Thirty years ago, former Japan singer/guitarist David Sylvian and CAN legend Holger Czukay released "Plight & Premonition", a collaborative album whose experimental spirit still amazes today. One year later they continued their cooperation with "Flux + Mutability". Now the German label Greenland is relaunching its adventurous works. David Sylvian tells the story of its creation.
What Joe Bonamassa managed to do with the blues - to get him out of the old man's mess and back into the limelight - The Night Flight Orchestra could succeed with the AOR. The Swedish melodic rockers are just delivering their fourth album and are dusting off a genre that has not only had an image problem in recent decades, but has also all too often frozen in clichés. Björn Strid and his band are in love with these standards and provide them with a fun factor of ten.
Deep Purple only know one drummer in their ranks. Also on the keyboarder position the hardrockers only get it to two players. And when you ask for their bassists, strictly speaking only one name comes to mind. Thus Purple form a fixed instrumentalist unit. This explains the homogeneous, powerful sound that has been the band for decades. In the following we portray the drummer as well as the keyboarder and bassists in the service of one of the greatest bands in rock history.
Despite major social and musical changes, the spirit of Germany's biggest hippie festival has remained constant for fifty years. But how did it all start? What has changed? What are the constants? And what will be on the agenda for the big anniversary in 2018? Together with organizer Gunther Lorz we trace the historical cornerstones of the meeting of old and young flower children.
With The Sea Within, Roine Stolt has gathered a veritable all-star ensemble - with members of The Flower Kings, Pain Of Salvation and The Aristocrats. Names like Daniel Gildenlöw, Marco Minnemann or Jonas Reingold raise the expectations of fans of progressive music. The band initiator is aware of this and therefore tries to keep the ball flat. What would not be necessary at all, because the self-titled debut is a stylistically versatile double album between prog, art pop, jazz rock and film music, in which the joy of the participants is clearly noticeable.
Mid-June. Getting an interview appointment with Mariusz Duda is currently extremely difficult. Since March, Riverside have been at Studio Serakos in Warsaw to work on their seventh album "Waste7and", the first without guitarist Piotr Grudziński, who died in early 2016. The band also has to prepare for three summer festivals. For eclipsed Duda nevertheless takes a lot of time, explains why the current Lunatic Soul album "Under The Fragmented Sky" stands for him "between life and death", and describes how Riverside have reinvented themselves with "Waste7and", which is expected to appear at the end of September.
eclipsed: Mariusz, you always carry your feelings outward with absolute honesty through your music. Your fans appreciate this courage to be vulnerable.
Josh Tillman doesn't give interviews about his new album "God's Favorite Costumer". Why, he must have thought, after all he threw himself into the media hustle and bustle for the not even one year old predecessor "Pure Comedy" without regard to losses. Suddenly his fictional character Father John Misty was on everyone's lips, not only the music press, but also the feuilletons became aware of the singer-songwriter. And he had also created a really wonderful album, which reminded of the West Coast Pop of the 70s, of brooding, shy songwriters like James Taylor or Jackson Browne. No wonder, since "Pure Comedy" was created in close cooperation with the producer (and current Roger Waters tour guitarist) Jonathan Wilson, who is a kind of guardian of this sound, as not only his own records but also those of the band Dawes, which he is in charge of, prove. Traces of the early Elton John could also be heard on the album.
The word jazz doesn't mean much to Kamasi Washington. It's just a word. With his music he wants to express what words are not enough for. One cannot deny him a certain inclination towards gigantism, because Kamasi Washington wants nothing less than to change the world. But is that possible? For this he reaches for the stars and the earth's core at the same time.
