Three quarters of Electric Orange were reachable for the interview. "Double D", as keyboarder Dirk Jan Müller and guitarist Dirk Bittner, the founding fathers of the band, call themselves with a wink, and drummer Georg Monheim provide a look behind the scenes.

eclipsed: The new album contains some elements that are unusual for Electric Orange: acoustic passages, avant-garde structures, Far Eastern sounds.

Georg Monheim: That actually happened consciously, and when I listen to the result, I like it very much. By the way, we don't even find the sounds Far Eastern.

Dirk Jan Müller: We also did a few more sessions with other instruments than usual, with acoustic bass, mandolin, banjo, straw violin. I don't really hear anything from the Far East.

Dirk Bittner: Sounding Far Eastern was not an intention.

Trail Of Dead have reason to celebrate. Exactly twenty years ago, the US formation, once known for its destructive stage shows, was founded. Of the original line-up only Conrad Keely (voc, g) and Jason Reece (dr, g, voc) are left, but the current album "IX" shows that the band doesn't want to rest on the laurels of "Tao Of The Dead" and "Lost Songs". Instead she offers with "IX" a very coherent, melodic work, which at the same time undertakes beguiling New Artrock excursions. In an interview Jason Reece reveals more about the songwriting process, the recordings and the therapeutic effect of the songs.

eclipsed: Your new CD "IX" is released just in time for the band's twentieth anniversary. Is that why it sounds so optimistic?

Jason Reece: We actually wanted to make an instrumental album with music that could be used for film and television. But in the end a song album came out and it took a while until we made friends with it.

Mike's Rutherford's book "Rhythms of Life" is a blend of rock'n'roll biography and homage to the late father. Wide passages of the book are true treasure troves for the Genesis fan. We present here - as a look-up to the cover story of our last issue - an exclusive excerpt in which Rutherford remembers the time of the recordings of "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway".

Headley Grange in East Hampshire was a large 18th century country house that had seen better days. Led Zeppelin lived there during the recordings of Physical Graffiti, which didn't necessarily make the building any better. When Genesis arrived in June 1974 to write The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, there were rats everywhere and hardly any furniture. Rich, who had been there for a few days to clean up, told us about ropes he had found on a bed!

"Celebrating Jon Lord At The Albert Hall" (DVD, Blu-ray, CD) is a tribute to Jon Lord's diverse musical output. Ian Paice, who is married to the twin sister of the widow of his friend who died of cancer in 2012, played with the Hammond organist in Deep Purple and Whitesnake. At Whitesnake Paice also met guitarist Bernie Marsden again. He had worked with both of them on the exciting band project PAL (Paice, Ashton, Lord).

eclipsed: At the concert evening for Jon Lord you played with Bernie Marsden two tracks from the PAL album "Malice In Wonderland". Does that show in retrospect the significance this force had for you and Jon?

For fifteen years, John Illsley kept his leukemia secret. After successful bone marrow donation by his sister and positive prognosis, the co-founder of the famous British band Dire Straits has returned with the solo album "Testing The Water" (Review: eclipsed 10/2014). We talked to the bass player about his illness, the new album and the levels of meaning of his songs.

eclipsed: At the end of June, you turned sixty-five. Does it feel different for you to celebrate your birthday after you've defeated the disease?

John Illsley: Oh, my goodness, thank you for reminding me. (laughs) You know, the last few years have been pretty interesting, and I've come out stronger from all this history. I'm feeling very positive vibrations right now.

eclipsed: How was it writing songs at the hospital?

...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD - A Million Random Digits (3:07)
Album: IX (2014)
Label/Distribution: Superball/Universal
www.andyouwillknowusbythetrailofdead.bandpage.com

With TRAIL OF DEAD, you can never be sure what's coming: Brute Alternative? Or do you prefer smooth, carried melodies in the direction of art rock? The answer this time is simple: On "IX" the Americans simply mixed both elements. And the bill works out wonderfully in various passages.

As a supplement to our Pink Floyd title story of the eclipsed print edition 11/2014 we document here the complete interview which our author Wolf Kampmann conducted with Phil Manzanera at the beginning of October about the work on "The Endless River".

eclipsed: How can you make an album out of outtakes from "The Division Bell" after twenty years?

Phil Manzanera: When Pink Floyd started recording, which then became "The Division Bell", they decided to record the album like in the old days. The shows of the "Momentary Laps Of Reason" tour had gone well and the guys wondered why they shouldn't just improvise freely as they had done before. They went to different studios, maybe they had some chord sequences in their heads, but mostly they improvised. David had a DAT recorder with him, and whenever they had something up their sleeve that sounded reasonable, he would record it. In this way, twenty hours of jams and ideas were created.

It wasn't as if Genesis hadn't already been involved with the idea of conceptual rock art before 1974. After all, the band had previously released "Supper's Ready", an epic that spanned an entire LP page, and in 1973 presented songs on "Selling England By The Pound" that were held together by a certain idea of Britishness. However, Genesis had not yet dared to produce a record that would tell a coherent story from beginning to end.