With the sampler "She Rocks, Vol. 1", released in January on Steve Vai's label Favored Nations, the guitar virtuoso fulfilled a heart's desire and chose recordings from eleven of the most interesting female rock guitarists today. In addition to the goal of promoting talent, this project was based on the realization that women who play the guitar are still not regarded as serious musicians by the general public.
eclipsed: Your new album is named after a strange ritual from ancient Greece in which young men supposedly turned into werewolves. Is there anything current in the werewolf motif?
eclipsed: During the "Abracadabra"-Tour 2016 you conceived, composed and recorded the new album "Stereolith" on your laptop during the "Abracadabra"-Tour 2016 in the hotel and in the tour bus. How'd that go?
With the album "In The Passing Light Of Day" the Swedish progressive metalers Pain Of Salvation return to their roots after years of stylistic excursions. That they can do this is anything but self-evident: at the beginning of 2014 Daniel Gildenlöw fell ill with a life-threatening streptococcal infection. The singer/guitarist had to spend several months in hospital. In a very personal interview he told eclipsed how this time has shaped the new album and what is currently going on with the 43-year-old exceptional musician.
It sounded like Maurice Ravel on LSD, and the singer's icy voice made tender natures' blood freeze in their veins: In July 1967, the legendary Summer of Love, "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane conquered the top ten of the US single charts. It was already the second bang of the drum that the band from San Francisco landed in this wildly moved flower power year. Only a few weeks earlier, on June 16th, the very day when one of the first big rock festivals started in Monterey, Jefferson Airplane celebrated their hit premiere with "Somebody To Love": 5th place in the USA.
Not all musicians can put their art into words. This also applies to Aviv Geffen, who receives at the Cologne Hilton, but prefers to play with his mobile phone rather than concentrate on the conversation. He suffers from a discreet self-overestimation and sometimes has less to say than one would expect from a man of his reputation. After all, he is not only a musician, actor and TV celebrity, but also the mouthpiece of the political left in Israel, critic of the radical Orthodox like the Netanyahu government and a good friend with all kinds of rock celebrities.
Crippled Black Phoenix deal with the current socio-political situation. Their thoughts also revolve around internal topics. Behind the band from Bristol are legal disputes with their former members Karl Demata and Christian Heilmann. She survived the ordeal. Crippled head Justin Greaves has meanwhile passed through a personal misery: he has fought his depressions and put them in their place. The 45-year-old said that he had emerged stronger from it. In any case he turns against negative elements like populists and other dividers with the new record "Bronze".
On 29 December Marianne Faithfull turned seventy. For the former junkie, who became an elegant dark icon with albums like "Broken English", "Strange Weather" or "Before The Poison", no reason to celebrate. In the sixties, the "mother of all rock chicks" was the first woman next to Nico to celebrate just as wildly as the rock stars with whom she was associated. We visited her in her adopted home Paris for a coffee in the Hotel Costes at the Rue Saint Honoré.
BLACKFIELD - Family Man (3:37)
Album: V (2017) (Release: 10.02.)
Label/Distribution: Kscope/Edel
www.kscopemusic.com/artists/blackfield
