At the renowned Burg-Herzberg-Festival anecdotes are welcome guests - this summer as well. On 30 July they will be the last band on the opening day to enter the stage and ring in their live comeback in Germany. In an interview with eclipsed, band boss Nicklas Barker reflects on the roots of his group and names the reasons for the long break.

eclipsed: The release of "Until All The Ghosts Are Gone" coincides with your unofficial 25th anniversary, because the core cast of anecdotes has existed since 1990. What were the most important stages of your career?

Dave Schmidt candidly mentions the chaos that currently reigns over him, and one cannot get rid of the impression that this disorderly state persists persistently and sustainably - but that it is also a source of his almost untameable creativity. Schmidt is currently giving the scene four high-calibre releases via Sulatron Records: a new live album by Electric Moon, the second album by the Russian band Polska Radio One, Krautzone will follow with separate CD and vinyl releases, and finally - what a surprise! - the first Zone Six studio album in 11 years.

eclipsed: The members of Zone Six call themselves lazy bastards. So how did the new studio album "Love Monster" come about?

Dave Schmidt: Like everything with Zone Six, this was very spontaneous, during a recording break at the Krautzone sessions.

Not many know it yet, but there is a beautiful live recording for band and orchestra of Genesis' epic "Supper's Ready". Recorded and filmed in January in Iceland, the result is stunning. The band is called Todmobile, an award-winning prog band, founded in the late 80s in Reykjavik. The orchestra is the Northern Symphony Orchestra. Guest star: Steve Hackett! I've never been to Iceland before, and when Steve visited me in Los Angeles last December and told me that he was going to play some concerts with a local prog band there, I was fascinated and amazed.

Although James Taylor has been clean and secluded for thirty years in the woods of Massachusetts, his time as a junkie, Beatles protege and member of the Laurel Canyon scene also catches up with him on his comeback album. Luckily

eclipsed: "October Road", your last studio work, was released in 2002. Why the long break?

James Taylor: (laughs) Very simple: I got married, moved to an old farm that I had to renovate, and I had children. A full-time job where there was no time to write. This did not change until 2013, when the children started school.

eclipsed: Your studio is called The Barn. That sounds very rural..

Taylor: It is. My house is located in the woods of Massachusetts, with few neighbors, but a lot of wilderness. I've always dreamed of that. And the barn is the studio.

Geoff Downes would love to start working on a new Asia album right away. But he's currently hanging in the air again. His songwriting partner, singer/bassist John Wetton, has just been operated on. A tumor weighing almost a kilo was pulled out of him. So the live document "Axis XXX Live San Francisco" from the last tour with Steve Howe of the band fits well into the stuff.

eclipsed: How's John?

Geoff Downes: You have to wait and see. It is important to me as a friend that he gets fit again so that he can enjoy his life. And as his partner at Asia I hope that he will be able to work on new songs with me again in the near future. Asia without him is hard for me to imagine.

eclipsed: With your other band, yes, you don't seem to think so?

VENNART - Infatuate (5:08)
Album: The Demon Joke
Label/Distribution: Superball/Universal mikevennart.tumblr.com

Mike Vennart, the former Oceansize front man and current tour guitarist of Biffy Clyro, invites on his solo debut to a gripping, quirky and interlaced trip between prog, noise and quiet stuff to breathe a sigh of relief. An extremely artistic sound odyssey that quickly captivates the listener.

The starting point of the album, which changed everything and without which according to keyboarder Mark Kelly "Marillion would no longer exist in its present form", is to be found in late summer '84: After the exhausting "Fugazi" tour, Marillion initially took a two-month break. Although they sketched some initial ideas for a new album here and there, they used this phase to recharge their batteries for the upcoming tasks. And they had it in them. The band had got wind of their label EMI playing with the idea of terminating the contract with them. The responsible persons there were dissatisfied that the high investments in the second album had not led to the desired sales figures. In fact, "Fugazi" had been sold a few thousand times less in England than "Script For A Jester's Tear", which sold around 120,000 copies.

In 1972, Yes were big in the live business. More than 100 shows in Europe, USA and Canada. The "Close To The Edge" tour with Alan White's official debut on the drummer's chair was also the beginning of a meteoric rise of Yes in the big US live arenas (partly supported by the Eagles, Edgar Winter or the Mahavishnu Orchestra). Together with "Seconds Out" by Genesis, "Yessongs" is considered the ultimate live statement of a prog band. What the 14-CD-box "Progeny" has to add to that and how the live year 1972 went for Yes, we get to the bottom of it in the roundtable with Chris Squire and Alan White.

eclipsed: How did the "Progeny" project come about?