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Erik Cohen is an artificial figure, as the singer, who listens to the middle-class name Daniel Geiger, emphasizes time and again. "He's definitely a musical outlaw, who also goes through the wall with his head. Like 'Theo against the rest of the world'," he explains in allusion to the 80s film with Marius Müller-Westernhagen. Meanwhile, Geiger knows his way around artificial figures, and for many years he has headed his band Smoke Blow as frontman Jack Letten. When Smoke Blow decided to go into partial retirement in 2010 - they no longer release albums but still play concerts here and there - Erik Cohen was born: "Smoke Blow is punk, Erik Cohen is rock. But it is well known that these terms actually fit together quite well. It's all organic and not as far apart as you might think. Nevertheless, I consider Erik Cohen to be an independent design who from the beginning was not out to serve the smoke-blow clientele. On the contrary."

Thematically, this time everything revolves around the eternal battle of good against evil. It burns up around "Amoretum", according to the album title, a Garden of Eden somewhere in space, the last place of its kind. A concept album then? "No, more like a song cycle around an idea," singer and guitarist JE explains. Like "Refugeeum", the title "Amoretum" is also an artificial word that refers to its content; it is composed of "Amore" (love) and "Aboretum" (a protected garden or park).

MAGNUM - Forbidden Masquerade (4:58) Album
: Lost On The Road To Eternity (2018) Label/Distribution
: Steamhammer/SPVwww.magnumonline.co.uk

One direct hit at a time. No other MAGNUM album of modern times delivers as much classic-suspicious material as "Lost On The Road To Eternity". "Forbidden Masquerade" begins as if it were a "Lost" track from "On A Storyteller's Night" (1985), but MAGNUM have a lot more to offer here and on the album.

The Berlin Classic Rocker WEDGE will release their new album "Killing Tongue" on February 9th and on January geht´s on big tour. See the first video of the song "Lucid" here...

The band to it:

It's Pink Floyd's fault. The story of the extent to which the escalating material battles of prog and art rock in the mid-seventies, accompanied by overestimation of one's own self and megalomania, helped to cause punk, has been told a hundred times. It is true that the adolescents of those years who were affected by a recession lost touch with their idols, especially in England. But this movement was not a one-way street. The album "Animals" is an impressive example of the effects of the social circumstances that gave birth to punk on a band that was already regarded as dinosaurs at that time. With this surprising record, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright were closer to the Sex Pistols than their contemporaries could have known.

He calls himself an old bag. Achim Reichel, 73, looks back to the seventies, not without pride, but with the awareness of having been lucky too. Growing up in St. Pauli, a stone's throw from the neighbourhood, the hamburger talks like his beak has grown. That is amusing and makes him sympathetic, this guy without airs and graces, but with a lot of charisma. In his answers he sometimes digresses, but that doesn't matter, because the man has something to tell. Anything but a sailor's yarn.

eclipsed: In your musical life you didn't necessarily take a straight path stylistically. You've always done what you just made sense of. You don't compromise?

The story of Yes is a story full of surprises and imponderables. This includes the separation into two autonomous fractions. First happened in 1989, when Jon Anderson moved away from "Yes-West" (the pop-oriented group led by Chris Squire and Trevor Rabin) to revive Yes's classic seventies sound with ABWH (Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe). When the band - long again in a singular incarnation - continued in 2008 with a new singer due to health problems of Anderson, the former members Anderson, Rabin and Wakeman announced ARW in 2010. The first concerts were in 2016 and since April of this year, after the name change to Yes feat. Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin, Rick Wakeman, there are now also two Yes formations nominally. The following interview took place in July 2017 during the Night Of The Prog.

eclipsed: How far along are you with the recordings for your first studio album?

Probably no other musician in Germany holds the flag of the psychedelic higher than Christian "Doktor" Koch, the thought leader of the band Vibravoid founded in the late eighties. In music and lifestyle he orients himself on the forefathers of the movement and acts as an ambassador of an idea that is no longer present in the general public. The man from Düsseldorf himself did not experience the time and its vibrations, and yet he internalized them.

eclipsed: What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about 1967?

Doctor: What we have lost. Look at the last hundred years: Between 1917 and 1967, much more developed socially than from 1967 until today. Nothing new came in '67. Everything was just further commercialized. There were computers and radios back then, but not so many. People didn't have smartphones to say anything about it.

eclipsed: What about the music?