Dark and sarcastic greetings from the island: The British prog band FROST* is back - with a new album and three drummers. In an interview with eclipsed, keyboardist Jem Godfrey and guitarist John Mitchell talk about the recording process, the line-up change in the band and their anger about the current British government

Hamburg art rockers Sylvan have become experts in concept albums: With "Posthumous Silence" they set standards in this discipline 15 years ago, and their last album to date, "Home" (2015), also followed a consistent basic idea. Now they have once again presented a work in which a story is told: "One To Zero", with which they musically tread somewhat different paths than on the predecessor, describes the development process of an artificial intelligence from the initialization to the self-determined reset from their own perspective. In an interview, singer and lyricist Marco Glühmann, keyboardist Volker Söhl and bassist Sebastian Harnack talked about the background of the new album and their rejection of musical pigeonholes.

Duisburg, early 70s: Heinz Robert Martin and Claus Rauschenbach founded the duo Kalacakra and released the album "Crawling To Lhasa" in 1972. A krautrock mix of dirty rock-blues-folk and Indian-Tibetan sounds. Right after that, the duo called it a day. In 2002 Martin dared to release a new album and now he is on the road again with Kalacakra

Heinz Robert Martin is 72 by now, but he remained musically active all these years and shows himself as open as ever in the interview.

eclipsed: How did your interest in the Tibetan, Indian and Far Eastern arise?

The famous philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once went down in history with his call "Back to Nature!". Philosophically strong is also Single Celled Organism mastermind Jens Lueck on the sequel of his concept album "Splinter In The Eye".

eclipsed: When you delivered the first SCO album in 2017 and in it 85 percent of humanity perishes due to a virus, you couldn't have anticipated the Corona pandemic, after all. Did that make you uncomfortable afterwards?

Jens Lueck: Very much so...I was also asked about it quite often!

eclipsed: Did the pandemic with all its consequences, lockdown, etc. change anything in terms of the storyline? And did you get a different view on the story itself?

Jules Galli, the 27-year-old singer of Levara, is not only in a good mood because of the spring weather in his adopted hometown Los Angeles. The self-titled debut album of his band is also cause for joy for him: Because on it the French-born singer together with guitarist Trev Lukather (son of Toto string wizard Steve Lukather) and drummer Josh Devine (ex-One Direction) cultivates a highly polished melodic rock that has what it takes to reach a large mass audience.

eclipsed: Levara are a multinational band. You yourself are from France, Josh Devine is from England and Trev Lukather grew up in Los Angeles. What musical preferences do you have in common?

Classical electronic music in the spirit of the psychedelic-experimental seventies, abbreviated EM, leads a rather exclusive shadowy existence despite some great successes, mainly of the Berlin School or international pioneers like Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis. Listeners who are open to a mental journey into other spheres - the really big (and usually long!) instrumental head cinema - are all the more infatuated with their music. Only a few labels have specialized in this music, Manikin, MellowJet-Records, SynGate and Spheric Music.

"It's a typical winter day today," says Andi Deris when we meet in a bar in Puerto de la Cruz on Tenerife. Nevertheless, we sit outside and enjoy the view of the city. He points in the direction of some houses a bit away: "Weik lives over there" he explains. Meant is of course Michael Weikath, guitarist of Helloween. But even apart from facts about the band, the musician from Karlsruhe always pulls interesting stories about the city and the island out of his hat. And of course about the pumpkinheads' new album.

eclipsed: "Helloween" is your first studio album as a seven-piece. Were the songs written after the "unification" of the old and new formation or before?

Andi Deris: Both and. "Down In The Dumps", for example, was already in the making before the "Pumpkins United" tour. And the chorus of "Mass Pollution" is ancient, I've probably been carrying that around with me for 15 years

As usual in these times, we meet Justin Sullivan via video link at his home in Bradford, UK. Sirens are blaring in the background, Sullivan is relaxed, if slightly annoyed by the forced break his band has been given due to the pandemic. At least he used the time creatively and recorded a quiet, very personal album.

eclipsed: When we talked about the last New Model Army album "From Here" in 2019, you put special emphasis on the song "The Weather", which deals with the fact that man and nature are inextricably linked, so that, for example, climate change synchronously leads to a growing heating of the minds. Do you feel vindicated by the emergence of the coronavirus?