the shows I work on there aren't my own projects. I've realized that doing my own projects is way too important. So, I've reduced my theater contract: instead of four productions a year, I do three. That gives me more time during the year to travel, to meet Dustin, to help produce the songs. Still, it's a struggle, because I have to work on [Curió Curió] with any breaks I might have. Because I have shows that I can't miss, it's not flexible in that sense. However, I'm happy that the theatre I'm working with right now is supportive of allowing me to have time to work on my projects outside the theatre.

Bill: How long did this record take to make?

Luiza: It took us pretty much one and a half to two years to finish the whole album.

Dustin: Two and a half, even, I think. We also had quite a distance between us. I sometimes say we could have wrapped all the recordings within six weeks, which is probably too optimistic—but we're nine hours apart, and that makes it a little complicated.

Luiza: It was a long process, but sometimes that's good, because you grow along the way.

Bill: Tell me more about what that process looked like and how you wrote the songs on the album.

Dustin: We always tried to arrange at least a week to spend on writing and recording—never just a day. Mostly we recorded at my place, but sometimes, to make things easier, we rented a studio halfway between us and met there to record and write.
We built the foundations together and then brought the project to other musicians to record afterward. With the distance and our time limitations, it would have been impossible to do it with a full band in the studio. I also don't like the workflow of working with a whole band at once.

Luiza: It wasn't like a classic singer-songwriter thing, where I write the song on my piano at home, I bring it to Dustin, and then we produce it together. Instead, Dustin and I had a clear vision of how the project had to sound. Then Dustin met with other musicians, and they built parts for the music—parts A, B, C—as well as grooves and textures. Then we'd meet with that structure in place, putting the parts together in a way we felt comfortable with and liked. I'd improvise over that and build melody hooks, verses, everything. So, it was kind of like a collage.

Bill: One thing I really enjoy about this record is the improvisational aspects. Can you speak to where that comes from? Is it from your music experience or the theatre, or a little of both?

Luiza: Yeah, I guess it's a mix. I've always been that kind of singer. I don't sit at the piano for eight hours writing difficult material; I'm more into improvisation. Because we're both in this creative process together, making choices as we go, we can have a sketch of something that I take back home. Then I refine it, and it grows. It worked well because that's also how you work, too, Dustin. You like to try things out.

Dustin: All this improvisation was helpful because we didn't know each other or how we'd behave in the studio. I knew Luiza was comfortable improvising. We'd do several takes, improvising from beginning to end. Then we'd try things out and move parts around. Sometimes, we'd try to glue something together, or Luiza would come up with something so catchy and so good that we just locked it in right away.

Luiza: I will say, though, that theater does help me with improvisation, because we often work that way. You must have the freedom to try things, even crazy stuff, to see if it works. Sometimes, we thought we'd never go in a specific direction with this album, but then we'd decide to try it out.

Dustin: I'm also convinced—correct me if I'm wrong—that because you're such a talented actor, Luiza, you can really feel during recording that you're improvising without fear. I've worked with a lot of musicians who don't have that skill that comes from being an actor, where you can confidently slip into different characters. I feel like they're different characters, but in the end, each one still sounds like Luiza.

Bill: Luiza, it's cool how you were able to go out into these wild pathways, but it still feels consistent in terms of sound.

Luiza: A lot of that comes from you, Dustin, because from the first day I had the feeling you had a clear vision of the sound you wanted. There were songs where I'd say, "We can do that with a little more reverb," and you'd say, "No, I think that's not the right choice, because then we leave this world we're already in." You were a great director.

Dustin: We were privileged that we weren't rushed. We'd bring a song to the trumpet player, then to the vibraphone player, and the energy of the songs sometimes changed. At the end, we wanted to make sure the vocals and their energy still fit with the instrumentals. With most songs it worked, but sometimes we had to push in another direction. It's good that we had the time to revisit tracks and see if they still felt right after two years.

Bill: One of the things I remember reading about the record is that you were trying to create a Brazilian work that isn't cliché. How would you say you worked to make sure that didn't happen?

Luiza: I'm not sure it was conscious. It was more like searching for something that felt authentic and connected to our energy.

Dustin: It's about being honest with your craft. Luiza's very experienced, so she knows who she is as a singer. I'm experienced as a producer. I wouldn't have brought her a classic bossa instrumental. I love bossa, but I'd be bored. I want to explore something new. Also, Luiza has a style, so you want to match and support it instead of forcing it into something it's not.
We didn't reinvent the wheel, but we tried to express ourselves. We wanted to make a Brazilian project, and since we have inspirations and references—because we're fans, not only creators—we tried to blend it together.

Luiza: It's funny, because at some point in the process I was afraid it wasn't Brazilian enough. I thought, "Should we get some more Brazilian instruments in there or a little more percussion?" I was afraid it wasn't true enough to my roots. It was always about what felt authentic. 'Authentic' is a weird word, but it's like: what feels right? You want something that feels like what you want to listen to.

Dustin: I don't want to sound too spiritual, but sometimes when you create, there's something in the room, as Luiza said, that just feels so right. It's a certain feeling you always want to chase, and it has to do with where you are right now with your art and what you expect from it.

From: https://www.thetonearm.com/curio-curio-turns-distance-into-a-collage-of-voices/ 

Big Big Train - Warp and Weft

First, could you give a brief history of the band?

Gregory Spawton : We started making music in 1990 and were signed to the GEP label in 1994, releasing a couple of albums through them. After losing our record deal we formed our own label and started doing things for ourselves. We began to gain a reasonable profile on the progressive rock scene and, in 2009, after The Underfall Yard album, things started to take off for us a bit. We won the Breakthrough category at the Progressive Music Awards and started to get occasional airplay on BBC Radio . We have been featured in Prog magazine and, more recently, in Classic Rock . We had a long break from playing live but returned to performance in 2015 and will be playing more gigs in the future. Our latest album, Folklore , which came out in May 2016 was the first of our releases to feature in the official national charts in the UK.

Big Big Train has a curious name. Where did it come from?

Gregory Spawton : My Mum grew up in a railway cottage in the Midlands . Her Dad and brothers were on the railways so we were always surrounded by railway things. At some stage somebody bought me a trainset which was called Big Big Train and the name stuck in my mind. In the late 1980's my brother formed a short-lived new wave band and I suggested that name for his band, which they used. When I was forming my own band in 1990 I threw that name into the hat and it was the most popular suggestion.

So, “Folklore” is the title of your new album. Why this title?

Gregory Spawton : The title was the product of a long conversation between me and our singer David Longdon . We talked through the material that we had written and the common themes that we were exploring. A number of songs had a folklore element to them and we thought the word itself was a strong title. We wanted a bold, memorable title and we wanted a theme which we felt listeners would relate to.

Is there a concept behind the album?

Gregory Spawton : I wouldn't describe it as a concept album. There isn't a narrative across the whole album and while most songs are on the folklore theme, not all of them are. Like most of our releases, though, there are a number of themes across the album. Aside from the folklore tales that we tell on some of the songs there is a theme of how folklore is made and communicated. We also address the subject of time passing and loss and we tell a couple of non-folklore stories as well. 

“Folkore” was released a few months after “Wassail” and “Stone & Steel”. Could you tell us some words about their influence on the writing and recording?

Gregory Spawton : Wassail was very much the starting point for the album. Our drummer Nick D'Virgilio lives in the States and only comes to England two or three times a year and so we make most of the time that we can spend with him. We had some time with Nick at Real World in 2014 and he put down some drums for “  Wassail” , “  Lost Rivers  ” and “  Mudlarks  ” plus “  The Transit of Venus ”. We held Venus back for the album but we wanted to play Wassail live at the 2015 shows so put it out as part of an EP release. Wassail was the first time we introduced a definitively folklore theme to our music and so the subject matter of the song was in our mind when we were thinking about writing and making the new album. David also used some sections of music from Wassail as a starting point for the title track. Wassail and the song called Folklore are both linked lyrically and musically.

It's the band's ninth album. How are you looking at the evolution of your music?

Gregory Spawton : It has been a quarter of a century of making music, so forgive me for this being a fairly long answer. When we started back in 1990, there was not much of a progressive rock scene. The bands from the early 80's had taken a similar route to the bands from the early 70's, with a more commercial approach and I am not sure it was working that well as the existing fan bases weren't that keen and the music wasn't really reaching new audiences. There was a new band I liked very much called It Bites and I saw them many times in the late 1980's. They had a very good fusion of rock, pop and prog rock and we followed their lead a bit for the first couple of albums, with a smattering of XTC , Radiohead and Prefab Sprout in the mix as well. The Gathering Speed and The Difference Machine albums were a bit more influenced by 70's progressive rock and we started to grow our audience with those albums. The progressive music scene was beginning to thrive again and this made it easier for us to sell our music. In 2009, we decided to completely relaunch the band with an album called The Underfall Yard . David joined on vocals, Nick became our permanent drummer and Dave Gregory started to play guitar for us. We also incorporated a brass band and real string instruments into the band's sound for the first time. In subsequent years, Dave Gregory became a full-time member and other strong new musicians joined, Rachel Hall on violin, Danny Manners on keyboards and double bass and Rikard Sjöblom on guitars and keyboards. Another important factor is that David started to share the songwriting with me, so there was another songwriter in the band. Therefore, I see our music as changing significantly from the Underfall Yard album as the sounds we were using with real brass and strings, the different musicians in the band, David becoming the voice of Big Big Train and the expansion in the songwriting team all led to a bit of a revolution. Having said all that, the earlier versions of the band and the current incarnation share a lot of musical DNA, so I think listeners can find music to enjoy from all of our albums.

What is your creative process?

Gregory Spawton : The initial versions of the songs are normally developed by David or myself. We'll make a demo recording of each song and this will usually feature a basic version, including the structure of the song, the chords, melodies and themes. Nick normally records his drum parts to the demo. Most of the drums are recorded in England at Real World but sometimes Nick, who lives in the States, will record at Sweetwater . Nick likes to work intuitively so he doesn't get to hear the songs in advance. He'll listen through three or four times and then the ideas will start to flow and we'll start getting taken. Once the drums are down, the rest of the musicians become involved and will work up their parts. For the brass band and strings, this will mean writing a score out, for the rest of us it is just spending time with the song and getting things as good as they can be. Like many bands today, the band members don't all live in the same town so communication when songs are being worked on is by email or Skype or Facetime. Recording of final parts will take place in various locations depending on the musician. Sometimes, because of the complex multi-layering of songs we have too many parts fighting for space.
The final decision on the arrangements always remains with the songwriter. Mixing is done by Rob Aubrey in Southampton. After many years of spending day after day sitting with Rob during the mixing process, we now just let him get on with it. He'll send mixes out for snagging as he makes progress. Danny, Nick, Rachel and Rikard are all writing songs for Big Big Train now so the process will continue to evolve but I doubt it will change much. We are only all together as a band three or four times a year so we have devised a working method which is efficient and enables us to be productive musicians.

From: https://www.amarok-mag.com/interview-big-big-train-english-version-2016/ 

Ferries - I Swear I Left It Right There

Ferries do not deal in certainties. At present, the project is anonymous, electing not to reveal their identities, or any personal information, nor do they play live. The band’s former label Bergpolder liken them to “quickly vanishing” ghosts, their default mode to “exist without existing”. Even Ferries’ album titles, Eye Flutter (2025) and now Eye Wander, evoke a middle ground between earthliness and detachment, stasis and motion, that feels uncanny: a perfect analogue to the type of music they make.
I’m beguiled and conflicted by the group’s second album. Eye Wander spends its runtime drifting in and out of consciousness. Prickly basslines, squealing guitars, and high pitched vocals grow legs of their own, sauntering into strange new territory on longer tracks.
But what is striking about Eye Wander, no matter how much I listen to it, is the record’s likeness in sound to Damo Suzuki-era Can. This results in a project that threatens to teeter towards banal nostalgia rather than originality. At best (which is most of the time), the pendulum swings towards the latter. At worst, things can get a little pastiche-y.
‘All At Once Again’, the album’s second track opens with lone vocal chops, before drums crash into earshot, their dry sound and repetitive style no doubt pulled from the Jaki Liebezeit playbook. A bassline that oscillates octaves across multiple strings grounds the rhythm, while a high keyboard line bobs around somewhere in the mix. When the jam reaches its most intense, the interjection of heavily modified, near funky guitar stabs, combined with the sleekit bass and motorik drums, create a neat simulacrum of Can.
The band rarely slip into parody save these shorter – dare I say, filler – tracks. The moments where it feels like they aren’t channelling their forebears so directly and engaging in broader musical conversation is when things start to get interesting. This is chiefly done through drawing upon dub music, an influence which pervades the record. Listen out for the liberal use of tape delay across the entire project, or the stuttered, hard pan vocal chops that back-end ‘I Swear I Left It Right There’. Similarly, the way in which tracks like ‘Knightville Brawl’ seem to degrade in fidelity as they go on, points to dub. It’s an effect which replicates the way original dub mixes cut to tape would wear down with every use.
Drawing on sounds from a bygone genre or epoch is one of those deceptively tricky things to get right as a musician. It involves an element of looking back, abstracting a sound’s symbolic power, in some ways similar to the art of translating a book from one language to another.
What Ferries forfeit in orthodoxy sometimes they make up for in the inventiveness of their genre hybridity, which lets me overlook some moments of clear magpie-ing. Their music highlights the fascinating connections between krautrock and dub that quickly become evident through listening and research but are rarely realised. Dub and krautrock themselves share a similar sentiment: both styles are about artists dealing with fraught landscapes through ruination, deconstruction, and construction.  From: https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/ferries-eye-wander-review/ 

Strawbs - Lemon Pie

Ghosts was the last album by the Strawbs to appear while the band was on its upward curve of commercial success; a more lyrical follow-up to Hero and Heroine, it was the group's last thrust at wide-audience appeal, with a hoped for-hit ("Lemon Pie") that didn't materialize. The group's mix of acoustic guitars, electric lead and bass, and Rod Coombes' heavy drumming was very compelling on this, their smoothest album. The title track introduction, mixing multiple overdubbed harpsichords, acoustic guitars, and church bells was a gorgeous beginning, and the melodies only got better further into the album. The hauntingly beautiful "Starshine/Angel Wine" was a magnificent successor to "Lay Down" off of Bursting at the Seams, with a moment of Led Zeppelin-like flash from Dave Lambert's playing in the break, while "The Life Auction" was a bigger, bolder follow-up to "The Hangman and the Papist." The original finale, "Grace Darling," is probably the prettiest tune Dave Cousins ever wrote. Alas, Ghosts would be the group's last record to be released before the changes in music -- with the introduction of punk rock in the middle of the '70s -- began hemming them in, and they never again put out an album with as much panache as this.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/ghosts-mw0000454314#review 

Marekvist - Draug

Dark Norwegian Folk Prog #1: Instilled with a deep love for Norwegian Folk from a young age not many know about, the fusion of these particular, wonderful sounds with heavy prog vibes is a prospect that had my mouth watering – or rather my ears dying to hear. Marekvist from Kristiansand nailed this heavenly marriage to perfection on their second album “Varde”. For those not familiar with Norwegian folk music, rest assured, it’s nothing like anything you will see on TV in Germany for example, what they like to call “Volksmusik”. It’s naturally proggy and with light melancholy vibes,  and the closest thing to it a proghead might have heard before could be the intro to Opeth’s ‘Folklore’ (sic!). Even though that’s Swedish. So it’s similar, but different. With a quite smooth and groovy double drum/percussion attack feat. frequent Ihsahn collaborator Tobias Øymo Solbakk on one of the drumkits and an expressive vocal delivery from Live-Andrea Gjessen Rasch in her Norwegian mother-tongue, “Varde” ticks all the right boxes for me.  From: https://theprogspace.com/album_releases/week-18-2023/#marekvist 

New Age Healers - Falling Apart

Seattle-based psych rockers/shoegazers New Age Healers will be releasing their fifth album, Blowing Smoke Through the Choir is slated for an August 19, 2026 release. The album is a reportedly an expansive evolution of the shoegaze-psych hybrid they developed and sharpened on 2024’s The Spin Out that sees the band pushing their sound further sonically and structurally while brining new collaborators into their dense, dreamlike orbit, including Film School’s Greg Bertens and Karate Guns & Training‘s Valerie Green.
For the first time in their history, the new album sees frontman Owen Murphy sharing songwriting duties with guitarist Jeramy Koepping, whose ideas form the backbone of four tracks. The addition of vocalist Elisa Notthingham helps to deepen their already immersive sound while threading new textures through their signature swell of ethereal guitars, luminous synth work and muscular rhythm section. “It was amazing to have someone present ideas and get to sing over them,” Murphy says of co-writing with Koepping. 
While the music opens up, the lyric remain characteristically oblique. “These are political songs hidden within love songs,” Murphy explains. “There’s no possible way someone like me can make a record right now and not, in some way, shape, or form have what’s happening in the world affect it thematically.”
The album also marks the band’s first collaboration with producer and mixer John Goodmason, “It was really interesting working with John, because besides being an outrageously great guy and extraordinarily talented, his resume blasts out of the pages,”says Murphy. “He’s the guy that mixed or recorded the likes of Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Blonde Redhead, and he’s worked with a local band here called Suzzallo that is incredible. So I was just so grateful that we got to work with him, hear his ideas, and have the opportunity to trust him to help us make something great.”
Thematically, Blowing Smoke Through the Choir is about emotional accumulation — how personal and collective anxieties bleeding into one another. Murphy credits his work producing KEXP’s The Morning Show with John Richards as a major influence on the album. “It’s a different kind of radio show in which John, through music, is communicating emotions of all types, and the audience responds to us, often calling to share birthdays or to tell us of loved one’s passing,” Murphy explains. “It’s incredibly powerful. We’ve been doing this five days a week amidst the last ten years of pure chaos, and all of that experience, probably more than anything, is infused into this record.”
Blowing Smoke Through the Choir‘s latest single “Moored” is a shimmering and slow-burning shoegaze track featuring Murphy’s urgent yet melodic croon beneath skittering drums, swirling and atmospheric guitars. shimmering synths and a supple bass line. Seemingly channeling a blend of Luminous-era The Horrors, A Storm in Heaven-era The Verve and others, “Moored” is ethereal yet grounded, suggesting that we remain tethered to something — whether it’s hope, faith or something less easily named and more difficult to describe.
Murphy explains that the central characters of the song are a bit of a reflection of the voting public, and how over the past decade or so, everyone just wants to throw Molotov cocktails into the system, not caring about the results and without any thought towards the future, ““Like the couple in the song, they’re just along for the ride. And so, the next part of the lyric says, “Leave them out in the sun like you want to burn them,” just let everything burn. And we’ll see what happens, for better or worse.”  From: https://joyofviolentmovement.com/new-audio-new-age-healers-share-atmospheric-politically-charged-moored/ 

Robin & Linda Williams - Battle of Sugar Creek Road / Daughter of McLeod / Danville Girl / Adam Rude

After nearly five decades of playing, touring, and loving together, singer/songwriter couple Robin & Linda Williams are folk music fixtures. The Williamses have amassed a prolific discography that features original songs and folk covers alike. Their first release was their 1975 self-named album Robin & Linda Williams. Their most recent album, A Better Day A-Coming was released in 2021.
Southerners to the core, Linda hails from Virginia and Robin from South Carolina. The couple have lived all over the Southeast and the stylings of the region shine through in their music. This is especially true of Appalachia, as Robin & Linda Williams often play classic tunes like "Wildwood Flower" and "Cotton Mill Man."
Over the course of their impressive career, Robin & Linda Williams have played alongside many other great and well known artists. Between 1975 and 1987, they were frequent performers on the infamous variety show A Prairie Home Companion. Because of this, the Williamses developed a lifelong friendship with host Garrison Keillor and even formed the Hopeful Gospel Quartet with Keillor and Kate MacKenzie, vocalist for bluegrass band Stoney Lonesome. Robin & Linda Williams have also played alongside Mary Chapin Carpenter, Emmy Lou Harris, and Tom T. Hall.
As for where they've played, the Williamses have graced thousands of stages all over the world. Both Williamses play guitar and banjo as well as sing in harmony. Having made a life of playing music together, Robin & Linda Williams have such synergy that any audience they play for cannot resist the creeping goosebumps and dancing feet.  From: https://www.visitstaugustine.com/musician/robin-linda-williams
  

 

The Grand Astoria - Curse of the Ninth

Imagine, if you will indulge me, Hail Spirit Noir. Subtract the black metal, all songs but two, then add stoner rock and multiply the length of the remaining songs by four. This is as close an approximation as can be construed for a review catering to metalheads as to the sound of The Mighty Few by The Grand Astoria. Or you could use theirs: “psychedelic fuzz rock having sex with heavy metal”. Either or. I often find stoner rock can border on lethargic but on this, the sixth full-length in as many years by these crazy Russians, there are so many ideas packed into its two tracks and fifty-minute duration that I can’t help but admire their ambition and revel in their success.
The first track, “Curse of the Ninth,” proves a very fitting title. Referring, of course, to the classical music superstition that the ninth symphony of great composers will be their last (somewhat like the 27 Club, but for the mighty and cultured), it transitions between various movements and is most impressive in its totality. To name a few of the sounds at play here, it opens with a slow, gentle passage overlaid with porn jazz through its saxophone and jazz keyboard. The groovy guitar lead kicking in at 2:50 (which recurs at 23:25 to bring the track together) is thick and heavy but has just the right hook to ensure you aren’t going anywhere once it’s started. The vocals straddle the fine line between incredibly smooth and maniacally strained, and the vocal harmonies employed in the breakdown at 20:50 are a perfect respite, especially when things are stepped up with the epic female vox at 23:00. The East-influenced breakdown at 6:40 is something entirely different and the almost-imperceptibly subtle jazz lounge crescendo starting at 11:54 builds to a surprisingly dense climax. It’s a huge song and one I’ve grown intimately familiar with as it encourages many listens to unfurl all its intricacies.  From: https://www.angrymetalguy.com/things-you-might-have-missed-2015-the-grand-astoria-the-mighty-few/

Renaissance - On The Frontier

Sometimes there are bands that just don’t fit the mold you’re looking for in a given genre, but where you find something that changes your framework for what you’re seeking. I think that’s a good thing, and I thank Renaissance for convincing me through their ’70s output that progressive rock doesn’t need to have searing guitar leads or a heavy rock beat. Sometimes a gorgeous structure and a killer 5-octave voice are all you need to satisfy the itch. And though it’s the fifth album to enter my collection, Ashes Are Burning is the earliest of them, and I’d argue the album that solidified the “classic” Renaissance sound.
The setup at this time was odd, to say the least. Guitarist and songwriter Michael Dunford wrote most of Ashes Are Burning, but he wasn’t a full member of the band until after the album was released. Similarly, the lyrics were written by his writing partner Betty Thatcher, so we have a case of the classic lineup kind of being set, but at the time of the album’s recording no one in the band actually wrote any of the music.
That’s okay, because the group—keyboardist John Tout, bassist and guitarist Jon Camp, drummer Terence Sullivan and vocalist Annie Haslam—know exactly how to execute what Dunford and Thatcher were laying down. Setting the tone with a massive gong, “Can You Understand” is a sweeping epic with Tout’s piano laying the melody down with some electric power coming from Camp. It’s a fantastic opening suite, and the perfect intro to the vocal part that follows.
Speaking of vocals, Annie Haslam truly carries the song forward from there, and is the undeniable centerpiece of Ashes Are Burning as a whole. Her voice is incredible, and even when she’s singing something as treacly as the cringe-inducing “Let It Grow” I have a smile on my face. Thankfully it’s a brief sidestep and the music gets back on track with the grooving, psychedelic folk of “On The Frontier” to end the side.
The second side starts off with the brief exuberance of “Carpet of the Sun” before settling into the more somber and reflective “At the Harbour” where Tout again shines with his piano work. But the 11-minute title track is where Ashes Are Burning really comes together. Featuring some great lead guitar work from Wishbone Ash’s Andy Powell, it’s the platonic ideal of a Renaissance song. Haslam sounds divine, the band really stretches together, and the harmony vocals from Tout and Camp really deliver.
Not your typical UK ’70s prog nor part of the Canterbury scene, Renaissance really carved out a niche in the pastoral/folk corner of progressive rock, and this early classic is a great starting place if you’ve never heard the group, or Haslam’s angelic vocals.  From: https://consumethetangible.com/2026/01/26/renaissance-ashes-are-burning-1973/

Stevie Wonder - You Haven't Done Nothin' / Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away / Bird of Beauty

The cover of Fulfillingness’ First Finale depicts a staircase of keyboards rising — from the Motor Town Review and “Fingertips” through gold records, Grammies and an auto accident — to the sky. It’s remarkably apt, for the careers of few performers in popular music have been such uninterrupted ascents. Nothing, not even a brush with death, has interrupted Wonder’s progress toward ever higher ground, and FFF is a new plateau. As its title declares, the album is a culmination of what has come before, but it is by no means a final destination.
Since he assumed complete control of his musical direction in 1972 (relegating Motown to the role of merchandiser), Wonder’s albums have been about vision. About the false visions that delude and undo people (ambition in “Superwoman,” superstition in the hit of the same name, shady demagogy in “Big Brother” and “He’s Misstra Know-It-All,” and dope in “Too High”); about Wonder’s idealistic “innervision,” which is religious, romantic, and political at the same time; and about things as they are.
Talking Book (1972) juxtaposed the faith of “Lookin’ for Another Pure Love,” “I Believe (If I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever),” and “You and I (Can Conquer the World)” with the frank and funky realism of “Maybe Your Baby,” “Blame It on the Sun,” and “Tuesday Heartbreak.” In “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” Wonder sings, “And I know that this must be heaven,” but Talking Book makes clear that heaven is more a matter of wishing and hoping than a firm conviction. A year ago, Innervisions pitted “the milk-and-honey land,” which was a social as well as a romantic ideal, against the gritty naturalism of “Living for the City,” the “superficial paradise” of drugs, and “Misstra Know-It-All’s” con game. The contest ended in a draw.
If Talking Book deals primarily with love of woman and Innervisions with love of humanity, FFF concerns the love of God. Wonder’s faith has become more inner-directed and otherworldly, less easily threatened by the here-and-now. “Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away” but Stevie Wonder can feel God within him, despite His seeming absence from the contemporary scene. “Feel it (yeah) feel His spirit.” A self-assured serenity pervades FFF, and it opposes the tension and urgency which made Talking Book and Innervisions more exciting albums. FFF‘s tunes and tempi are for the most part easygoing, more like “Sunshine of My Life” than “Living for the City” or “Superstition.” The album aims at relaxed enjoyment; it’s not something to get hot and bothered about.
FFF is less funky, less specifically black than its predecessors. For Wonder’s onward and upward development has consistently been away from strict soul music and racial categories or limitations. Because of this, his appeal — greater than that of almost any other performer today — cuts across social and ethnic barriers. In this respect he’s ideally suited to Motown, which has never been content with an exclusively black market. But unlike so many Detroit acts, whose wooing of white listeners leaves them pallid and gutless, Wonder’s music expands and its integrity is strengthened, not diminished.
A striking example of his cosmopolitan approach is the stark and dramatic “They Won’t Go When I Go.” Inspired by gospel testifying, nonetheless the song variously sounds Islamic, Gregorian, and even Hebraic, reflecting the syncretism of Wonder’s religion. Stately and decorous, doleful, even stone-righteous, the track’s blend of tones and fervent piety make it FFF‘s most arresting track.
It’s also the least representative, for Wonder realizes that such seriousness can be less entertaining to a pop music audience. More typically, he weds an earnest lyric to a lighthearted melody, as he did on Talking Book‘s “Big Brother.” Thus a mellow, easy-rolling tune sweetens the zeal of “Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away,” and it also conveys the calm confidence of Wonder’s devotion. Even when it touches upon lost love or abandonment, FFF is a cool album, for Wonder has reached the point where little can shake his convictions or composure. “Please Don’t Go” is sung to a woman, but it’s neither desperate nor abject like “Maybe Your Baby” on Talking Book. In fact, it’s cheerful. “It Ain’t No Use” treats the end of a romance, but its attitude — kindly, even jocular — is a far cry from the pain and guilt of Innervisions‘s “All in Love Is Fair.”
As has become his custom, Stevie Wonder plays almost all of the instruments on FFF, and his drumming (once a sore point) continues to improve. The only other musician whose contribution is essential is “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, whose pedal steel on “Too Shy To Say” is lovely. The high note Wonder sings at the end of each verse of this hushed, sentimental ballad is extremely touching. More than its predecessors, FFF abounds with other voices, including cameo appearances by the Jackson 5, the Persuasions, and — would you believe — Paul Anka. The album explores rich harmonies with splendid results, particularly the duet with Wonder’s protegee, Minnie Riperton, on the slinky “Creepin’.” The refrain is “in my dreams.” FFF succeeds in making Stevie Wonder’s dreams seem attractive and real.  From: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/fulfillingness-first-finale-110901/ 

MoeTar - Ketamine

MSJ: Can you catch the readers up on the history of your involvement in music – both individually and as a band?

Tarik Ragab I have always loved music, it makes me feel alive more than anything else. I knew at an early age I wanted to be a musician and have pursued it ever since. I have played in many cherished projects over the years and now I have the real honor of playing with some of the finest musicians I have ever known in our MoeTar. 

Moorea Dickason: I grew up studying jazz with an emphasis on a cappella music. I still keep a foot in that door by being a board member and the Development Director for the Women’s A Cappella Association and sing in and arrange for The Riveters.  I do a ton of session work and a little claim to fame of mine is the dozens of songs that I recorded for the Guitar Hero, Garage Band and Karaoke Revolution video games. I teach private voice lessons and work with high school aged singers. However, my musical baby is MoeTar. I’ve done a lot of singing in bands, and other original projects, but this is the most prized musical project of my life so far.

Matt Lebofsky: The short story is that I've been making music since birth - it's pretty much just part of my DNA. Band wise, I met Tarik in 1995 and we kept bumping into each other as fans or creators in the curious music scene over the years. When the stars aligned and he called me saying he needed a keyboardist during the formative months of MoeTar it took about 1.5 seconds of thinking about before I said, "yes." 

Matthew Charles Heulitt: My mother is a classically-trained pianist/organist/choir director.  I studied classical guitar, jazz, and rock and had a formal music education at the Interlochen Arts Academy, and University of Miami.  I met Tarik on a jazz gig. 

Jonathan Herrera: I started on piano at age five, and picked up the bass at eleven. I’m 35 now. I studied music at USC and at the Los Angeles Music Academy. I’ve played with famous people, and many not so famous people, primarily on bass, although as of late I’ve focused a lot on integrating analog synthesizers into my work. I became involved in MoeTar out of my close friendships with the people in the band, and frequent musical collaborations. I was around at the recording sessions, and contributed synth to several tracks. Subsequently, I became a full-time band member.
MSJ: If you weren't involved in music what do you think you'd be doing?
Tarik Ragab:  Painting, I’m also a visual artist. 

Moorea Dickason:  I will always be involved in music, but I do already work part time at the amazing non-profit organization, One Circle Foundation, which promotes small support group work with teens. I am passionate about teenagers feeling supported and getting through that crazy time. I get to work with a lot of young people through music and through OCF.

Matt Lebofsky: I'd work on the world's biggest volunteer supercomputing project and world's largest scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Which is actually what I do when not playing music. 

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Providing therapy, working for environmental conservation, or living as a monk in some distant mountain range.

Jonathan Herrera: Writing, begrudgingly. It’s a skill I have, that I actually don’t enjoy all that much ... at least the process. Being finished writing, though; that’s a lovely feeling.
MSJ:

How did the name of the group originate?

Jonathan Herrera: It’s a portmanteau of Moorea and Tarik. 

Moorea Dickason: Yup. So Tarik and I have been together for a long time, and MoeTar became the nickname that our friends gave us as a couple.  When we had the idea to start this band, we used MoeTar as the name in the beginning as kind of a place-holder, but it stuck. It just felt right. Now it’s not just about the two of us anymore, it’s about all of us in the band. We are MoeTar.
MSJ: Who would you see as your musical influences?
Tarik Ragab:  Frank Zappa, Duke Ellington, Hermeto Pascoal, Elliot Smith, The Beatles, XTC, Jaco Pastorius, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Mahavishnu Orchestra. 

Matt Lebofsky: I admit it's hard to shake my prog rock roots, but there are specific artists I'll auto-buy anything they touch: Robert Wyatt, Cheer-Accident, Motorpsycho, to name a few...

Moorea Dickason: My biggest musical influences in my formative years were a mix of rock and jazz. So Nirvana, Miles Davis, Hendrix, Ella Fitzgerald, Queens of the Stone Age, Carmen McRae, Jonnie Mitchell, to name a few. Now I listen to a lot of different things, but I’m currently listening to a lot of St. Vincent, Dirty Projectors, Tame Impala, Shovels and Rope, and a thousand other things. 

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Sergei Prokofiev, Jeff Buckley, Led Zeppelin, Donny Hathaway, Wayne Krantz

Jonathan Herrera: Bach, Jaco, Anthony Jackson, Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Stravinsky, Joni Mitchell, D’Angelo

MSJ: What's ahead for you?

Moorea Dickason:  We’re writing for our third album, we don’t want so much time between Entropy of the Century and our next album as we had between the first two albums. We’re booking shows, a lot here in the Bay Area and greater California, and we’re going to be heading out to the Eastern US in the Summer of 2015. We’re hoping to tour and to get some booking support. Right now we do it all on our own. We also are working on new music videos – there is a lot going on and a lot to do!
MSJ:

I know artists hate to have their music pigeonholed or labeled, but how would you describe your music?

Jonathan Herrera: Brainy pop.

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Original rock music designed to challenge and inspire.
MSJ: Are there musicians with whom you would like to play with in the future?

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Always…anyone who’s soulfully and intelligently reaching for something new or just interested in having a musical conversation.

Tarik Ragab: I am happy with the ones I am playing with now.

MSJ: If you were a superhero, what music person would be your arch nemesis and why?

Tarik Ragab:  I’d be Beethovenman with my struggles for perfection and my nemesis would be Motzartman, with his effortless divine creations.  

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Yngvie Malmsteen because he seems like a worthy adversary to battle, and I don’t like that type of music… 

Jonathan Herrera: Tarik Ragab, simply because we’re both good bass players that approach the instrument in an entirely different way. I love learning from him.

Moorea Dickason: When I was a little kid I loved Jem and the Holograms, and their arch nemesis band was The Misfits. So…

MSJ: If you were to put together your ultimate band (a band you'd like to hear or catch live), who would be in it and why?

Tarik Ragab: Not to sound vain, but I think I already have. 

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Paul Motian - drums, Beethoven - piano, Eric Dolphy - bass clarinet, Bill Frisell – guitar

Jonathan Herrera: Steve Gadd, drums (the best). Richard Tee or Herbie Hancock, keyboards. Wayne Krantz or John Scofield, guitar. Moorea Dickason, vocals.

MSJ: What was the last CD you bought and/or what have you been listening to lately?

Tarik Ragab: Gentle Giant, Proclamation. Of Montreal, too. I know I’m late in the game but I’m into it.

Matt Lebofsky: The last CD I bought was Dead Rider Chills on Glass. Two albums I've been playing a lot lately are The Knells (self-titled) and OM Advaitic Songs…great travel music. 

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Brian Blade Fellowship: Landmarks, Abraham Salman: Saltana 

Moorea Dickason: The last one I bought was Summertime by Shovels and Rope. I’m a huge Cary Ann Hearst fan.

Jonathan Herrera: Kendrick Lamar, good kid, M.A.A.d city
MSJ:

Have you read any good books lately?

Tarik Ragab: Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. Both blew my mind. 

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Into my second book of Cormac McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy”.

Jonathan Herrera: The last really great book I read was Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night

MSJ: What about the last concert you attended for your enjoyment?

Tarik Ragab: I went with Moorea and her Dad to see Paul McCartney at Candlestick Park in San Francisco for the last concert there ever. It was epic. 

Matt Lebofsky: Faun Fables/Dead Rider/Free Salamander Exhibit. 

Matthew Charles Heulitt: Michael Landau Trio - one of the greatest living guitarists.  

Moorea Dickason: The last show I went to was to see our synth player, Jonathan Herrera play at Treasure Island Music Festival with Cathedrals. I also got to watch New Pornographers from the side stage, which was a show of a lifetime for me. I’m a big fan.

Jonathan Herrera: I saw Lorde because another band I’m in is signed to her label. It was not as good as I would have hoped.

MSJ: Do you have a musical “guilty pleasure?”

Tarik Ragab: Madonna’s "Material Girl." I could say more but I won’t. 

Moorea Dickason: I feel no guilt for anyone I listen to and I listen to a ton of music.  It’s all good in my world.

Matt Lebofsky: What Moorea said. I have no guilt. Despite being in a bunch of crazy bands, most of the music I actually listen to is fairly "normal." 

Matthew Charles Heulitt: I love so many things…but in my refined tastes I still love coming back to Van Halen and Black Sabbath.

Jonathan Herrera: Similar to Moorea, I don’t feel guilt for listening to and learning from music, no matter its street cred.

MSJ: What has been your biggest Spinal Tap moment?

Matt Lebofsky: Our very first public gig was playing near the finish line at the Bay to Breakers race (an annual public 12k footrace in San Francisco). When we started playing the ominous "Screed" some older man collapsed from exhaustion right in front of our performance area. We awkwardly had to stop mid song as he was tended to. He was eventually alright, but it took 45 minutes for an ambulance to arrive and carry him off, during which most of the race participants jogged past us as we stood there in silence waiting to start up again. 

Moorea Dickason:  Yes – that’s the story. It was crazy. If you’re not familiar with Bay to Breakers, it’s like Burning Man meets a race in San Francisco. Another story is when we played the Burning Man Decompression party in SF. A DJ was playing on the stage and it was packed with people, we then got up and played our set and the audience completely cleared away. We played for one guy in a demon costume. A DJ started up right after us and it was packed again within seconds. Awkward! At least we got free drinks out of it.

From: https://musicstreetjournal.com/artists_interview_display.cfm?id=100676 

 

Blend - Flood

Are you into rock music? Then you should know about Blend, one of Lebanon’s pioneering English-language rock bands in the late 90s-early 2000s. Formed by Souaid (vocals), Jad Aouad (drums), Haytham Chalhoub (bass), and Miran Gurunian (guitar), the band emerged from Beirut’s post-war youth culture and carved out a unique identity in a city still grappling with instability.
The band formed around 1995–1997 while the members were still at university, initially performing as Leviathan and playing rock covers in local pubs. After some time apart, with two members moving overseas, they reunited and rebranded as Blend to pursue original music. Blending post-grunge influences like Pearl Jam with traditional Middle Eastern instruments and melodies, their music stood out in a local scene dominated by pop and folkloric genres.
The group faced bans on Western rock music in the ’90s after a Lebanese metal fan committed suicide during that time, which led to albums by Metallica and Nirvana being banned in Lebanon. “We also sing in English because the rock scene here is minimal,” Souaid explained. “So we are aiming to get released in Europe and the States. And we want as many people as we can to understand our music and lyrics.”
Souaid and Chalhoub, who met while studying engineering, left Lebanon for work abroad. But a short trip home changed everything. The band recorded a song together as a keepsake, not expecting much to come of it. That song, Belong, ended up catching the attention of EMI — a groundbreaking moment for a non-Arabic-singing rock band in the Middle East. “When I heard the news [about the EMI deal], I quit my job in Canada, sold my furniture, and came back,” Souaid said. “I’m not an engineer anymore.”
Their 2003 debut album Act One—featuring a guest appearance by Natacha Atlas—was a moody, politically and personally charged record that reflected the complexities of life in Beirut. Their breakout track Belong touched on themes of identity and disillusionment and received regional airplay. It helped them build a grassroots following despite limited radio support. And it looks like a part of the music video was filmed right outside The Egg, one of Beirut’s most iconic landmarks.  From: https://www.beirut.com/en/754374/blend-lebanons-late-90s-rock-band-you-didnt-know-about/

October Project - Always

I personally love October Project. I grew up listening to ELP, YES, Zappa, jazz, ELO, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Renaissance, as well as Americana country rock and Laurel Canyon California music, with added Grateful Dead. This is some of the most beautiful, expressive, creative, unique music I've heard since the days of Renaissance and 1970's Prog Rock. Even though both of their albums are devoid of pyrotechnical instrumental virtuosic solos, I consider them Prog Rock. Mary Fahl has been compared to Annie Haslem (who is a fan by the way of both Mary Fahl and seperately October Project) and Grace Slick. As a vocal music major, I can say that she has one of the best voices I've ever heard in this genre or any for that matter. Linda Ronstadt also comes to mind. Some of their songs tend to be longer than average, have "sections", have etheral or fantasy lyrics, and have a floating and flowing feel to timing and chord movement. This is NOT typical of Pop-Rock. Many are orchestrated--even if done with electronic keyboard orchestra instruments (hey we didn't hold that against YES did we) and much more lush and complex than what passes for pop or other "alternative" rock of the time. The melodies, harmonies, and chord movements while flowing when performed, seemed to have been well constructed and meticulously thought out in the manner of a Classical music composition. Having seen them live many times, what they evoke on the albums is recreated very well and very powerfully in their live performances.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=2190