"Breakfast In America" is an album which is the subject of numerous rumours and misunderstandings. Roger Hodgson is settling these accounts on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the success record - and doing what he does best: He's going on tour.
The German band around their mastermind Florian Fricke is counted as Krautrock, but Popol Vuh were always musically an outsider among the outsiders. From 1970 the band released 20 albums for 30 years until Fricke's death in 2001. Five of them - "Affenstunde" (1970), "Hosianna Mantra" (1972), "Einsjäger & Siebenjäger" (1975) as well as the soundtracks for the Werner Herzog films "Aguirre" (1975) and "Nosferatu" (1978) - will now be released individually on CD in a first season (two more will follow in autumn 2019 and spring 2020) and in a 5-player LP box.
Opeth, Spiritual Beggars, Anecdotes, Kamchatka or Candlemass: Just this small selection of bands, with whom Per Wiberg has already worked as a keyboarder, doesn't read badly. The multi-instrumentalist only lacked a real solo album in his vita. In an interview, the 50-year-old Swede offers interesting insights into his creative cosmos and also let his band King Hobo, whose review can be found further back in the magazine, elicit a few words about their new album.
eclipsed: Per, you have so many interesting bands and projects going on, why a solo album?
Lamp Of The Universe is Craig Williamson's one-man band. After his stoner rock band Datura broke up at the end of the 90s, the New Zealander tried it on his own. With "Align In The Fourth Dimension" the tenth Lamp Of The Universe album is now released on the German Sulatron label. Like all previous albums "Align In The Fourth Dimension" offers a soft, relaxed psychedelic wrapped in cotton wool, full of organs, tablas, sitar, guitars, mellotron, flute and hypnotic, trance-like rhythms as well as beguiling melodies. An oasis of bliss and spirituality.
The dominant theme of the year, despite the fresh wind blowing through the Federal Republic of Germany with the election of Social Democrat Willy Brandt as Chancellor, and despite oppressive news from Vietnam and Ireland, is the landing of the Apollo 11 crew on the moon. On earth the longings of the hippies burst in Altamont at the latest, rock as "Way Of Life" has lost its innocence. On the other hand, rock music is just really taking off, the Krauts are springing up, jazzers are discovering rock, King Crimson is the prog that Zeppelin is circling - new visions for the seventies.
15 years is between A Valid Path and The Secret. His excursion into the electronica realm had not brought any success to the eponym of the Alan Parsons Project, multiple Grammy winner and sound engineer of albums like "Abbey Road" or "The Dark Side Of The Moon". So the Englishman remained silent for a long time as an album artist. Now Parsons returns to the symphonic rock realms for which he is known and loved. But how much can "The Secret" really tear in 2019?
Archives - already in the name of the band hides the everlasting. Now the collective is celebrating a quarter of a century of band history under the motto "25". Almost four hours of archive material in the rearview mirror, the headlights are nevertheless consistently directed forward.
The Canadian exceptional musician Devin Townsend presents on his new solo album "Empath" a wicked mix of extreme metal, country, ambient/new age, orchestral and choral compositions and jazz, detached from all stylistic constraints. It is nothing less than a tour de force through the career of the 46-year-old synesthete who perceives "Empath" as an iridescent white album.
The rock scene in Turkey is almost unknown in German-speaking countries. Since the late sixties, an independent variety of contemporary music has developed there, whose exotic, even psychedelic charm lies precisely in the mix of tradition and modernity. Bir sevgili uğruna, Sen de benim gibi yanma arkadaş", and later in the chorus: "O yaşlı gözlerine, o yalan sözlerine, Kanma arkadaş" - many sang these lines of text. The hard rocker Ogün Sanlısoy for example - his video has been clicked 1.5 million times on YouTube so far.
