Author: philfacelift

This was a rare treat – an evening of excellent music hosted over the other side of the Pennines in Sheffield, ‘A Night of Prog’ but with a distinctly Canterburyesque hue: Needlepoint and Zopp were two bands I’d interviewed as part of PhD research last year, and the extended delvings into their histories are printed as part of the Canterbury 2.0 series here and here, as well as within the recent Prog article that was based on this project.

In fact, the bands tonight were part of a rarified 3 progged attack: Norwich’s Guranfoe, who I think had performed in full alongside Needlepoint the previous night in London, appeared in very stripped down form to start off the evening’s events: just two guitarists, one a highly fluent guest soloist who graced the later performances of the other bands with somewhat conspicuous, angular bodypopping in front of the stage, but on stage exchanged some highly intricate duo lines with his partner Whether these were adapted pieces from the Guaranfoe repertoire, I’m not sure, but it was polished and enjoyable interplay, I suspect somewhat curtailed because of the evening’s slightly delayed start.

Zopp came next. This is the fourth time I’ve seen them, and each performance brings new insights and experiences. A  set pared down to an hour meant some compromises, even more so when you are showcasing lengthy new material: I’ve heard the opener ‘Intuition Made It’ in a couple of guises now, and possibly snippets of the very lengthy ‘Endless Decrees’ too: this has evolved into something of an epic, and luckily by the time the band reached this penultimate track, some of the wonky sound had resolved itself, with guitar and bass in full sonic glory.

In the meantime, it was Ryan Stevenson’s trademark Stewartesque keyboard sounds which dominated; each solo silhouetted. The classics all got an airing: Before the Light from the first album; Toxicity and You from the second, the latter’s staccato intro played by saxophonist Myles Noble on a portable keyboard. Uppmarksamhet was sadly truncated before its wonderful improvised stretch out. All tracks were excellent, ‘You’ in particular, but the excitement of the new material, all stop-start sections, Stevenson’s increasingly confident vocals, wonderful bass lines and admirable precision is what will remain in the memory.

Stretched out across stage in an elongated front line, with Andrea Moneta’s extensive kit behind them, and a nest of leads stretching in all directions, Zopp’s kit would take some untangling before Needlepoint arrived on stage. The Norwegian band, who have just released their seventh album ‘Remnants of Light’, had made their UK debut only the night before, and were hotly anticipated. Their set-up was a relative contrast, a circle of intimacy with singer Bjorn Klakegg seated stage left, guitar cushioned on knee, one shoe off, the epitome of calm; fresh-faced drummer Ola Øverby with stripped down jazz kit, at the rear; bass player Nikolai Haengsle the only one standing, energetically powering through his lines to the left – he’s been an ever-present with the band since their inception; and the studious Erlend Slettevoll on Rhodes opposite. There was a personal, living room vibe to their performance, the understanding between the players unspoken and obvious.

Needlepoint’s calling card on record is their dreamy, pastoral vocal style; live there are some elements of this, but it is largely superseded by the most incredible grooves the band produce: one couldn’t take one’s eyes off the mesmeric performance of Øverby , fingers half way up both drum sticks, feeling every microbeat; whilst Slettevoll, head down, was economy in motion: every lick a considered refinement. I couldn’t give you an exhaustive breakdown of the tracks they played, even though I recognised all: this was very much a continuous stream of superbly executed music: on the hand as tight as it is possible to be in terms of a secure, unyielding base; on the other loose enough for all the players, including Klakegg’s own fluid guitar work, to add their own personal touches. I did spot in there ‘Web of Worry’, the magnificent ‘Soaring’, my own personal favourite ‘When The Ocean Meets The Sky’, the Stevie Wonder-like ‘Why’, and an unexpected highlight ‘The Diary of Robert Reverie’, the jaunty Caravan-esque title track from the band’s 4th album which tonight took on the guise of a hard-headed groove. We’d talked a couple of years ago at Facelift HQ about heading out to Norway to see Needlepoint perform, so enamoured were we of their back catalogue. Their brief visit to these shores has only reinforced that desire – it was an extraordinary performance.

Needlepoint – https://needlepoint.bandcamp.com/music

Zopp – https://zopp.bandcamp.com/

Guranfoe – https://guranfoe.bandcamp.com/

‘It’s fucking fantastic, this’. These words rang out somewhat incongruously to my left in amongst the dying notes of Led Bib’s opening track, resonating around a hushed, packed Puzzle Inn. But looking around me,  I could see little disagreement.

Promoting their new album ‘Hotel Puplik’, Led Bib were playing the Puzzle as part of a short UK tour, an intimate venue, a proper old boozer, with its monthly jazz gigs, characterised by a pass-the-hat policy rather than entrance fee, augmented by this unscheduled Monday night performance, one of the finest I’ve seen in recent years.  I’d most recently been at the Puzzle for a superb Gary Boyle gig where post-gig he related some slightly scurrilous stories about the Bilzen festival back in 1969 that he’d played at with Brian Auger (alongside Soft Machine). Since then Chris Martin had dropped in for a solo set a few weeks previously, prior to a few dates in somewhat larger arenas with Coldplay.

I’ve seen a number of the Led Bib’s members in the past few years as hired hands within Jack Hues’ extended bands, most memorably performing ‘Facelift’, in appropriate septet mode at the Westgate Hall in Canterbury alongside two of Syd Arthur’s Magill brothers, plus pianist Sam Bailey. But this was the first time I’d heard the band as a single entity. 5 albums in and I’m regretting that.

The band are a Mercury-nominated outfit, recently reduced to a four piece containing two saxophonists, electric bass and drummer. Instrumentation is minimal  – Mark Holub, (who makes the announcements, or at least spoke wryly between sets), deftly operates on a basic kit with Cutler-like omnipresence, and the two reed players play solely baritone and alto respectively. One might worry about the ‘middle’ vacated by their erstwhile keyboard player  – but great washes of echoed sounds often permeates between the opposing saxes Chris Williams and Pete Grogan – think a less manicured Delta Saxophone Quartet. Their collective collages are as much a part of the palette as the presence of the astonishing Liran Donin – often using the bass as a lead instrument: high up on the fret board crafting melody, or grinding out memorably dexterous rhythms.

This is music of high pedigree: improvised material played with sensitivity, freedom and tempo but never losing sight of a pre-ordained core: whether returning to the root of a driving bass theme or etching out anthemic lines between the saxophonists. There are folky hints here, North African rhythms even. It’s jazz, but not as you know it.

Hotel Pupik available at https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/hotel-pupik-3

I was apparently one of only of a handful of lucky people to hear ‘Acid Funk’ back in  early July, courtesy of  the band <<NUKLI>> inadvertently pre-releasing their new album on Bandcamp, and my unseemly haste to hear the latest output from one of my favourite bands bore fruit before the band realised their mistake and took it back down again pending its 1 August release. It’s been on permanent play ever since.

‘Acid Funk’ seems to have finally bucked my own personal trend of missing out on << NUKLI >>. In the 90s they were on the roster of Delerium Records, that peerless psychedelic label which introduced me to the likes of Kava Kava, Porcupine Tree and the Dead Flowers, but released their first album ‘The Time Factory’ round about the time I was packing in Facelift as a fanzine. Then, when I started going to Kozfest in the mid 2010s, I somehow conspired to miss the band for at least three editions despite being otherwise sucked into that festival’s wall to wall trippy bombardment.

On the fourth occasion, nursing a migraine from hell after a long drive down to Devon, the band’s warm sounds and beautiful instrumental harmony coaxed me inevitably out of my tent to the safe haven of the festival’s Daevid Allen stage. I’ve been hooked ever since.

<<NUKLI>> are a trio spearheaded by Kev Hegan (guitar and vocals) and Mark Huxley (bass), both of whom are regulars with the Glissando Guitar Orchestra, but trace their roots back to the 1980s. Their brand of space rock is uplifting, positive and not a little folky, and perfect in a small festival environment. They are joined on drums by recent recruit Paul Maguire, who brings an energetic, high-end accompaniment to a tightly-grooved mix. Via annual Kozfest encounters in subsequent years (the band’s delicious late night <<NUKLITE>> alter ego, featuring pared down, semi-acoustic performances in Wally’s tent, uniquely captures the vibe of the festival), I’ve come to grow and love their outstanding ‘There Is Another Way’ release (2019), an album with nary a duff moment, blues-flecked breaks, gentle wig-outs and glorious ambience. The band have subtly weaved new material into their sets (some have appeared on live albums) so that ‘Acid Funk’ is not such much an outpouring of new material as a sonic document of what has already been honed live. And it’s mighty fine…

There’s one track which Kev Hegan, live, describes as their ‘prog rock’ number (it could be either the opener ‘Tomorrow People’ or the ‘The Kings Hat’). It’s a description that struck me as slightly self-deprecating but not entirely wide of the mark in terms of how pieces evolve: there is no pomposity here, no overblown performance, but instead the term progressive amply describes a mode of composition that sees the band move easily from theme to theme within each track, with some obvious highlights emerging: that might be the minor-key cascading riff on ‘Dancing In The Moment’, or the recurrent wah-wah solos on ‘World of Light’. One gets the impression that pieces might have germinated via lengthy jams between the three musicians – certainly the vibe between Hegan and Huxley is almost telepathic, so sensitive are the changes and developments within each piece.

Ultimately though the band are at their finest during an epic 4 piece suite in the latter part of the album. There is the glorious stasis of both ‘Afrika’ and ‘Indiah’, each of which are underpinned by memorable bass lines. Their proponent, Mark Huxley reminds me a little on stage of Hugh Hopper: an imposing, implacable figure, masked behind glasses and facial hair, with a certain knowing detachment, generating a fat, enveloping sound which permeates into the soul; the economy of effort at odds with its impact.

Hegan, meanwhile cuts a more animated counterpoint, engagingly flitting between snatches of vocals to provide a variety of guitar roles: subtle licks, atmospherics and free soloing which build up a rich sound. It is here that the alchemy of the band becomes clear: the overall sonic palette is way beyond what should be reasonably produced by a three piece. ‘Afrika’ and ‘Indiah’, each with their respective ethnic undertones,  are spliced either side of ‘Acid Funk’, which does what it says on the tin, a spaced out groove a la Mike Howlett with Gong or House of Thandoy. ‘Indiah’, a new tune to me, may well be the album’s highlight, with just a hint of the Ozrics’ recently restituted tune ‘Ayurvedic’, before wending its way down, all sitar atmospherics, into the concluding piece ‘Good Times’. Enjoy <<NUKLI>> in all their guises if you manage to get to Kozfest’s new location in mid Wales, or check them out at their free album launch. For if <<NUKLI>> are indeed prog rock, they might just be its best kept secret.

https://nukli.bandcamp.com/ – don’t forget that this Friday 1 August 2025 is Bandcamp Friday where all fees go directly to the artist

‘Acid Funk’ launch party on 16 August – details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/biddle-bros/sad-house-daddy-presents-nukli-acid-funk-album-launch-tony-hands-free-entry/1796714970922215/

Kozfest tickets (8-10 August) are at https://www.electricsalad.co.uk/kozfest.html

(Thanks to Banana Steve for this review)

Ever wondered what ‘For Richard’ or ‘Nine Feet Underground’ might sound like unplugged? Wonder no more. Pye Hastings, Geoffrey Richardson and Mark Walker are re-arranging songs from the Caravan catalogue and playing them as an acoustic trio.

Last night at the Sound Lounge in Sutton was, according to them, their second outing as a trio. I’m pretty certain it was their third (after The Firkin Frog in Herne Bay, 10th November 2024 and Trading Boundaries, Sheffield Green/Uckfield, Sussex, 23rd March 2025). Maybe the north Kent gig was only a toe-in-the-water tester? Anyway, two wonderful sets with a beer break in between (the venue was rammed and it was virtually impossible to move or get to the bar when the trio were playing – great for listening, not so good for ageing bladders). I’d be guessing at 150 plus fans?

I’d first heard an acoustic version of ‘Smoking Gun’ on a YouTube clip recorded at the pub in Faversham/Herne Bay and liked it immediately, then sometime later a version of ‘Ride’, I think it was, with a raga-style intro. The original ‘Ride’ has always been a favourite, ‘Smoking Gun’ much less so. Probably like for many fans, the early albums are indispensable, then it’s the law of diminishing marginal returns with a few pearls here and there. Times and styles change and musicians need to make a living but those AOR/MTV-style later albums generally leave me cold but the songs resurrected acoustically last night are all, without exception, winners. ‘I’ll Be There For You’, ‘Farewell My Old Friend’, ‘If Better Days Are To Come’ moved me almost to tears.

Of course you won’t get those powerful ‘Pearl and Dean’ explosions on the old favourites nor the labial Grumbly Grimblies (their hands were full at the time) but neither will you miss them. Geoffrey Richardson on viola does a splendid job building up to all the climaxes. ‘Love To Love You’ had a wonderful Latino feel. Even catchier and as up-lifting than the original. 

First Set: I’ll Be There For You, Dead Man Walking, Grey And Pink, Golf Girl, Smoking Gun, Love To Love You, Spare A Thought, For Richard, Place Of My Own.

Second Set: Who Do You Think You Are, Farewell My Old Friend, Every Precious Little Thing, The Dog The Dog, If Better Days Are To Come, Cold As Ice, Best Thing In My Life, Chance Of A Lifetime, Backwards/A Hunting We Shall Go, Nine Feet Underground.

Encore: I’m On My Way

I’m unclear in my mind (and they probably aren’t either) whether they are Caravan Acoustic or Acoustic Caravan. I get the impression it doesn’t matter that much. Highly recommended if you get a chance.

Banana Steve

Another year and another new chapter in the history of Soft Machine as the band launch their 2025 dates with a Tuesday night gig at a favourite stomping ground, the Band on the Wall in Manchester. The amount of social media ads about this had made me think that this mini-UK tour might be slightly going under the radar, but the place appears pretty full, filled seats stretching so far back that the merch stall is relocated upstairs, and genuine roars greeting the band as they power their way through a repertoire both new and old.

We’re treated to no less than 4 ‘world premieres’ – tracks that will soon take their place in what will be the third studio album since the band became Soft Machine again rather than Soft Machine Legacy, and shows that the growing coherence of this lineup as both a compositional and performing act is palpable: Theo Travis’ ‘Seven Hours’ continues some of the impressionistic free work seen on ‘Other Doors’ before finally settling on a more etched out theme; ‘Green Books’, possibly the highpoint of the evening has a funked out guitar and bass intro from John Etheridge (its author), and Fred Baker, which returns throughout the pieces, as does a strong angular line played in unison by Etheridge and Travis (on tenor sax). The second set opener ‘Open Road’ sees Travis bestride the stage, knees bent, in an extended, fulsome tenor rant – I’ve seen him many times over the years, both with Gong and Soft Machine, but for me this might well have been the most commanding performance from him I’ve witnessed.

In between times, there is the usual handpicked blend of band standards and newer pieces: ‘Facelift’ opens proceedings with impressionistic noises and rumblings before carving out those all too familiar riffs in a sadly truncated rendering; ‘Burden of Proof’, a title track from those Legacy day albums is another unexpected highlight, a fluid swingalong which morphs into guitar and sax call and response. There are Etheridge’s beautiful ballad pieces ‘Heart Off Guard’ and ‘Stars Apart’ from the last 2 albums; Asaf Sirkis’ thunderous assault on his drum kit before and during the otherwise tranquil ‘Tales of Taliesin’, him otherwise being a figure of zen-like precision throughout; and Fred Baker’s showpieces: the vintage renditions of ‘Joy of a Toy’ and, briefly,‘1030 Returns to Bedroom’, a cacophonous outpouring of fuzz bass. Hugh Hopper’s ‘Kings and Queens’, always a highlight, enjoys yet another re-interpretation: this piece has the ability to suspend time for a moment, and yet, normally, dominated by Travis’ looped flute, tonight appears to have gained a glorious 4-way improvisational section where each member subtly interweave.

Perhaps the only surprise of the evening was the lack of a Mike Ratledge-penned setpiece: ‘Slightly All The Time’ and ‘Out-Bloody-Rageous’ have received recent reworkings by the band, who have also provided re-interpretations of more tranquil pieces such as ‘Chloe and the Pirates’ and ‘The Man Who Waved At Trains’. Perhaps this omission was the rawness of recent events: most if not all of the band had attended Ratledge’s funeral a few days previously, which was alluded to within Etheridge’s between-piece monologues – his repartee is as undiminished as the fluidity of his soloing. What we did get as a first encore is the fourth new piece, dedicated to the original Soft Machine’s last surviving member: ‘Waltz for Robert’, a plaintive Asaf Sirkis piece with a beautiful Baker bass solo, before the a more rumbustious second encore of ‘Grapehound’ (Grey Pound – geddit?) saw the crowd off into the Manchester evening.

One thing that strikes me about this Soft Machine is that this version always sounds remarkably fresh: their sound is heavy enough to easily sit outside other technically adept but sometimes musically insipid areas of jazz fusion. As a fellow gig-goer commented, they play with a joy and energy which doesn’t detract from their expertise. It’s a very fine evening’s music all told.

Soft Machine play another 6 UK gigs in March, starting with Kinross tonight before heading out to Scandinavia in May. Full gig details below:

March 4 – Manchester, UK (Band on the Wall)

March 5 – Kinross, UK (Green Hotel)

March 7 – London, UK (New Cross Inn)

March 9 – Exeter, UK (Exeter Phoenix Arts Center)

March 15 – Worcester, UK (Huntington Hall)

March 18 – Milton Keynes (The Stables)

March 21 – Lichfield, UK (Guildhall)

April 4 – Vortex, London https://www.vortexjazz.co.uk/event/soft-machine-a-celebration-of-john-etheridges-50-years-with-the-band/

May 9 – London, Uk (Signature Brew)

May 13 – Malmoe, Sweden (babel)

May 14 – Halmstad, Sweden (Kulturhuset)

May 15 – Goteborg, Sweden (Playhouse)

May 16 – Oslo, Norway (Cosmopolite)

May 18 – Stockholm, Sweden (Fasching)

May 20 – Pori, Finland (Validi Karkia)

May 21 – Espoo, Finland (Louhisali)

May 24 – Muenster, Germany (Hot Jazz Club)

May 25 – Zoetermeer, The Netherlands (de Boerderij)

Thanks to Nick Utteridge

https://softmachine-moonjune.bandcamp.com/

How do you begin to pen a tribute to someone who has been such an essential part of your musical listening for 40 years? Keyboard player Mike Ratledge died yesterday after a short illness, leaving a huge musical legacy. Whilst he had essentially stepped back from the Soft Machine by 1976, as the then last original member, his body of work prior to that with the band was considerable with today’s discography spanning in excess of 20 live releases to accompany a dozen or so studio recordings. Classically trained on piano, his poise had been evident even from the  Soft Machine’s earliest demos (‘That’s How Much I Need You Now’ from ‘Jet Propelled Photographs’), and was arguably captured most eloquently on the 1969 version of ‘Memories’ (on ‘Wilde Flowers – Tales of Canterbury’). At the other end of the scale was the  extraordinary complexity of his written pieces (the starkest example being perhaps ‘Teeth’ from ‘4’). Much has also been written elsewhere over the years about the fluidity of his soloing technique on the Lowrey organ being born from technical issues requiring a continuous stream of notes to be played – either way his style became a trademark adopted by subsequent Soft Machine-influenced bands.

Perhaps his crowning glory is the Soft Machine ‘Third’ album, my own introduction to the group. In fact it would have been Ratledge’s extraordinarily nihilistic intro to ‘Facelift’ that greeted me on a scratchy library-borrowed version of the band’s groundbreaking double album, complete with its minimalist cover. The band members morosely stare into space inside the cover, Ratledge typically impassive behind dark shades and moustache, and the ambience is framed by the record’s antiquated, yet somehow timeless sound quality. For all the collective alchemy of the band’s four members, each adding a unique component, be it Robert Wyatt’s defiant ‘Moon in June’, Elton Dean’s distant solos or the Hopper glue that bound the project together, it is perhaps Ratledge’s album more than anyone’s: two definitive compositions in ‘Slightly All The Time’ and ‘Out-Bloody-Rageous’, as well as sculpting that detached ambience which prevails throughout.

Personnel, musical styles and group dynamics changed thereafter, but Ratledge remained a constant until after the ‘Bundles’ album in 1975. Thereafter he was consistent in wanting to put his Soft Machine days behind him, both in terms of his music, and the chronicling of his output – his move into library music and world of advertising in the late Seventies was only occasionally interrupted – by the disquieting and underrated ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’ soundtrack for example, or a programming credit on the hugely commercially successful classical piece ‘Adiemus’. Even prior to this, during  the Karl Jenkins’ axis of the Soft Machine, personal interviews had reduced to a trickle. In the 1990s Facelift somewhat disingenuously claimed a Mike Ratledge interview when Mike King was carrying out research for his Wyatt biography Wrong Movements – in reality this was little more than details of a conversation the two Mikes had had, the most telling quote being ‘I’ve buried my past’. Rob Chapman’s quotes from Mike for a Mojo Soft Machine article in 1997 represent a rare contemporary insight into former pursuits.

As I never got to meet Mike personally, I’ll post here some thoughts from someone who most certainly did: his fellow classmate at Simon Langton Grammar School and first musical collaborator, Brian Hopper. Some of their musical experiments together, sampled for the Canterburied Sounds CDs represent the first known Ratledge recordings, and as Brian told me: “Mike Ratledge’s household was very studious, – his father was a headmaster. Mike was quite an intellectual even at that stage, a very serious individual but very willing to take part in all sorts of multimedia things we did, photography and tape recordings. He was just exploring things in the same way that I was but maybe on a slightly different level. I think probably his father had an interest in technologically up to date things, which Mike seemed to have quite exclusive use of. Mike was one of the brightest people I’ve ever known. He challenged me all the time but it was stimulating nonetheless, he would never let you get away with half an argument – you always had to justify what you said! Obviously that laid the foundation for what he did later on musically.“

“He has left a great legacy of musical compositions and musical performances which were often radical especially with his ‘stream of consciousness’ solo technique of keyboard playing, but also his compositions often featured very lyrical themes as well as complex rhythmical patterns. He will be greatly missed.“

As for his musical impact outside of the ‘Canterbury’ bubble, I’ll leave the last word to one of a number of fans who encountered the music of the early Soft Machine, and had their lives changed forever: Jeff Sherman of US progressive trio Glass who witnessed the full glory of the band’s sound in 1968.

“Seattle Center Coliseum was packed with people. This was like Hendrix’s homecoming. We’re in there and before Soft Machine play, they douse the lights – it was pitch black, and we hear this rumble. I mean, it literally was shaking. It was Mike Ratledge doing the bass pedal intro to ‘Why Are We Sleeping’. We can see they had this thing called the revolving stage, a round stage, and it’s backlit, but we can’t see the members. And we see this guy, somebody climbing over the amps to get on the drum set with just a vest and a hat on. And Mike’s playing the bass pedals. And the lights still haven’t come on. And then we hear this voice – Kevin steps up to the mic and says, this is called ‘The Rise and Fall of the American Empire’. Then there’s like a little laughter. And he goes. ‘We’re not kidding’. And then boom, they launched into it. The lights come on. You couldn’t have had more impact on us. They sounded like nobody we would have ever heard before. They looked like nobody we would ever heard before…. They were freaking loud – hell! But where we were sitting it was just perfect – it is not hyperbole to say that moment literally changed our lives…’

Mike Ratledge 06 May 1943 — 05 February 2025

(thanks to Jeff Sherman of Glass and Brian Hopper for providing quotes for this article)

The first gig of the year for Zopp, and after the euphoria of seeing them wow the Crescendo audience outdoors on the West Coast of France, it’s back to the bread and butter of local East Midlands gigging. The Dubrek is a complex of recording studios located almost in the shadow of Derby cathedral, a bright, vibrant venue which was pretty much full to see a double header of fine local bands. The evening was promoted by Greenhouse Jam who apparently present a monthly hub for innovative improvised music at the venue. Halta D are a five piece playing upbeat instrumental jazz fusion with more than a hint of funk, performing pieces I think largely authored by guitarist Richard Belfitt, underpinned by a warm bass groove, textural drumming and plenty of nuance from the other two band members, one of whom flipped between the saxophone, flute and some quite wacky keyboard sounds, the other a player of quite extraordinary poise who provided enough moments of casual virtuosity for Ryan of Zopp to later admit to (somewhat unwarranted) inferiority!

Zopp had already set their stall out for the evening with a large banner backdrop and Andrea Moneta’s prog drum setup both bearing the band’s name (Andrea told us it was in fact his smaller kit, but it still seemed to straddle the stage), and it struck me that after seeing their exploratory debut gig at the Sumac as well as their French exploits, that we were likely to see an extended set. And so it proved: those lured to see the band for the first time having only heard their two studio releases to date (and one audience member appeared to have travelled from South Korea), would have been treated to pretty much half an album of new material, as Ryan Stevenson continues to tweak a couple of extended unreleased tracks: the driving opener ‘Intuition Made It’ plus ‘Living Man’ (which includes a new section entitled ‘Endless Decrees’ – ‘it’s about 16 minutes long but don’t tell anyone!’, quoth Ryan).

‘Living Man’, as one would expect in any self-respecting prog epic, manages to incorporate the full gamut of styles: of screaming keyboards, grandiose stretched out sections, and elements of tranquil ambience – the band were joined tonight throughout on saxophone by Myles Noble, who was also the evening’s compere (and promoter?). Noble’s slightly larger than life appearance, in green boiler suit, and presence as compere (and promoter?) belied a real sense of sensitivity to the music – he subtly adds an extra dimension to band’s sound in a way I wasn’t expecting.

The band raced through an extensive repertoire, with almost imperceptible refinements to familiar favourites: the spellbinding ‘You’ seems to have added a new bass part from Ashley Raynor, with Noble and guitarist Richard Lucas also inheriting a subtly different unison line towards the piece’s conclusion. The improvised section in the Uppmarksamler/Perspectiw track seems to stretch out more evocatively on each hearing, and the band provided their usual rousing versions of ‘Before The Light’ and the somewhat trippier ‘V’. The one surprise was the performance of ‘Being and Time’ from the first Zopp album, and if there was an advance apology for its melancholic nature, it was unnecessary, with Lucas eking out some fine most Phil Miller-like statements of melancholy.

The stage setup was slightly different to previous gigs: Stevenson was off stage right somewhat in the gloom, reflective perhaps of him wanting a slightly lower profile after admitting to losing his voice the previous day (it bore up well regardless). And strangely enough, the band’s trademark saturated Dave Stewartesque keyboard sound seemed to follow suit, its magnificence only fully audible during moments of isolation. Visually the stage was dominated by Moneta’s compelling drumming: my two previous Zopp gigs have seen him somewhat obscured by other band members from my particular vantage point and it was nice to see him stretch out fully.

Ryan told me later that there is a full 50 minutes or so of the third album pretty much ready to go, and this, alongside news of a number of upcoming gigs, both locally and at the Gouveia festival in Portugal has to be one of the best reasons to look forward to 2025 unfolding.

Buy Zopp albums and merchandise at https://zopp.bandcamp.com/

Read Facelift’s interview with Ryan Stevenson here and here

Zopp gigs

10 April – Billy Bootleggers, Nottingham

1-4 May – Gouveia Art Rock Festival, Portugal

13 June – Old Salutation Inn, Nottingham

5 September – Nene Valley Rock, Grimsthorpe Castle

One of the things people told me they liked about Facelift the fanzine in the 1990s was the ‘… and beyond’ part of the magazine – a regular section which reviewed music which couldn’t easily be put under the ‘Canterbury scene’ umbrella. I ended up on the mailing list for a number of very supportive record labels, including Cuneiform, Delerium and Voiceprint, reviewed a lot of albums from their rosters and ended up hearing some quite marvellous music I wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed to. Ultimately though, this part of the fanzine became a bit of a millstone – finding space and time to include those reviews arguably took Facelift away from its unique position of covering Canterbury music. It was one of many factors that meant that things ground to a halt in 1998.

25 years on and Facelift the blog and Facebook group has tried to maintain the same Canterbury-centric approach, although, like everyone else out there, I have much wider tastes than what is contained within its pages alone. So, as we draw towards the end of 2024 I thought it was high time to share some of the non-Canterbury highlights for me this year. I just didn’t feel I could justify entirely avoid talking about them. The criteria for selection: well, I’ve listened to them more than any other albums, Canterbury included, in 2024: my daughter, for example, immediately identified what they would be, based on her (and other household members’) subjection to their various virtues!

5. Sykofant

An unexpected addition to the growing collection of Norwegian progressive music I have in my collection came back in the spring from a band calling themselves Sykofant. This suitably hirsute guitar-based fourpiece purvey a whole host of extended, epic compositions of heavy, folkloric intensity . Imploring vocals imbued with just a hint of growling menace (‘Suddenly I walk among the gods’), crashed guitars and enough changes in direction and style to keep this listener enthralled, this is good rollicking stuff, with chugging riffs, hints of Rush in its compositional complexity, alternately rasping and soaring solos, and the odd mellow vocal melody a la Porcupine Tree.

The last two minutes of ‘Forgotten Paths’, ushered in a by a brief mediaeval burst of mandolin, no less, are based on a mere three chords, etched through with funked, thrashy strumming and power chords (and are actually a mirror for the opening few bars of the album, as those, who like me have the CD on repeat, will recognise) and are amongst the finest passages of music I can recall this year or any other.

https://sykofantband.bandcamp.com/

4. Dog Unit: At Home

Dog Unit are one of two bands in this list who’ve had a video session on the fine State 51 Conspiracy platform, which is an excellent introduction to their work, but who actually came to my attention thanks to a recommendation from a good friend with entirely different musical interests to my own.

They’re an instrumental four piece of 2 guitars, bass and drums providing grooving, slightly hypnotic pieces propelled along by the prominent, bouncy drumbeat of Lucy Jamieson. On stage the 2 guitarists are seated opposite each other, alternately supporting the themes of one another with clearly marked out lines of their own, a bass which rolls along rather nicely, and arguably the star of the piece, Jamieson, whose undeviating motorik rhythms provide the visual and sonic focal point for the band. I hear elements of post-rock here (they’re like a slightly more upbeat version of Tortoise at times), early Foals-ish too in places, but also throw in some funk licks a la The Egg, plus occasional stop start rhythms to keep you on your toes (‘We Can Still Win This’).

The band’s music is so fundamentally simple, and the musicians’ presence on stage so understated that you could almost imagine yourself getting up there on stage with them to add an extra line or two. If you did, however, you’d have to don a regulation issue boiler suit bearing the band’s name! Hypnotic, grooving, slightly warped stuff from which the ambience and glorious bass line of ‘Consistent Effort’ is the highlight.

https://thisisdogunit.bandcamp.com/music

3. Actionfredag (Amarxe)

Late contender chez Facelift for crashing the Bandcamp server through repeated listening, is Actionfredag. Apparently a Norwegian supergroup of sorts – they appear to have attracted a ‘Canterbury’ tag, which if valid, constitutes just one facet of a varied palette of influences. From the charging bass line and angular two note guitar motifs of the opener – ‘Pönk på Svenska’, to the anthemic, open-throated vocal (and violin) theme of ‘En behagelig durakkord som sier noe om hvordan det er å se uten å bli sett’, this is memorable and high class music throughout.

If indeed Canterbury is at play, then it’s probably within the National Health-like jumpiness of ‘Jesus i min bod’ or the Samla-like complexity and unison lines of ‘Ensomhet er bare en følelse’ or even the Underdubbish jazzy guitar/keyboard lines of ‘Tobias’. But frankly I was just glad to turn off my Canterbury antennae for a moment and enjoy the music for what it is: an undulating, foottapping ride where the core band of guitar, (heavy) bass and keyboards, and drums are augmented by flute, harp, woodwind, tuned percussion and strings. Complexity and cacophony are very fine bedfellows in the hands of Actionfredag, and I’m looking forwarded to jumping into a second album which has also appeared on bandcamp.

https://actionfredag.bandcamp.com/album/turist-i-eget-liv

2. Yang – Rejoice! (Cuneiform)

Whenever I’m asked who my favourite guitarist is (which to be fair, isn’t very often), it’s expected that I might roll out Phil Miller, Steve Hillage or Allan Holdsworth for consideration. And indeed that might be the case. But undoubtedly the guitarist I listen to most of all is Frenchman Frederic L’Epee.  Frederic came to my attention back in the Facelift fanzine days when Cuneiform Records sent me a series of albums from his wonderful quartet Philharmonie, with its intricately intertwining guitars and an uplifting semi-classical vibe of almost religious portent. He went on to form the somewhat heavier Yang, associated with much harder riffing and a funkier vibe, whilst at the same time putting out a series of digital-only solo guitar releases which veer between sound experimentation of varying accessibilities and the most deliciously gentle orchestrations. Whilst L’Epee’s calling card is his Frippian motifs (as well as early use of what are now ubiquitous loopers), for me he produces music that is much more beautiful: it sets out to elevate first and foremost, not just to discordantly wrench the heart strings.

All of which gives only a brief backdrop to ‘Rejoice!’. After 3 entirely instrumental albums, Yang took a slight diversion with their previous album ‘Designed For Disaster’, introducing a female vocalist and despite some undoubted highpoints (‘Flower You’ has a set of guitar themes to die for); but it felt slightly like a hybrid approach.  ‘Rejoice!’ takes things to a much more logical conclusion: new vocalist Carla Kihstedt is entirely integrated (fellow guitarist Laurent James sings too), and this rather lengthy album, whilst varied in style, feels like a much more coherent statement.  

‘Step Inside’, and the title track ‘Rejoice’ enjoy the discordant, heavy riffing I’d associate core Yang with. ‘Concretion’ too, but it’s the latter which starts to subtly weave the album’s web, Philharmonie style, with some wonderfully subtle reflective guitar interplay. ‘Entanglement’ and ‘Berceuse For the Guilty’ incorporate vocals into this intoxicating mix: the former, in which Kihlstedt sings in French, is a lesson in building tension until the main guitar theme finally breaks through.  

These particular pieces involved such heavy repeated playing that it took me an age to reach the later extended tracks, most particularly the epic closer, ‘The Final Day’ whose first 5 minutes build through a succession of separate but complementary guitar themes, eventually bridging via a hypnotic, almost Zeuhlian chant to a crescendo which thereafter refuses to relent. It’s a fitting conclusion to a very fine album.

I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent listening to Yang’s particular alchemy over the last few years: the telepathy between the guitars of L’Epee and James is apparent; the intricate rhythms handled with precision, subtlety and power by Voloda Brice; not to mention Nico Gomez, who is amongst the most melodic bass players I’ve heard.

Frankly I had to get this review out (and it what was triggered all the other ones in this piece) as I’m getting rather tired of inflicting it in its entirety on myself and others around me – it’s that good…

https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/rejoice

1. Plantoid: Terrapath

Plantoid came to my attention thanks to a video posted by Dario of Homunculus Res of a 20 minute section, performed live, also on the State 51 platform: a jazzed up segment featuring the ultra-tight, intricate head-nodding versions of ‘Wander Wonder’ and ‘Insomniac’ with a stellar performance from vocalist Chloe Spence.

Dave Newhouse of the Muffins commented when I posted this “Man! I watched that whole thing! Amazingballs! Big Wow! Like Indie Pop but with some fusion and then really strange time signatures,”, and when you consider that musically this is just a brief sample of their considerable wares, the sum of the album ‘Terrapath’’s parts is simply astonishing: at times they do crash through indiestyle, but elsewhere guitarist Tom Coyne solos with the angular dexterity of a Patrice Meyer or Allan Holdsworth; bass player Bernardo Larisch chin juts a la Mike Howlett ; the drummer Louis Bradshaw is impressively omnipresent, and in the middle of it all is Spence, not just playing the rhythm guitar which underpins the whole thing but a compelling vocal presence too, all the way from the gentle Moloko-like intro ‘Is That You’ to the utterly bonkers ‘Dog’s Life’, which manages to jump effortlessly between any number of razor sharp, super tight rhythms whilst Spence croons beautifically above. Probably my track of the year from most certainly my album of the year.

https://plantoidworld.bandcamp.com/album/terrapath

Some are born in Canterbury, some achieve Canterbury status and some have Canterbury thrust upon them… Horrendous misquotes aside, in amongst this series of interviews, Needlepoint of Norway are in the unique position of ending up being associated by some with a music scene they had no prior knowledge of. I first became aware of the band through an article called ‘You Can’t Bury Canterbury’, a bandcamp-related piece which showcases pieces by many of the musicians featured here (Zopp, Amoeba Split, Homunculus Res, Magick Brother Mystic Sister), others I’m very familiar with (Magic Bus, The Wrong Object, Alco Frisbass) and a number of additional bands I am not.

When I first contacted Bjorn a year or so ago, having binge-listened on their then latest album ‘Walking Up That Valley’, he was at pains to point out that his own musical heritage owed nothing to Caravan or any other related band, whilst being sympathetic enough to the project to send me the band’s entire back catalogue and agree to an interview which has materialised over the last month or so. In the meantime Needlepoint’s 6^th and 7^th album have appeared: the first a live album ‘In Concert’, the most recent the band’s latest studio album ‘Remnants of Light’ which introduces two new members of the band.

So, if as will become clear, Bjorn, the band’s main songwriter, guitarist and vocalist was not at all conversant with music from the Canterbury genre, then what is the story behind his own musical upbringing?

I was born 30th of January 1958, in Skien, a quite small town a couple of hours’ drive south from Oslo. My first instrument was classical piano. I loved Bach, and was a very romantic interpreter of his music. I also played flute for a number of years, before I ended up in a small bedroom at my grandparents’ house where a guitar was hanging on the wall. I was a bit bored when all the grown ups in the house took long rests after supper…so I took it down…and that summer I learned a lot of chords….and was sold! After that, nobody ever had to ask me to practice…the guitar went with me everywhere!

My father played piano quite badly… both he and my mother loved singing. Norwegian songs, but some very old standards too…like ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. My uncle and his son played these songs well, and my brother ended up as a well known jazz piano player. He was three years older than me, and listened to Fleetwood Mac, Jimi Hendrix…and then turned towards Chick Corea, Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett.

When I started to listen to music on my own, my sister’s boyfriend, Roger, already had tons of LPs. Gentle Giant, Yes, Back Door, Zappa… I liked all of it, but ELP was what I really loved! I remember that I told my mother that,…whatever happens…ELP will always be my favourite band. But after a while I joined a jazz band with much older guys in it, and Wes Montgomery and Pat Metheny sort of kicked Greg Lake’s wonderful voice out of my head for a long long time.

There’s a  been a common theme that’s been emerging through the Canterbury 2.0 series. Many of  artists playing the music we follow on this page have often largely self-taught, even in some cases not having a working knowledge of music notation. Bjorn certainly bucked the trend in this regard:

I went to the “Jazzlinja” on Trøndelag Musikkonservatorium in Trondheim. The first class ever for that discipline. I had my own bands with others from that school, and joined other ones too. When I was finished there I found that many of my friends, like Nils Petter Molvær, flew away and had incredible careers, while I was left on the carpet in my living room trying to get off the ground. I didn’t really take off. But after a while I started my own band NUKU (‘Det Absolutte Nullpunkt’ was a CD I made with that band) and we had some nice gigs. I also started a band with my brother, Out To Lunch, and that was a quite popular band for a while in the Nineties.

One day I met a drummer called Harald Skullerud, and we made a duo record called ‘Gloria’, named after a wonderful old acoustic guitar with Gloria written on it. It’s a record I’m proud of, and I have received many letters from people being comforted by the sound of that one! Then two other albums with Harald followed…’A Day With No Plans At All’ and ‘Sidewalk View’. All of them instrumentals.

So how did Needlepoint come about?

I met Nikolai (Hængsle)! A meeting that changed my musical course completely! Or rather …I met Thomas Strønen first, and he suggested we ask Nikolai to join the band we were planning to put together. At that time all my music gear was digital! A lot of expensive TC Electronic stuff. But working with Nikolai kind of awakened stuff from before jazz took me away. I had a pedal I thought was called Shin Ol. Shin Ol? Nikolai asked…and he told me it was a Shin Ei Fy6, an extremely cool pedal from 65 or something. So I turned it on for this band!

The first Needlepoint album, released in 2010, was called ‘The Woods Are Not What They Seem’, recorded by this core trio. It is probably best described as blues-based rock and is instrumental. There is a groove, a funk underpinning the music, but still with the occasional hint (on ‘Trapdoor’, for example) that there might be a desire to expand the music further, if as yet no vocals. Bjorn had told me in a previous conversation that Ry Cooder had been a particular hero of his.       

Before Needlepoint was put together, I did not sing at all, my fuzz pedals had got dusty! And as you say…Ry Cooder was absolutely a musician I liked a lot. I also liked Bill Frisell, and since we are both melodic players, I tried hard not to walk in his footsteps. Stealing others’ specialities is something I quite early on tried to avoid. Without knowing, my way of playing was close to his. He was bending the neck of his SG, and I had got my first guitar with Floyd Rose, and found a way using the bridge that gave me quite a unique sound…I thought. Until I heard Bill Frisell on an album for the first time with Arild Andersen. I got sooo sad, but immediately I let go of that way of playing, and started finding myself another way…

With the album, it was such fun to plug in those pedals. I also used and am still using a pedal called Tube Zipper (Electro Harmonix). There is a filter inside it, and when I turned a certain knob, quite apart from the tone on the guitar it produces random bird chirping sounds! I played a lot of long guitar solos…my longest ever..) But, back to that first album. I must say I wasn’t inspired by anything else than the energy I got from suddenly being a part of this band…but of course…inside me all the music I had ever listened to was resonating.

The band’s second album ‘ Outside the Screen’, recorded in 2011, starts to take something of a new direction, with vocals and keyboard added, and unlike later albums appears to be more a collection of different styles. I asked if this album was more of a collection of separate written pieces rather than a grander concept?

We’d almost finished recording ‘Outside the Screen’ when I asked Nikolai: ‘Why am I only making instrumental music when nowadays I am mostly listening to vocal based music?’ And then we decided I had to start singing! We found places to replace guitar-played melodies with vocals, and sort of turned an instrumental album into an album with vocals in it. During this process David joined us as a studio musician, colouring the music in his beautiful way.

‘David’ is David Wallumrød, credited with clavinet, upright piano, Hammond organ and autoharp. There was an immediate change in sound, particularly with the adding of Hammond. There is also a new lightness and humour within the mix (shown on tracks such as ‘Johnny the Player’), as well as the first real evidence of more of a dreamy vibe on ‘Tree on a Hill’, and ‘If I Turned Left’, and the detached beauty of ‘Siikup Sinaani‘, all of which contrasted with the crashing guitars of ‘Snoring Husband’ (I didn’t ask Bjorn if this was an autobiographical reference!) Needlepoint were extending their range as well as their repertoire.

It was the third album ‘Aimless Mary’, from 2015, however, which constituted, for this fan at least, their own great leap forward. From start to finish this is something of a masterpiece, from the Stevie Wonder-like funk meanderings of ‘Fear’, via the hard electric piano groove of ‘Why’, all the way through to the daydream-like imagery of ‘Imaginary Plane’. (‘Light as a bird and easy for an angel to carry/ Leaning back in your chair, as if you’re up in the air’) In between times there is the stuttering trance of ‘Soaring’, the exquisite duelling guitars of ‘Shattered into memories’ (which descends into a most unexpected Van der Graaf-like dirge); as well as the melancholy of the title track.  This is an album rich not just in a new level of composition and realisation, but also in its vocal and lyrical content…

This was the first album were I knew I was going to sing before starting to making it. So now I had to write lyrics beforehand….very difficult I thought, but something that has turned into a pleasure for me more recently.

I have always followed a romantic route playing piano or classical guitar. And in the beginning the songs I made were so sweet, or romantic, that they were difficult for my fellow jazz musicians to play. To me it is completely impossible to write music with a heart intent on trying to be someone else. I have many influences in life …Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, ELP, old Irish songs or Norwegian folk tunes are just a few, but when I get up, I make myself a cup of coffe…maybe light a candle.. and take my guitar, and just let the first chord start a melody. It’s very funny sometimes to go back to my mobile-recordings and check out how much of a song is based on those spontaneous recordings. Sometimes they’re just the same. But of course…behind what every composer composes…there are others…

I think ‘Aimless Mary’ is the album where Nikolai really was able to start to turn this band into something he for a long time had wanted. His friend Olaf (Olsen) joined the band (on drums).  David was already a member of the band, and this gave him freedom to influence our sound even more than before.

I wrote the songs, also the instrumental parts and also some riffs…but I had no clue that we were moving into a kind of musical sound that would turn prog rock-loving listeners towards us. I think HE did, though!

I wondered whether with the follow up album ‘The Diary of Robert Reverie’, recorded in 2017, that there was a deliberate attempt to tap into Caravan vibes with the cartoon-like imagery of the title track:

“Robert is a strange old man

Living on a farm alone

Sleeping in the barn.

With cows around him all night long”

It’s so nice that I have learned what Canterbury is, and Caravan is also something I learned about after ‘Aimless Mary’. Is there an Aimless Mary in one of the Caravan songs too?

Caravan is often mentioned as an influence, but the truth is…I’m sorry to say…I never listened to their music. Not because I didn’t like it; just because no one ever played their music for me when I was young.

The reason albums turn out different from each other is that we have to deal with the material that shows up in the process of composing it, that in their different ways inspire the cooperation between Nikolai and me. So when a tune becomes long, it’s just because the song happened to have so many nice things inside it in the original spontaneous recording that we didn’t want to take anything away!

‘Reverie’ is perhaps more diverse, but less grand than its predecessor, with less of a larger group sound. For example, the predominant elements on ‘In My Field Of View’ are guitar and hand percussion, whilst ‘Will It Turn Silent’ is one of a number of gentle ballads and there is a languid pastoral feel to ‘Grasshoppers’. ‘In The Sea’ could almost be a ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ type exultation whilst ‘Shadow in the Corner’ could be a sequel to the previous album’s musings of ‘Imaginary Plane’. Overall, ‘The Diary of Robert Reverie’ takes Needlepoint’s mellow charisma to extremis.

In 2020 Needlepoint recorded their fifth album ‘Walking Up That Valley’. Like ‘Aimless Mary’ is another coherent classic, a return to whole-band complexity. If ‘Rules of a Madman’ was the first track that introduced me to the band with a Richard Sinclair-like ditty, delivered a la Pye Hastings, kooky in its time signatures; there is arguably finer music elsewhere on the album:  ‘I Offered You The Moon’ is wonderful – outrageous fuzz bass contrasting with gentle melody, ‘Where The Ocean Meets The Sky’ is a masterpiece with a change of direction typical of the band at its heart. The album features Bjorn contributing notable extra instrumentation, including violin, cello and flute. The title track is a 10 minute opus, which likes all the best Caravan tracks, flits between dreamy introspection to bass-driven playful grooves but also features some of the best of Bjorn’s wonderfully fluid guitar lines.

Our desire is only to make as good an album as possible from the sources in my simple mobile-recordings. I think you should ask Nikolai the same questions one day and he would remember the process much better than me, and differently too! I guess we put together different ideas into one long composition in that title track. I remember we used to call that long instrumental melody “Long Song”, and I also guess Nikolai had something in his mind when we ended up putting this part in the middle of everything!! These questions made me think that maybe I should find all of the different original mobile-recordings in one place? Good plan!

Before talking about the two albums which have come out this year, I asked Bjorn about the band as a live entity, and what sort of audience it attracts:

I think there are very many different people listening to our music. We have been embraced by people who love prog music, and are thankful for that. But we are not a band that tries to make prog music. I didn’t know I was making prog or Canterbury at all!…I just continue to write my instrumental stuff like I did when I was an instrumental jazz musician, and when I started to sing some years ago, these things were mixed together…and maybe that is a kind of recipe for prog? At least…with Nikolai’s help it is, I guess!! But there are other kinds of people listening too. People who are very interested in the lyrics and think our concerts are kind of poetic too, which touches me to hear.

We tour for a couple of weeks, maybe three each year, and we have not been abroad a lot. I know many people from different parts of the world would like us to come, so we’d better hurry up I guess!! I would like to play abroad…yes! But we are a bit too grown up to play for nothing. There are kids to be taken care of and to feed here and there!

In terms of venues…we love the smaller ones, but we also play festivals with larger capacities; but I love to have the audience as close as possible, so I can smell what kind of toothpaste they use!

We do not have loads of followers. But yes, some have come from Germany, Netherlands, Italy, even from USA to hear us…but that doesn’t happen often. But in Norway there are people who have seen us many times, yes.

I guess we are more energetic when we play live. The solos can last longer, but we never really betray the shape of the songs…we just bend them in different directions! I mean, how can you stop Erlend when he is on fire behind his Rhodes?!!

Earlier this year, there appeared a budget priced live album on Stickman Records, ‘In Concert’. This is a curiously presented collage of excerpts from the band’s live perofrmances, and Needlepoint afficionados will recognise snippets from the various studio albums spliced together within two long pieces: ‘Trying To Relax’ parts 1 and 2.

The live album is really Nikolai’s work, with assistance from Olaf. It was a sweet way to say goodbye to Olaf with this album! The recordings are from a few concerts on a tour a couple of years ago, and I know Nikolai had productions like “Bitches Brew” in his mind when allowing himself to put parts of those concerts together in exciting ways. I think the record demonstrates a little in relation to what you asked earlier…it shows the difference between a studio album and live concerts.

Finally, we talked about the latest album ‘Remnants of Light’, which was released in October, featuring two new musicians Amongst many strong tracks there are familiar sounds – the title track encapsulates the best of the band’s mellow introspection; ‘Head In The Sand’ marches straight ahead Pye Hastings style; whilst arguably the finest piece, the glorious ‘Where You Two Once Held Hands’ could be a strummed Sixties anthem.

We just released a new album called “Remnants of Light”. It was so nice making a studio album with Erlend (Slettevoll – keyboards) and our new, young incredible drummer Ola Øverby. This is an album with nine songs, and I’m very happy that on one of them, the main part is written and sung by Nikolai! For the first time! After the release we had a wonderful 5 days tour in Norway.

I think this has been the nicest period for me with the band! As for the future: just carrying on! I will just continue, hoping that new songs will usher in the mornings and evenings, my favourite times for working. And I really hope we’ll manage to find new places and new people to play for…including outside Norway…

All of the band’s studio albums are available at https://needlepoint.bandcamp.com/

‘In Concert’ is available at https://www.stickman-records.com/shop/needlepoint-in-concert/

Part 1 of the interview here

The Muffins were partly lured back together in the mid 1990s by the prospect of putting together a single track for ‘Unsettled Scores’, a unique double album on Cuneiform Records, the label set up by a key figure within the band’s history, honorary Muffin Steve Feigenbaum. Steve also plays on 2 of the 4 tracks on ‘Manna/Mirage’, and has consistently provided a platform for original and re-released Muffins albums on Cuneiform, and their distribution through his mail order outlet Wayside, including early material aired which can be found on ‘Chronometers’, as well as the recent box set)

Dave Newhouse: Steve was /  is a friend, first and foremost. He saw us from the very beginning and always supported us and made sure to get the word around. He was also a musician, and so when the record label started (Random Radar Records), Steve was an important part of it. Later, when Steve launched his own label, Cuneiform Records, he brought us on board with him.

I believe that (‘Unsettled Scores’) was Steve Feigenbaum’s idea where Cuneiform artists would perform music by other Cuneiform artists.

Steve told me in 2020 during research for the Hugh Hopper biography (Hugh covered a Dr Nerve track for the project, whilst no less than 3 Cuneiform artists contributed covered Hopper tunes) that the initial impetus came via CW Vrtacek of Forever Einstein who had suggested a 94 second cover of a Birdsongs of the Mesozoic track to kickstart the project).

It was a great idea. I remember hearing Forever Einstein’s track “She Wears Her Dead Mother’s Hat” and thinking that that would be a good one for the newly reformed Muffins to record. It was actually the first thing the reformed band recorded since getting back together.

From their ‘Unsettled Scores’ endeavours (in the spirit of the project a Muffins piece ‘Hobart Got Burned’ had been covered itself by Kit Watkins​/ and Coco Roussel of Happy The Man) the band moved on to record their album, ‘Bandwidth’. I put it to Dave that in many ways this seemed like the band’s most accessible studio album. Billy Swann’s bass is very much to the fore, the album swings along and in many way it is much more like Dave’s own later Manna/Mirage material. I asked whether the music’s changing nature was reflective of the band’s change in circumstances, different from the ‘house’ vibe of ‘Chronometers’ and ‘Manna/Mirage’ and the ‘local’ downtown feel of ‘185’.

Yes, we were no longer living together, so the compositions had to reflect that. I don’t think it was a conscious effort to return to type (‘Manna/Mirage’), it was just something that we naturally gravitated toward.

In the early Noughties the band played what would be the first few of what would become more their gigging norm: festivals showcasing progressive and adventurous music. Their first of three performances at ProgDay was in 2001, whilst the band were invited to play at Nearfest in 2005 (this is the 13^th CD – constituting that ‘Baker’s Dozen’ –of the recent box set), and also the RIO festival in France in 2009. I wondered if the band had been invited to play at the original Rock in Opposition incarnations in France in 1978, where fellow ‘Gravity’ contributors Samla Mammas Manna had appeared, as well as Stormy Six, Etron Fou Leloublan, Stormy Six and Henry Cow themselves.

No, I don’t believe so. We weren’t considered for any overseas RIO festivals until our second regrouping. (In relation to band’s festival appearances) Yes, we were never really a club band (although we tried for years and DID end up playing in some nice club venues), but the festival circuit seemed to be better suited for what we wanted to do. And the like-minded audiences were there, so we met them there.

If the band was to continue to produce new music together, there would be the need for periods of intense rehearsal as members were dispersed across three different states. This was one of the factors leading to the ‘Muffin Summer Camps’ which became a regular feature of the band’s activity in the 2000s.

The Muffin Summer Camps at Tom’s house in Virginia came out of necessity; we needed a place to rehearse 24/7 for at least a week just to get into shape for the festivals that we were starting to play. They were also ideal for writing and rehearsing new material for the next albums. It was the closest thing we got to what resembled the old ‘Buba Flirf’ group house. It was Paul who somehow got in touch with Marshall Allen in Philadelphia and invited him down to DC to record with us over at Paul’s house (Allen, appears, alongside fellow Sun Ra Arkestra member Knoel Scott) on a further Muffins album ‘Double Negative’)

‘Palindrome’ was our second to last album (the last album being ‘Mother Tongue’). When we were trying out some ideas for the title, Tom’s wife Susan mistook one of our original titles ‘Conundrum’ for ‘Palindrome’. We decided that ‘Palindrome’ sounded better. We had high hopes for this one; a French label (Musea) had expressed interest in putting it out. We agreed, signed the contract, and got no money for it. Very disappointing. We returned to self-releasing our last album ‘Mother Tongue’. You can hear the entire ‘Palindrome’ album on the ‘Baker’s Dozen’ Muffins box set.

The Muffins’ Box set is an extraordinary document of largely unreleased material from the entirety of the band’s existence: unheard studio recordings and live documents of the band in their various guises, as well as 76 pages of personal accounts, photographs and other artefacts.

I will be forever grateful to Paul Sears for being the original instigator for getting the box set moving in the first place and to Steve Feigenbaum for choosing all of the live and studio tracks that would eventually be included on it; I especially appreciate how he (Steve) focused on the live energy of the band as well as the humour that we tried to get across. And of course, it could not have happened without Ian Beabout’s expert mixing and mastering as well as Eric Kearn’s graphics on both the box and CD / DVD covers and booklet. And a pat on the back to me, if I may – I wrote the text in the booklet which ended up taking up many many months of research and calls and emails in order to get it right. ‘Baker’s Dozen’ is a product of a lot of love and hard work from everyone involved. It is a true labour of love.

We lost Billy Swann this year. Utterly heart-breaking. He was my big ‘brother’. For awhile, it was just him and me at the Muffin ‘Buba Flirf’ house until the rest of the band joined us, and Billy and I really bonded at that time. We never had an argument, we never got upset with one another, I always knew I could rely on Billy to talk things over with; he was calm and reasonable and always a bit more mature than me. I’ve said for years that Billy was the heart and soul of The Muffins. We all had our parts to play in the band, but Billy was its spiritual nucleus. 

Since the final break up of the Muffins, Dave has devoted much of his attention to putting out a superb quintet of albums under the umbrella title of Manna/Mirage – they are arguably not as compositionally dense as Muffins work, but not only do they give a greater voice to Dave’s stripped down keyboards sound (as well as multiple sax lines such as on the memorable ‘Catawumpus’ ), but they also allow Dave’s Canterburian, RIO and Zeuhlish influences to be heard more clearly; as well as providing an outlet for some inspired guest appearances: including members of the Muffins; Univers Zero’s Guy Segers; Fred Frith, violinist Forrest Fang; the wonderful Rich O’Meara on tuned percussion; and the vocals of Carla Diratz.

Well, my ‘Manna/Mirage’ solo albums (I hated borrowing the title of the studio ‘band’ from our first album, but I thought just using my own name, no one would know who that was. I thought it would give listeners a necessary Muffins connection) came from a split that Tom Scott and I had; we were working on a Muffins album that we wanted to be mainly a big band recording. So Tom recorded some of his songs at his studio and I recorded some of my songs at my studio. When we started listening to the album, I noticed that Tom’s tracks and my tracks sounded to me like they came from completely separate bands. They just did not blend. I suggested to Tom that we produce two separate solo albums and then come back later for a true Muffins album. And so Tom’s tracks became an album he called ‘4S’d: Man Or Muffin’ and my tracks became my first ‘Manna/Mirage’ album ‘Blue Dogs’.

I asked Dave about a couple of specific tracks with clear Canterbury references, ‘Canterbury Bells’ and ‘Mini Hugh’ (the latter from ‘Rest of the World’)

‘Canterbury Bells’ was the first piece I recorded for my first Manna/Mirage solo album ‘Blue Dogs’ and ended up being the first track on the album. My son George is playing drums because the song needed a solid Ringo-style of consistent rock drumming that George can really deliver. Very few of my songs have titles until after I’ve recorded them and listened back, and then the titles just present themselves to me (something to do with those damn Muses who, to this day, will not leave me alone). When I listened back to this one, it sounded very Canterbury to me (I also wanted to get across to my listeners that I was continuing along previous Canterbury roads), and the word ‘Canterbury’ of course refers to Canterbury Cathedral, and so ‘Bells’ was added on. I may have also read somewhere where someone was enjoying hearing the bells ringing from Canterbury Cathedral. 

‘Mini-Hugh’ I wanted to reflect my love and respect for Hugh Hopper. Hope it did him justice. And of course I had to incorporate Guy Segers, who is himself a big Hugh Hopper fan and who can get those super low Hopper fuzz tones on bass. I also tried to replicate a Soft Machine sound with my Mike Ratledge Fender Rhodes playing and my Elton Dean sax noodlings. 

And a big shoutout to Mike Potter, who has mixed and mastered all of my solo albums. Those albums sound as good as they are because he is the master at his craft. 

This doesn’t’ even cover various low-key projects which Dave does little to promote or push, being seemingly happy to press a few hundred copies and watch them inevitably find their ways to good homes – these include ‘Daughter of Paris’, an experimental pair of pieces which constitute a project started at the times of the Muffins 80s/90s work and was completed by Dave during Covid, as well as the ‘Moon X’ projects with Jerry King (and son George Newhouse on drums), a multi-faceted outfit just about to release their fourth album, promoted through obscure mid 20^th century sci-fi imagery whilst Moon Men’s album ‘Uncomfortable Space Probe’ was described in Facelift as a ‘seismic romp’

MOON X came out of the breakup of another band that Jerry King and I were in called Moon Men. We so enjoyed working together on Moon Men that we decided to keep the momentum going with a new project that we called ‘MOON X’. We added my son George Newhouse on drums and kept the band as a trio. Jerry and I seem to have a really good telepathy working together.

 I also had to ask about the Diratz project, a three-way collaboration (with inspired additions including guitarist Mark Stanley) between Dave, guitarist Bret Hart and French singer Carla Diratz. The album was reviewed in Facelift here and I spoke at length about the project with Carla earlier in this interview series here:

I’ve always been interested in songwriting, and when I first heard Carla’s voice on Facebook (I believe it was a song from her former band No White of Moon), her voice just struck me as so unique and powerful. I got in touch with her via the Internet, sent her my stem tracks for a song, asked her if she could come up with a singing melody and some lyrics, and she agreed to do it. The final product was amazing, so we decided to continue on with an album. It was a dream come true when she was able to fly over here from France. We had one good  show at Orion in Baltimore, Maryland. We’ve recorded two other songs together since that album, but we did not continue. I wish we could have kept it going. I think that first ‘DIRATZ’ album is very special in some intangible way. It is mysteriously magical to me.

In the process of researching this article I also stumbled upon a unique version of Soft Machine’s ‘Box 25/4 Lid’ (recorded alongside another regular collaborator, Italian musician Luciano Margorani), which of course introduced Hugh Hopper to the listening public as both a composer and bass player. 

I’ve always liked this crazy song from the first Soft Machine album and jumped at the opportunity to record a version of it. The time signature is complex, and the way it repeats itself into oblivion is fascinating to me. It sounds like a whacky bossa nova. 

I asked Dave what his musical plans were moving forward and commented on his apparently prolific nature both in terms of recording new material but also unearthing archive recordings – I wondered if this had accelerated in particular when Dave finally retired from teaching a few years back.

Throughout my teaching career, I was still writing and recording music for The Muffins, even finding time off from work to go play overseas in Italy and France. So, retirement hasn’t changed any of that; I still write and record the same as always. I haven’t experienced any kind of particular freedom in that area. I just literally can’t stop doing music. I HAVE, since I’ve retired, started painting. I’m an abstract expressionist. You can see my work on Threads and Instagram. My ID is ndnewhouse.:

My solo ‘Manna/Mirage’ project has ended, but I’m continuing putting out solo albums under just my name. Thus, ‘Natura Morta’ is by Dave Newhouse. I have a new one coming out in May (?) titled ‘Soli’,  which is just me playing all the instruments on it. I’ve always wanted to try a ‘McCartney’ to see if I could do it.

I’m also working on an album of improvisations that I’m calling ‘Improvika’ with some of the great improvisers out there that I’ve met on Social Media, primarily Facebook. I’m also in a studio-only band with my old friend and former Muffins bandmate Micheal Bass called ‘The Swell Brothers’ – we have two albums out on Bandcamp and are presently working on our third. And MOON X is getting ready to release our third album (a vinyl release, actually!) titled ‘Rocket to the Moon’. We will begin work on the fourth album soon.

And finally I asked Dave about his particular relationship (if any) with the Canterbury musical genre.

I never tried to emulate the Canterbury sound, it was just natural to me. It was a familiar kind of music to me ever since I first heard it. It’s like I just walked into the Canterbury meeting room and joined the club.

Links

Dave’s solo material is at: davenewhouse.bandcamp.com

The Muffins box set ‘Baker’s Dozen’ is available at https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/bakers-dozen

You can purchase other Muffins albums on Cuneiform – Manna/Mirage, Chronometers, 185, Double Negative

Thanks to Dave, The Muffins and Steve Feigenbaum of Cuneiform Records for the use of quotes and imagery from ‘Baker’s Dozen’

For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here

To put Dave Newhouse within this series of interviews at all is probably a little incongruous. He’s best known for his critical role as saxophonist, keyboard player and composer within the iconic American band, The Muffins, who are very much an entity in their own right with recorded output spanning four decades. This was  most recently celebrated with a gargantuan box set ‘Baker’s Dozen’ on Cuneiform Records, which adds to rather than anthologises their considerable existing output.

But beyond this, Dave is simply a prolific musician and continues to produce music apace: there have been 5 albums from his solo project Manna/Mirage, 3 from Moon X (with a fourth imminent) and an increasing number of diverse solo projects in recent years. He also is a regular guest on albums from other musicians interviewed within this series, most notably Homunculus Res. Plus of course he was an essential component in the Diratz album, already eulogised heavily over within the Canterbury 2.0 series.

It’s fair to say that the reason his interview comes so late in this series is that there was just so damned much to listen to (and I’m still not sure I entirely did it justice) before interview questions could be adequately formulated. And if he’s ‘neo-Canterbury’ at all (Dave admits in the interview that he quite enjoyed the tag ‘Americanterbury’), then he should probably be ‘Canterbury 1.2’ rather than ‘2.9’ simply because The Muffins were one of the pioneers in taking forward Canterbury-imbued music as early as the mid Seventies.

We started, as is always the case, by discussing Dave’s own musical upbringing, both in terms of early playing as well as listening influences:

I started playing clarinet when I was in 4th Grade, so I would have been 8 years old? We had a music instructor who would come around and take us out of our classrooms mostly to play woodwind instruments, and teach us all the basics. Oddly enough, at the end of the first year, she discovered that I had been playing clarinet completely backwards, in other words my left hand (top) was on the bottom and my right hand (bottom) was on the top. She was amazed that I could even play that way. Needless to say, I had to relearn how to play clarinet over the summer with correct hand placement, which I did.

Around this same time, my parents had gotten a spinnet piano which I immediately and completely commandeered. I was not given any piano lessons and so taught myself by ear all of my favourite songs at the time; “Baby Elephant Walk” by Henry Mancini, “The Look of Love” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and “Sunny” by Bobby Heb, to name a few.

Also around this time, we got season tickets to a theatre in the round called Shady Grove Theater where they had touring companies come in and perform all the great American Musicals. (I would later see Jethro Tull’s first American tour there as well as The Mahavishnu Orchestra. And Iron Butterfly!) Shady Grove is where I fell in love with the American Musical Songbook, which probably explains a lot of my own musical compositional style. I remember seeing “Guys and Dolls”, “Camelot”, “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown”, “South Pacific” (The Muffins did a funny song early on we called  “South Specific”), and “The King and I”.

So, by Junior High School I’d decided that the saxophone was way cooler than the clarinet, so I switched over to tenor sax, which I played all through Junior High School and High School, including the Marching Band and the Pep Band. My dad had played alto sax in HIS High School. In fact, it was his Conn alto that I first played in The Muffins. But by the end of  High School, rock music was rearing its tempting head and bands like King Crimson, Chicago, Van der Graaf Generator, and The Mothers of Invention were demonstrating that woodwinds could be used successfully in rock music. I was off on a whole new journey.

Woodwind training stopped for me after High School. Any other progress I made on woodwinds, specifically flute, were self-taught. But it was our daily intense Muffin practice that made my woodwind playing better than it should have been. 

So how did this set Dave off on the path towards creating his own music?

I was in a Doors style band in High School, but didn’t really start taking band life seriously until I met Michael Zentner (guitar and violin) and we started an 8 piece early prog band around 1971 called Tunc. We played out live a few times and rehearsed for about a solid year until the band imploded. That’s when we went looking for other musicians for another band. Thankfully we found Billy Swann (bass) and so started The Muffins.

I was interested in Dave’s own exposure to Canterbury scene music as his own musical tastes were developing, but he places this as one of a number of influences:

Our friend, John Paige (who would later start Random Radar Records with us) had a Canterbury-heavy radio show on WGTB at Georgetown University in Washington DC that we (The Muffins) would religiously tune in to on Sunday nights. It was John who introduced us to a lot of what would become Canterbury. Of course, I already had the first three Soft Machine albums by that time and was a total big nerd fan. I remember the first time I heard Soft Machine ‘Volume II’ (I had bought it from a record bin on the boardwalk at the beach in Ocean City), I thought “Well, this sounds extremely familiar to me, like I’ve found my old friends.”

I heard the first Soft Machine album first, and I knew right away that I was listening to something very different than what was already out there. It wasn’t until I heard Soft Machine ‘Volume II’ that a Canterbury sound really started to emerge for me. By Soft Machine ‘Third’, I had sussed out the Canterbury chords that Mike Ratledge was playing and I absorbed the whole Canterbury sound and began replicating it in my own writing. Although, it sounded very natural to me, like somewhere I already belonged. 

The term ‘Canterbury’ had not been coined yet. I think John was just referencing what that kind of music has now turned into. At the time, we just knew that we were emulating all of our British rock heroes – Hatfield and The North, Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, Egg, Gong, etc. In fact, it was John Paige’s radio show on WGTB that introduced us to all of this great music. Not connected to the Canterbury sound, but The Muffins were also heavily into jazz improvisation at the time, i.e. Sun Ra and Art Ensemble.

And so to the Muffins. Here follows a brief synopsis of the Muffins story, which is  articulated far more eloquently and in extraordinary detail within the 60+ page set of reminiscences from musicians and associates within the ‘Baker’s Dozen’ box set, the written elements collated by Dave himself. The Muffins were a band that with very much their own take on progressive music. They emerged initially as a home spun collective of adventurous musical individuals (captured on the Cuneiform release ‘Chronometers’ of unreleased demos from 1975/6 which features both a lengthy 20 minute eponymous opus and numerous often madcap shorter pieces). A key term which resonates from the Baker’s Dozen box set liner notes about this era is ‘compositional humour’. The music evolved through to their Canterburyesque, keyboard-heavy debut ‘Manna/Mirage’, by which point the band settled on their core lineup of Newhouse (woodwind/keyboards, Tom Scott (woodwind), Paul Sears (drums) and Billy Swann (bass), although in reality each member played numerous instruments and further guests added to the palette of sounds.

Later there would be the discordancy of ‘185’, the brassy swing of ‘Bandwidth’ and numerous later albums (‘Double Negative’, ‘Palindrome’, ‘Mother Tongue’) recorded in a variety of circumstances as the band came to terms with the dispersal of its members around the country. In the box set Tom Scott memorably describes his introduction to hearing the then-members of the Muffins – Newhouse, Swann and Mike Apperiti  (Michael Zentner, the band’s guitarist was not present) as ‘some crazy shit. There’s melody. There’s all these interweaving time signatures and the compositions are very linear… commercially this a dead duck’. He joined regardless, and remained an ever-present within the band. Dave explains the band’s ethos:

We never thought about our marketability. We just wanted to keep making our own original music. The fans and the following just sought us out. And yes, we played many places where there was either no audience or just one or two people. But we still played (we were persistent), and the audiences started to get a little bigger. And when we couldn’t find gigs in the area, we put on our own backyard concerts behind our Buba Flirf house. Many of those concerts were recorded and you can hear them on my Bandcamp page and in The Muffins ‘Baker’s Dozen’ box.

Much of the early story of the Muffins centres around the incomprehensibly-named ‘Buba Flirf’, the first of two houses the band lived in together, with a practice room soundproofed by discarded carpets and egg cartons. I asked whether ‘Buba Flirf’ was a question of moving an existing band into a communal house to provide a vessel for their musical skills to develop together – or whether it was more a case of a band emerging from a group of like-minded friends living together.  

We definitely wanted a band and the house in Gaithersburg, which would later be called the ‘Buba Flirf’ house after some large plastic advertising letters that Billy nailed to the front of the roof of the front porch, just happened to become available. It became the meeting place, the magnet around which we all congregated.

‘Buba Flirf’ was not only the home for the band, it became the epicentre of a productive self-contained entity, centred around the band, making a virtue of their lack of apparent marketability to self-promote. Members supported themselves through various jobs but remained relatively impoverished. The band distributed postcards at gigs which they encouraged attendees to return to them, thereby generating an informal database of fans, the basis of a core following which remained loyal to the end. When the band moved out to a second house in Rockville, they launched Random Radar Records (alongside Steve Feigenbaum, a key part of the story, and a number of Muffins associates) partly to distribute the band’s work – the label’s first ‘sampler’ also included tracks from Fred Frith (unreleased tracks from ‘Guitar Solos 2’) and Lol Coxhill. I wondered whether this was an unconscious precursor to the independent models of production and distribution adopted by Chris Cutler and Recommended Records later that decade.

Once we decided to produce our own albums, the postcards (which spearheaded our first mailing list once they were mailed back to us), the albums themselves, etc. were never a political decision but rather a decision of necessity; we could not get a real label to become interested in us, so we just had to do it ourselves. Also, at that moment, there was a big DIY movement in the Independent Music culture (much like there still is today – with Bandcamp) that we latched onto.

In fact there was already evidence of cross-pollination between members of the Muffins and Henry Cow by the mid to late Seventies.

Michael Zentner (an early guitarist with the Muffins) flew over to GB with a reel-to-reel of our music and stayed with Chris Cutler  – Mike was so gutsy. The Cows and their engineers heard the tape and were impressed that there was an American band that was making a similar music. (Someone once called us ‘AmeriCanterbury’, which I like a lot.) I think we may have started corresponding with Fred in particular. When Fred came over to the U.S. and saw us perform at the ZU Festival in New York in 1978, we were blessed to include him as a fan. I think word got around that we were starting this new label, Random Radar Records, and so John Paige was able to get some tracks from Fred and Lol Coxhill included on our first record, which was a sampler of many musicians.

There was also more direct contact with RIO musicians at the Zu Manifestival, in November 1978, a 12 hour festival in New York organised by Giorgio Gomelsky (the record producer and manager associated with Soft Machine, Gong and Magma). Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, John Greaves and Peter Blegvad all performed (the latter two stayed with the band), as did an embryonic version of New York Gong with Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth. The Muffins also found themselves on the bill and Paul Sears did the sound for the festival.

Yes, this was the first time I had met any of my British musical heroes. And yes, this was on a whole other scale (HUGE) of gigs that we had ever played before. I remember it as a wild ride – so many different and varied bands performing! The new New York sound (No New York) was quite refreshing to us. It was no holds barred.

In the meantime, The Muffins had recorded their debut album ‘Manna/Mirage’, an album whose eventual CD re-release on Cuneiform Records in 1990 was my introduction to the band, and was subject to a cursory review in Facelift issue 9 where I commented on the ‘unnerving’ number of Canterbury reference points.

Billy Swann came up with the title. I can still see him sitting in the living room pitching the idea to us. The way he described it, the ‘Manna’ is the treasure that should be dropping down to us from the heavens, but the ‘Mirage’ part is the contrasting nature of it, is ‘Manna’ what will be coming to us or is it all a ‘Mirage’? And yes, I guess you could say that my own ‘Manna/Mirage’ solo albums (more of which later) were a natural extension of that first album.

With the album released through Random Radar Records, the band were at the centre of efforts of getting the record out to the world.

I think a lot of it was just word of mouth. We did the boxing and mailing ourselves. ‘Manna/Mirage’ was a solid on-going album that we wanted to keep in existence for as long as possible.

The band also released ‘Air Fiction’, an improvisational release, in 1979 on Random Radar, whilst ‘Open City’ appeared as a CD through Cuneiform in 1994, but is actually a re-release, with additional tracks, of an vinyl album whose material dates back to 1977-80. Steve Feigenbaum describes it as a ‘goodbye loveletter’ to a band he had never expected to reappear.

‘Air Fiction’ was a one-off, we wanted it to be a limited product of just 1,000 copies that would never be repressed again. It was just a fun idea to try.  ‘Open City’ was released was an afterthought, as it were, after our first breakup. We still had a last demo tape that we had recorded at our Portree Band House (where ‘Manna/Mirage’ was recorded) as well as a couple of outtakes from our Fred Frith ‘Gravity’ recordings from Tom’s studio. This is the classic quartet, released in 1994.

Eventually, in 1979  there would be a direct collaboration between the Muffins and Fred Frith, on Fred’s album ‘Gravity’, an outstanding album of dissonant but accessible folk-tinged experimentation which gave separate sides to Fred’s collaborations with, on the one hand, madcap Swedish progressives Samlas Mammas Manna, and on the other that of the Muffins. Dave contributes saxophone throughout the second half of the album but also plays organ on an extraordinary grating version of ‘Dancing in the Streets’

Lovely memories. Fred was so nice and forthcoming. He stayed with us at our houses – by this time we had moved to another group house together where we ended up recording ‘Manna/Mirage’. Tom Scott had a separate house with his wife that had a recording studio in the basement. It was there that we recorded our side of ‘Gravity’. I remember Fred having so much fun, like a kid in a candy shop. I also remember going out to the movies with him. I think we saw “The Elephant Man” and one of Richard Pryor’s live show movies, both of which he thoroughly enjoyed.

The Muffins took advantage of their new found connection with Fred Frith to record their second album ‘185’ in 1980, a manic, brassy, discordant project (Paul Sears describes the music in the box set liner notes as ‘angular and aggressive … the hairier the better’). It is fun, but not in a whimsical way a la Hatfield and the North. ‘185’ seems much sharper, dissonant and harsher than previous releases – and I suggested to Dave that its hints at faux folk could make it almost a companion album to ‘Gravity’.

Fred didn’t try to influence our sound in any way, he just wanted to get the best performances on tape as possible. The reason the album sounds the way it does comes from the writing; we all wanted to get away from the keyboard-based framework that had propelled us on ‘Manna/Mirage’. We had by this time been heavily influenced by Henry Cow, most notably “In Praise of Learning” as well as Etron Fou, Magma, and the new Post Punk / No New York sound, etc. We wanted a more stripped down honest sound, based more around horns, bass, and drums rather than a keyboard.

I hadn’t realised until the recent release of ‘Free Dirt’, a double CD of live performances from 1982-6, that Dave Newhouse had also taken a key role in early incarnations of Skeleton Crew, the utterly unique project put together by Fred Frith and Tom Cora. Whilst the latter is best known for his abrasive cello work,  both musicians played a multitude of instruments on stage, often simultaneously – and even sang, on a chaotic improvised melange of surprisingly accessible tracks. In the band’s first line-up Dave helped oil the wheels by contributing his own range of multi-instrumentation, including bass clarinet, saxophones and keyboards.

Fond fond memories of touring with that first iteration of Skeleton Crew. Tom Cora welcomed me with open arms into his loft in NYC where we rehearsed for a few weeks. The band we toured with, V-Effect, were all so nice and fun to be with. My only regret was not writing / composing for that group, which I’m sure was one of the reasons Fred asked me to join in the first place. But truth-be-told, I was burned out compositionally from a decade of writing all original music for The Muffins. I think I needed a break and to be just a band member for a while. But I do regret not writing any music for that group. As far as not continuing with them, I had just met Anne (my now wife) and I was ready to start a life with her and a career (a real job) where I finally made some money. And so I became a teacher.

Dave took a break from music as both he and other band members dispersed into different parts of their lives.

I went back to college after I left that first iteration of Skeleton Crew with Fred Frith and Tom Cora and got my degree in education. Then my girlfriend at the time (now my wife – Anne Hage), and I moved out to Albuquerque, New Mexico where she got a job as a teacher. I finished my classes there at the University and then also started teaching there. We stayed there for 5 years and eventually moved back to the East Coast to be nearer our family. It was in New Mexico where I started my cassette series of archival recordings called ‘Hand Systems Tapes’, the first of the Muffins ‘Secret Signals’ albums (there were 3 total, they’ve since become CDs) as well as other band offshoots from those halcyon days of yore.

We loved it there. When we moved back to the East Coast, Paul (Sears) got in touch with me and told me that he had been hearing on the internet that we still had lots of fans out there who were asking about us. Paul is the one who started us off on the second forming of the band by telling us all that we were working on a new album titled “Bandwidth”. We said, oh, okay.…

In Part Two of this feature, Dave takes us through how the Muffins’ story developed through the Nineties until their eventual split, and talks extensively about his prolific solo output.

Links

Dave’s solo material is at: davenewhouse.bandcamp.com

The Muffins box set ‘Baker’s Dozen’ is available at https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/bakers-dozen

You can purchase other Muffins albums on Cuneiform – Manna/Mirage, Chronometers, 185, Double Negative

Thanks to Dave, The Muffins and Steve Feigenbaum of Cuneiform Records for the use of of quotes and imagery from ‘Baker’s Dozen’

For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here

In May 2024, Facelift began a series of features with a number of international musicians who despite having no geographical connections with Canterbury, have become associated with its musical genre. This phenomenon has been variously described as ‘neo-Canterbury‘ or in some quarters ‘Canterbury 2.0‘. All musicians featured have released albums in 2024. Some of the interviews below stretch to several parts. This is an ongoing series and the intention is to interview a minimum of a dozen bands and musicians.

Canterbury 2.1 – Tom Penaguin (France)

Canterbury 2.2 – Lunophone (Ireland/Italy)

Canterbury 2.3 – Fabio Golfetti (Brazil)

Canterbury 2.4 – Amoeba Split (Spain)

Canterbury 2.5 – Carla Diratz (France)

Canterbury 2.6 – Zopp (UK)

Canterbury 2.7 – Homunculus Res (Italy)

Canterbury 2.8 – Magick Brother Mystic Sister (Spain)

Canterbury 2.9 – Dave Newhouse – The Muffins (USA)

Canterbury 2.10 – Needlepoint (Norway)

In the first part of the interview with Eva Muntada and Xavi Sandoval, the two main protagonists in Barcelona band Magick Brother Mystic Sister, we talked about their visits in Canterbury in 2000 and 2002 which sparked much of their interest in music covered in these pages, along with details of the long road towards creating their first album, which was released in 2020. In this second part we talk about the band as a live act, the ‘Tarot’ project which has spanned two separate albums, the first released earlier this year, and the second which is just about to make its appearance, as well as their part in unearthing a slice of Gong history from 1973.

After a four year gap, Magick Brother Mystic Sister re-emerged earlier this year with Tarot 1, the first part of companion albums covering interpretations of the meanings of the 22 major cards in a tarot deck. The music has changed too, with the pieces aired on the first volume of Tarot being by and large more reflective and dream-like than material on their debut album.

Xavi: This album can be seen as if it were a card reading and by some kind of cosmic chance these songs have appeared. We have tried to convey them as best as possible. The Tarot can be seen as a collection of knowledge from the ancient world. It has served and will continue to be a source of inspiration for countless artists. This has been our small contribution to give our thanks to all Tarot lovers.

Thinking about it, a lot of things have changed: the working method, the fact that the compositions were made during the pandemic had a lot of influence… but at the same time it gave us a few very valuable months to try things out in the studio…

It has also been a challenge to create the Tarot concept with 22 songs, having to adhere to certain parameters regarding their meaning or the length of the songs… Although many ideas on Tarot part 1 also come from improvisations, others were prepared beforehand in a more concrete direction. Of course, the change in the formation also influences this. Alex is a very powerful drummer with a new energy that is much needed on this album.

In this Tarot card we wanted each Arcanum to have its own focus, following the characteristics of each figure a little, but also letting yourself go without limits. Some ideas were quite old and we didn’t want to leave them behind so we took them up again with a new energy, maybe it has more of a krautrock, electronic music or acid folk feel to it…

Eva: I remember a pretty dark time during Covid and we weren’t at that exciting point of the beginning of the first album, that one took us too long and we wanted to recover other influences. Entering the world of Tarot requires very deep introspective work so the music took over.

There is also a change in focus in terms of instrumentation and the musicians involved. Whilst tracks such as ‘The Chariot’ and ‘The Justice’ in particular recall the overt Canterbury influences of  of the first album, the music elsewhere is more introspective, and the focus of the gloriously anachronistic music has moved from bossa nova, weaving flute and Dave Sinclair keyboard sounds to a more dreamlike 60s folky feel. It also introduces the sitar of Tony Jagwal, most spectacularly on ‘The Hierophant’.

Xavi: In the previous formation, drums, bass and keyboard, and perhaps because of the type of composition, the flute had a lot of space for solos.

The change of components and the entry of Tony Jagwar allowed us to give way to new sounds, to open up to new ideas, to be more expansive and not stay in the same formula.

Tony is a highly virtuosic sitarist and guitarist as you will hear in the second part.

We have also used synthesizer sounds more and I have been able to develop more acoustic guitars, mandolin, space guitars… in other types of compositions.

During the course of our conversation back in 2020, Eva told me the story of her’s and Xavi’s role in unearthing an unusual Gong video dating back to 1973. Eva told me that their connection with Daevid Allen continued after the Canterbury Sound festival in 2000.

Eva: We saw Gong on other occasions, once at a concert in Huesca (near Zaragoza in Spain in 2001). Daevid asked us if we had a car to go on tour with them and help the light technician, unfortunately the car was not ours and we had to return it, too bad. We met Gilli Smith, a woman with such kind energy, wise and lovely.

We learned of the existence of a lost film of a Gong concert at Montserrat Abbey in the early 70’s through a friend of ours who had previously been a monk. Daevid called him “Brother Francis” and he was the person who opened the door to the Monastery for them

Eva sent me the email thread from 2006 she had exchanged with Daevid which showed the exchange of information ‘… One day chatting about music with Francesc, he
explained an anecdote from his youth, when he was a monk at the Montserrat Monastery. Once a very special girl called Maggie Thompson knocked on the monastery’s door and started to talk him about a band very interested in the goddess and the black virgin, and to discover the theluric and mystic centre of Montserrat. They really wanted to play at the monastery. And yes! We realised that it only could have been you, the Gong Family!.. After some years looking for it, Francesc has found a copy of it that you might not have. We have it now, and we think it belongs to you’ (excerpts from email from Eva to Daevid Allen, 2006)

We obtained the film to send to Daevid… It is the film that was released on DVD…

I asked about the band’s live identity, as there is very little (although nevertheless stunning) evidence of the band playing live online, and this led to discussion of the music’s audience:

Eva: We have done concerts in a little church  were we rehearsed and made small creations with other musicians, violinists, classical guitarists, etc. Although we have worked on playing songs live, for the most part we are a studio group. In Barcelona you must pay to play which complicates things a lot.

Xavi: When the first album came out there were a lot of (COVID) restrictions and although it was a shame, we learned that for us it is more important to do concerts that have something special and to play in the best possible conditions (I don’t mean just economic ones) since this music is complex to perform live, it requires time and rehearsals and lately we have dedicated that time more to creation, recording, publishing, with everything that entails today… But it is very possible that a live presentation of the Tarot will be made.

Eva: I think (our audience) is also international, thanks to social networks and the globalized world. Perhaps it also counts that in other countries there is a musical culture where this type of initiatives are appreciated in a different way, but here they also follow us, and we are very grateful to all those who listen to us, I think that everywhere there are those oases of people that you get to know and connect with.

We also talked, as this article is part of the Facelift’s ‘Canterbury 2.0’ series, as to how the band felt about being afforded such a tag, and whether it fairly reflected their own influences.

Xavi: I remember the first time I heard Caravan’s ‘In the Land of Grey and Pink’ at a friend’s house, although we already knew something about Soft Machine, Egg, Gong, Arthur Brown and King Crimson… but that album introduced us even more to this style.

Eva: I remember going into a record store and seeing the cover of Soft Machine, it really caught my attention, I bought it and that’s where it started… In the same store they told me about Caravan… On another occasion, a Gong song was playing in a nightclub and I went to the DJ to ask him what it was. More or less at the same time I went to an after-party where Xavi played records, when we weren’t together yet, I was really struck by the selection, Tim Blake, Steve Hillage, etc…

Albums like ‘The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’, ‘You’ by Gong, ‘Third’ by Soft Machine were initiation albums for us and the beginning from which we began to discover more and more..

Xavi: We connect in a very deep way… because of the experiences we have lived following these groups, their stories, their members, for years it has been the soundtrack that has accompanied us.

Eva: We have played some of their songs and we learned a lot studying them and so many others. But the influence is evident in the techniques, the bars, the tempos, the sounds, the harmonies etc.

Xavi: There are many factors but I suppose it was a natural evolution from listening to British bands from the 60s to ending up with the Canterbury sound. There are incredible common elements, very virtuosic drums and bass, long solos and intertwined passages, the 7/4 time signatures and polyrhythms, the sense of humour, pataphysical, the use of the organ and mellotron with distortion, the flute and the saxophone, Steve Hillage style delay guitars or the influence of John Coltrane, the flexible and modal harmonies, all loaded with imagination and cosmic utopias.

Eva: Those who know this style will always defend it as a great moment in progressive music. In Barcelona many of these groups were very popular in the 70s and were a great influence on bands here. Many of them, like Kevin Ayers, spent their time in Ibiza and Mallorca and had a very direct relationship here, in concerts and even appearing on some music programmes on public television in Spain, so from what we know they were valued here although obviously not everything they deserved, perhaps because they were part of a counterculture environment and the political situation that existed here.

Finally, having not yet heard Tarot 2 (the plan was always to release the albums almost simultaneously, but in fact the latter is now more likely to appear now in November 2024) I asked how this latest release would take things forward:

Eva: It will follow the line of Tarot 1 because the relationship with the cards is maintained and we will play with that symbiosis, perhaps part 2 will be more lunar and there will be ambient passages, folk, space rock, or a kind of Hindu raga, but there will also be something more in the Canterbury style, lately we have been classified as a style … dreamprog … and I think it is quite accurate!

The band’s debut album can be listened to and purchased here: https://magicbrothermysticsister.bandcamp.com/album/magick-brother-mystic-sister-2

Tarot 1 is available here: https://magicbrothermysticsister.bandcamp.com/album/tarot-part-i and here https://www.soundeffect-records.gr/tarot-pt-i

Tarot 2 is available for pre-order here: https://magicbrothermysticsister.bandcamp.com/album/tarot-part-ii

Watch Magick Brother Mystic Sister videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8I5vUBFWFX6wh0Q0cXPNdg

For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here

In the second part of our interview with Homunculus Res we discussed later albums released by the band, before moving on to talk about more general themes such as how the band went about composition, live performances, and Homunculus Res’ place within the wider Canterbury diaspora. You can read part 1 of the interview here

Dario d’Alessandro: After having dealt with the body and nature, with the third album ‘Della stessa sostanza dei sogni’ I decided to deal with the oneiric (relating to dreams) and the psychological aspect of the homunculus. Each song covers the world of dreams. Dreams are mentioned in every single song. These cover: the dream as a desire for love (“Faccio una pazzia”, ​​”Non sogno più”); nightmares (“Mentre dormi”, “Denti cadenti”); a revealing dream to win the lottery (“La cabala”); or as a premonition – which contains cultural prejudices (“Bianco supremo”); the dream as a comfortable place compared to reality (“Dopamine”); ways to help sleep (“Rimedi ancestrali”); and finally the cryptic dream that hides unresolved feelings (“La casa dei sogni”).

I used the image of a horse in the first three pieces just as a device to create connections. I was probably influenced by the white horse, foretelling death, in David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’. However, Dario pointed out that the first track ‘La Cabala’ is actually not the Italian for horse, which is ‘Cavalla’ – ‘Cabala’ is an Italian term relating to the interpretation of dreams that correspond to numbers to play in the lottery. – Cabala also being a reference to the Jewish cabala, Qabalah or Kabbalah – a set of esoteric and mystical teachings typical of Rabbinic Judaism).

We chose a brighter overall sound than before . The best way to represent the dream, its immateriality and wonder, was the pop format. It is our ‘pop’ album, with light songs, and much more space for lyrics. It is true that the musical aspects are more subordinate to the song, even if there is no lack of large instrumental parts.

Dario also explains the increasing use of external musicians, as guests beyond the core Homunculus line-up, which had started on the previous album ‘Come si diventa ciò che si era’

Dave Newhouse (The Muffins), as well as Aldo De Scalzi (Picchio dal Pozzo), the Leddi brothers (Stormy Six, Mamma non piangere) and Steve Kretzmer (Rascal Reporters) were all great musicians of the recent past, who inspired us, who showed trust in us and enthusiasm. We are grateful to them. Just as we are grateful to all the musicians of today who have collaborated with us. The list is long, but I must mention Petter Herbertsson (Testbild!), Rocco Lomonaco (Breznev Fun Club), Regal Worm, Alco Frisbass, Paolo Botta (Ske, Yugen, who also took care of mixing a couple of times), Alan Strawbridge (Schnauser), Giovanni Parmeggiani (Accordo dei Contrari) and Sterbus.

We simply got in touch because of mutual respect. In particular Dave Newhouse was an enthusiastic collaborator, he played a lot of parts on two of our albums using many different instruments, flooding our songs with extreme elegance. For me it was a wonderful experience since ‘Ospedale Civico’ is inspired by ‘The Adventures of Captain Boomerang’ (from the Muffins’ first album ‘Manna Mirage’), for me a masterpiece of the entire twentieth century!

I had the pleasure of playing on the first pieces that Steve Kretzmer (of Rascal Reporters) composed with organ after a long period of creative pause, it was 2017, and I followed the evolution of the two Redux volumes and the album ‘The Strainge case of Steve’. I also painted two covers for Rascal Reporters, it was during this period that I met James Strain who took on all the work, from playing to mixing. (Dario and James collaborated most recently on the Lunophone album, released earlier this year, and the subject of an earlier Canterbury 2.0 interview (link))

‘Andiamo in giro di notte e ci consumiamo nel fuoco’, Homunculus Res’ fourth album was my own entry point into Homunculus Res in 2020 and arguably remains their defining statement. It appears to be their most coherent musical statement: the tracks are punchier, the ballads are sweeter, it is an album of consummate compositions. In the review in Facelift at the time, I remarked upon the convoluted changes of direction, the blazing fuzz sounds, the mediaeval feel but also the serenading of the listener through its wide-eyed innocence, before concluding that the band were as ‘mad as a box of frogs’. For all of this, in relation to the first 2 albums at least, there appears to be less of a deliberate attempt to throw the listener off track.

Yes, it’s exactly as you say. I think the fourth album is stylistically the most complete. We’d reached the perfect balance between experimentation and accessibility. Even if the provocative aspect was less present, I believe that this one, like the other albums, has in itself a whole layering of meanings, some more evident than others. And I think it has its own crypticism starting from the lizard on the cover that, with a fleeting and enigmatic look, stares at the viewer/listener, stops on a stone (it is our ‘rock’ album) in a suffocating post-apocalyptic background.

The album title is taken from the Guy Debord film, a medieval riddle applied to consumer society: we go around at night and we consume ourselves in fire. Consumerism consumes the consumer. In the first piece ‘Lucciole per Lanterne’, this is made explicit through the firefly (the solution to the riddle) attracted by the light of the lamp until it gets so close that it burns. In the song, the firefly is also a reference to prostitution and it is the light that speaks, it invites her towards itself.

All the songs in the first part of the album, up to ‘La Spia’, deal with the consumption of material goods. This includes ‘Il Carrozzone’ where we speak as a group: we have become rich with music and we buy the most expensive things while despising the poor, whilst ‘Supermercato’ is a bizarre dialogue with a supermarket clerk.

I mentioned in the introduction to the first part of this interview that ‘Supermercato’’s coda contained a rendition of first part of the piece rendered backwards, immaculately performed by the baroque sounds of French horn, oboe and viola . Dario is amused by the fact that no-one has ever spotted this even though he subsequently made a posting of the entire album played backwards on Youtube, which I saw and commented on at the time as being hilariously abstract, but it turns out was published just to give us all a bit more of a hint as to the coda’s origins. You heard it here first!

We continued on the album with ‘Buco Nero’, the black hole that devours everything, like Pere Ubu’s belly. And ended with ‘La Spia’, that is, the signal that lights up in a car when there is a problem (another reference to fire/light). It is a song about planned obsolescence. (This is the piece referred to in the Facelift review as containing ‘wideeyed whatsitallaboutery’, assuming as I did at the time that it referred to some sort of existential confusion about existence, which in a roundabout way I suppose it is.)

The second part of the album is more cryptic in its meanings. It goes from the salamander on the cover, a mythical animal that crosses the fire, indifferent and solitary, to deliberations on Pythagoras and metaphysical cosmogony; the song ‘Tetraktis’ is dedicated to the number 4, as the album is the fourth one. To arrive at the Kubrickian shining (‘La Luccicanza’) and the verbal violence of the last piece. The references to “Lullabye Letter” (in ‘Supermercato’) and “Hey Jude” (in ‘La Luccicanza’) are absolutely intentional.

I can’t remember quite how I got the impression that Homunculus Res’s fifth album ‘Ecco l’impero dei doppi sensi’ might well be their last, whether it was some throwaway remark from Dario, or just the overall mood of the album, which appears more philosophical, more stately, a project which feels it has reached a level of maturity. Dario remains cryptic on the subject.

The meaning (of the album) is not the end of the group, but the end of everything(!) Literally, so it is probably the most philosophical album. I am pleased that its solemn aspect comes out despite the catchiness of the music.

I agree that it follows the state of grace of the previous one, but the songs are deliberately simpler and more direct (apart from the album’s finale where the sounds precipitate into an increasingly frayed and shapeless sonic mix towards entropy).

Dario pointed me towards the press release which he made for ‘Ecco l’impero dei doppi sensi‘, which he told me he regarded as an ‘exhaustive’ statement on what he hoped the album would achieve. Here it is printed in full:

<<After the ruminations on the human condition, through metaphors of the natural elements [earth water air fire], the Sicilian band inevitably arrive at transcendence, always in an inexorably nihilistic perspective and with the usual humour that here becomes darker and in some cases even absent.

Every reference to humans, society, history, is avoided as much as possible. All meanings tend to be abstract. The theme is a continuous digression on the intangible: quintessence, absence, ether, cosmic and interior void, limits of language and the universe, destroyed and recomposed monads, memories of the future, senses, non-sense, double meanings, rhetorical figures, numbers; these are suggestions that often recur in the songs.

We’ve become accustomed to songs with wide instrumental spaces, with their particular progressive melodic pop-rock style with irregular structures, which here becomes even more dry and essential, even if there is no lack of episodes of instrumental richness that reach paroxysm, thanks to the various exceptional musicians, Italian and foreign, who participate with wind instruments, voices, exotic and ancient instruments. There are many references to the number 5, not least the length of the album being fifty minutes.

There is no desire to communicate anything or, rather: there is the desire not to communicate anything – even while doing so.

Homunculus Res have nothing to say, and in fact they do not say it.>>

The music of the song “Viaggio astrale di una polpetta” (the astral journey of a meatball) was written by Davide Di Giovanni and is dedicated to the death of his beloved cat, lovingly called by him with nicknames including Polpetta (meatball). For me, it was a pretext to write a text inherent to the concept of the album (“recomposed monad / unity in form”).

The piece is very funny and in some sections it contains this kind of bizarre ancient folk – plus a quote from Camel.

With Dario being the chief songwriter and main driving force behind the band, as was outlined in part 1 of this interview,  I was curious as to how his compositions took shape…

From the second album onwards, when we established ourselves as a quintet with the entry of Mauro Turdo on melodic guitar and Daniele Crisci on bass, I’ve always thought of a theme and a consequentiality between the albums, a continuum. So the theme, and the topics I want to talk about, influences the way I write the songs, for example I want a certain atmosphere of the song, more or less cheerful, more or less complicated to accommodate what will be the actual lyrics. These always come last, when the song is defined, and are modelled around the various accents of the music.

Usually I bring the pieces to the rehearsal room already quite structured, with an idea of ​​the arrangements for each instrument.

First of all I have to relate to the drummer, with him we decide the rhythmic progression and the bar lengths, then he is free to fill in as he wants. However, if there are accents that I cannot do without, these have to be respected. In the meantime, the others, perhaps with notes or chords to refer to, begin to familiarise themselves with the piece.

The same goes for Davide’s pieces, but it often happens that he records almost all the instruments for his pieces. For my pieces also interprets the chords and always inserts nice connections or cheerful rhythms and counterpoints. All the keyboard solos are written by him.

Daniele Crisci and Mauro Turdo have perhaps the most demanding tasks because, in most cases, they have to follow the most obligatory, written melodies.

The experience of forced confinement due to Covid was not a big shock for me. I continued to write songs and record. And I continued to collaborate remotely with other musicians. So my way of making music did not suffer any major shocks. Homunculus Res even managed to play live in December 2020 for an online prog festival in Japan. By contract we cannot show the video until December 2025!

We moved on to talking about how Homunculus Res materialised in a live context

We do few live performances, an average of one or two a year. The more time passes, the less we perform, because each of the 5 of us has his own work commitments, family commitments and commitments with parallel musical groups or long-distance collaborations. And also nobody calls us! However, we have met at least once a week for 14 years, maybe just to talk, or listen to music, or plan something, or play board games.

There are videos online (which give an indication of what Homunculus Res are like live). We play like a rock quintet and often have a friend to guest on wind instruments, for example. The songs with complex arrangements, like those on the second and third albums, are reduced to this rock formula. So we are more fundamental on stage.

We have played mainly in Palermo and Sicily. Twice we were invited to play in Milan, more than a thousand kilometers from here. We have played on both large stages and small clubs with average audiences of over a hundred people.

One of the motivations for the Canterbury 2.0 series of interviews has been to seek the views of musicians, particularly in climes a good distance from Canterbury itself, to assess the nature of what Canterbury music is, and how it is perceived in their country. Some of this will appear in a PhD project, due to be completed in 2025, but it felt appropriate to include here too. Dario is uniquely placed to judge this, both as a fan of the genre, but also because he has been particularly proactive (like Dave Newhouse of the The Muffins) in seeking out other similarly influenced musicians for guest work or collaborations.

The first Hatfield and the North record had a profound effect on me at 16 or 17, but I didn’t know about the connections between the musicians and the so-called scene. For me it was a progressive jazz rock record, a rare find among the records I knew. A few years later I discovered Soft Machine and Robert Wyatt and I began to feel the connections, the common taste. I used to read alternative rock magazines and the Canterbury scene was never mentioned. At the end of the 90s, thanks to magazines that did retrospectives of 70s groups and thanks to friends and music catalogs and above all the spread of the internet, I delved into everything.

In addition to the usual names of the “scene”, some of which I have already mentioned, I had fun and was amazed to discover the “minor” ones or those that can be grouped together or those of the second wave of the late 70s and early 80s such as Supersister, The Ghoulies, Moving Gelatine Plates, The Stubbs, Supply Demand & Curve, Cos, Nanu Urwerk, Grits, Master Cylinder, Massimo Giuntoli, French TV, Radio Piece III, Volaré etc.

I think that the traits that can be recognised and that were certainly born from those few English musicians at the end of the 60s are a certain elegance and lightness of composition that is jazzy and psychedelic and progressive. Warm and soft sounds and a lot of musical and textual intelligence and irony.

My understanding is that the Canterbury scene or sound is perceived benevolently in Italy, but only by a few people, as a gem – something for connoisseurs. And this is quite transversal among listeners and critics. The Italian press, more or less independent, since there was punk and post punk, has shown maximum contempt for progressive rock, but the most enlightened have distinguished the Canterbury sound as something precious and refined. A few books are dedicated to it. However, it seems to me that the term “canterburyan” has returned to music magazines and blogs in general – apart from those specialized in both prog and Canterbury or Rock in opposition and “other” music. I think that the greatest credit goes to Wyatt’s ‘Rock Bottom’, an album appreciated by many, which has overcome the limits of the niche and has acted as a portal to delve into the scene.

I can only be happy if critics and listeners include us in the neo-Canterbury genre. For us it is the main influence and it came out naturally, if there is some wink or citation, these are happily accepted. When we met we were super fans of Soft Machine, Hatfield and Egg. I am also happy that there is a sort of community of musicians scattered in Europe, the Americas and Japan who renew this type of music, as you are demonstrating with this series of interviews.

Given that later Homunculus Res albums in particular showcase guest appearances by members of a number of the projects mentioned above, I wondered if Dario had reciprocated in terms of his own collaborations and credits. In addition to the collaborations with James Strain and Steve Kretzmer of Rascal Reporters, discussed elsewhere, he mentioned the following:

I played on some records by Maisie, an Italian pop group. I produced with my phantom label Budella Records an album for Calogero Incandela (a name taken at random from a phone book), a “melancomic” singer-songwriter friend of mine from a town in Palermo, -all the Homunculus Res play on it. (https://www.discogs.com/label/1110952-Budella-Records?page=1)

I also played a small synth part on a record by Sterbus, a delightful Roman duo who are fans of Cardiacs, and who are present on two of our albums.

I have collaborated and still collaborate with Luciano Margorani, founder of the duo LA1919, a rock in opposition duo from Milan in the 90s. I sang and played keyboards on several of his albums and during the pandemic we made an entire album remotely! and I’m also more than happy with my parts on one of his albums released last year, I wrote all the lyrics and played keyboards.

I haven’t done anything since the Lunophone album came out, it’s been a hot and lazy summer that hasn’t encouraged me to do anything. A few days ago I started writing songs again, I’ve done three so far. And I think it’s my usual style, a little sweet, dissonant and complicated. And a few days ago I got involved in a very interesting project that I can’t talk about at the moment!

Huge thanks to Dario d’Alessandro for his hugely informative and detailed responses to my interview questions

Albums covered in this article

Homunculus Res

Della stessa sostanza dei sogni – https://homunculusres.bandcamp.com/album/della-stessa-sostanza-dei-sogni

Andiamo in giro di notte e ci consumiamo nel fuoco – https://homunculusres.bandcamp.com/album/andiamo-in-giro-di-notte-e-ci-consumiamo-nel-fuoco

Ecco l’impero dei doppi sensi – https://homunculusres.bandcamp.com/album/ecco-limpero-dei-doppi-sensi

with Luciano Margorani

Luciano Margorani – Dario d’Alessandro https://lucianomargorani1.bandcamp.com/album/luciano-margorani-dario-dalessandro-album-2021

Diece Pezzi Facili – https://lucianomargorani1.bandcamp.com/album/dieci-pezzi-facili-by-luciano-margorani-dario-dalessandro-fabrizio-carriero-album-2023
guesting with Rascal Reporters

The Strainge Case of Steve – https://rascalreporters.bandcamp.com/album/the-strainge-case-of-steve-2

Part one of the interview can be found here:

For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here

Magick Brother Mystic Sister are a project from Barcelona in Spain who by monicker alone should immediately attract your attention. Sharing a name with the first ever Gong album, they’ve managed to maintain, in between producing 2 very fine albums to date (with a third imminent) a certain mystery to both their music and their origins: videos online often mask identities, often through use of external video footage or simply through the blurring of images. Is there a connection to Gong? How long have they been in existence? How are they perceived in homeland Catalonia? Whilst some of that mystique undoubtedly will remain, hopefully what lies within the 8^th interview in the Canterbury 2.0 series will at least give some insight into this very fine band.

After some initial contact with the band when they released their brilliant first album ‘Magick Brother Mystic Sister’, I recently reconnected with the band’s two main protagonists: Eva Muntada (keyboards/vocals) and Xavi Sandoval (bass/guitar) and asked, as I always do, of their own musical origins. I got a suitably cryptic response:

Eva: That would lead us to write a book and for now it would be better if our music told the story…

Xavi: We have always felt connected to music, it is almost part of us, then over time there have been many projects in which you learn, where you try, you succeed. or you’re wrong… Until you find your way, and it is during that process that you develop as a musician. For our part, this is the music that counts now, it is the one we managed to publish and show abroad, so we will continue with more!

However, previous correspondence with Eva back in May 2020 at the time of the release of their first album had at least revealed an active interest in music covered in these pages, stretching back to two Canterbury Sound festivals in the very early 2000s, and goes a long way to explaining the myriad of familiar styles which cropped up on their first album: a whole range of Canterbury keyboard sounds, fuzz bass, bossa nova rhythms, flute and even glissando guitar. Eva and Xavi, the constants in the Magick Brother Mystic Sister continuum, take up the story:

Eva: The first (Canterbury Sound) festival was in 2000, we already knew many of the groups that played and that’s why we went. We were already fans and the lineup was irresistible, so we took a plane from Barcelona to London and then a train to a hill near Canterbury.

The concert was held in a huge English garden surrounded by fields of fruit trees and statues…the atmosphere could not have been better…

Just as we arrived in the morning, Arthur Brown began to compere the show and he started singing some songs from Crazy World of… to the audience and we were immediately amazed.

There weren’t too many people, we think it was the first edition. The rest of the lineup was Gong, Caravan, Man and Colosseum. We saw Caravan later on another occasion, once when they played in Spain.

We didn’t know Colosseum at this point, although we recognised the singer Chris Farlowe and it was an incredible concert along with Man’s, and when we returned to Barcelona we bought the Colosseum albums.

The festival closed with Caravan playing songs from ‘In the land of grey and pink’. We remember that the music sounded like the record, ‘Nine Feet Underground’ sounded incredible in that environment.

The Gong performance was fantastic. They wore their space-glam outfits…, Gilli in a blue dress and a silver cape representing the spirit of Selene. The atmosphere at the festival was very relaxed, totally natural, so we went to thank them for their music, to have them sign our records … We were able to speak to Daevid Allen – he was surprised that we had travelled here, a young couple from Barcelona. He told us, “you come from Barcelona to listen to this music, you are crazy but we love crazy people, we are all crazy!”. At that time we longed to have a band ourselves and it was something of a  pilgrimage, a great opportunity to see these great masters and learn a little.

There was another edition in 2002 (by which time it had been rebranded as the Canterbury Fayre), it was much bigger and had fenced areas and lasted 3 days. This time we went with friends from Barcelona in a Volkswagen van emulating the hippie dream.

We met a lot of interesting people, the lineup was already spectacular with bands from other styles as well… Pretty Things, Electric Prunes, Arthur Lee & Love, Jack Bruce, Nick Turner’s Space Ritual, Kevin Ayers, Ozric Tentacles, The Stranglers, Man, Arthur Brown, they were all fantastic with memorable moments, but the one that impressed us the most was the 21st Century Schizoid band, the line-up from King Crimson’s first album (minus Robert Fripp). We will always remember Ian Mc Donald’s flute solos on ‘Epitaph’ or ‘I Talk to the Wind’. Listening to all those songs was going beyond the pale…

The couple would renew their acquaintance with Daevid Allen a few years later in an unexpected manner, revealed further on in this feature, but we moved on to talk about the duo’s own music, starting with their own musical backgrounds:

Xavi: our training is somewhere between classical and self-taught. At home we listened to some pretty good music, my father liked rock and roll and flamenco so I grew up listening to the classics Elvis, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, etc. and then Paco de Lucia…

Eva: In my childhood at my grandparents’ house we listened to classical music, Bach, Mozart, Albinoni, Debussy and I played the piano they had there. And with my parents we always listened to rock music: Neil Young, Magna Carta, Supertramp, Mike Oldfield and many more… then I also tried to play that music on the piano when my grandparents were not there… Those moments have always stayed with me.

I asked about their choice of the name Magick Brother Mystic Sister

Eva: To choose a name was very difficult. At the time the band consisted of two couples (Eva and Xavi, but also flautist Maya Fernandez and drummer Marc Tena) and reflecting the inspirational effect of Gong on myself and Xavi, we decided on this name. We are aware we are not like Gong band but we love their spirit.

We  discovered that Magick Brother Mystic Sister suits us (although the name is a little long!) because it describes our music and our interests in magic and mysticism quite well, and on the other hand we are big fans of Gong and it is the title of their first album. Also, we wanted a name that contained two genders or complementary duality that would transmit that magical union that sometimes occurs between people.

I asked if Gong had given its blessing for use of the name

Xavi: No, because I think Daevid died before we released the album.

In reality the nature of the music displayed on the band’s brilliant first album takes influences from many more sources than just Gong. As I wrote in my review at the time in 2020 ‘the band they bear most resemblance to is probably Caravan circa ‘If I Could Do It All Over Again’, courtesy of a deliciously dated Sixties vibe, flute solos to die for and bossanova-flecked rhythms…’ The band also acknowledge influences from Ash Ra Tempel and Popol Vuh in particular.

Eva: We’ve always had a special connection to the Canterbury sound and when we started playing in a quartet format we turned to that spirit. This mix of jazz rock with flute, typical of the Canterbury sound, came naturally.

Xavi: The compositions were mainly from Eva and I, but we all participated because although many times the starting point was the bass lines, it was the improvisation that led us to choose the most interesting arrangements, to then polish the details for a while…

Eva: Actually we had been together since 2013. Songs like ‘Les Vampires’, ‘Instructions for Judgement Visions’, ‘Utopia’ or ‘Yogi Tea’ are originally that old. We recorded the album between 2016 and 2017 mostly, and some parts at the end of 2018. There were  many songs that remained unreleased.

Xavi: We started with keyboard arrangements from which we improvised until we found a good bass and drum base, so that the mellotron and flute could then flow in.

Eva: Normally  we played bass, drums, keyboards and flute initially and added the guitars at the recording.

Maya (joined us) on flute for Xavi’s original idea of putting music to the Tarot and she brought her partner Marc, an old friend music producer and jazz lover. We loved doing versions of Soft Machine, Skin Alley and Jethro Tull in concert,  and really enjoyed making improvisations with them. Playing in a group opened up new possibilities and the album was part of the result.

We recorded it at home. We live near the Park Güell in Barcelona where we have a cabin with a recording homestudio. From our studio we can see the amusement park and the Tibidabo mountain (The magic mountain of Barcelona). It’s a very inspiring sight.

In Part 2 of this feature, Eva and Xavi go on to talk about their latest album Tarot 1, tell the story behind their part in the unearthing of a long lost Gong video from 1973, and talk in more depth about their love for Canterbury music.

The band’s debut album can be listened to and purchased here: https://magicbrothermysticsister.bandcamp.com/album/magick-brother-mystic-sister-2

Tarot 1 is available here: https://magicbrothermysticsister.bandcamp.com/album/tarot-part-i and here https://www.soundeffect-records.gr/tarot-pt-i

Watch Magick Brother Mystic Sister videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8I5vUBFWFX6wh0Q0cXPNdg

For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here

It’s probably fitting that of all the interviews carried out for the Canterbury 2.0 series to date, it is the one with Dario d’Alessandro of Sicilian band Homunculus Res which has provided the most intrigue. A band that, for all that their overt musical Canterbury influences, can appear to be so innately bizarre that there was almost a sense of relief within Dario’s emails that someone had taken time out to try and understand some of the riddles within their music.

Dario had already spoken to Facelift earlier this year about his latest project, Lunophone, a duo with Rascal Reporters’ James Strain, but it’s fair to say that my original curiosity was all about Homunculus Res, a project stretching back to 2010 with, to date, 5 albums under their belt.

The concept of the homunculus itself, a tiny but proportioned human being contained within sperm cells,  is rooted within the context of 16th century alchemy. Given this somewhat abstract starting point, as well as the band’s lyrics being in Italian, I for one have always concentrated on the Homunculus Res’ ludicrous switches of musical direction, analogue keyboard sounds, and d’Alessandro’s voice which possesses an almost demonic innocence.

And yet if I tell you that, for example, that one of the band’s most memorable pieces, ‘Supermercato’ (which contains a quote from Soft Machine’s ‘Lullabye Letter’) is in fact a palindrome (its string quartet coda is actually a perfectly played performance of the first part of the piece played backwards), it gives you some idea of the as yet unfathomed depths of the band’s psyche.

Towards the end of this summer I had the chance to speak to Dario via email for a second time, this time covering a much wider range of topics. We were able to cover his own musical roots, influences and the circumstances which led up to the Homunculus Res project, before moving on to talk in detail about each of its 5 albums.

Dario d’Alessandro: I was born in ’72. My city, which I love and hate, is Palermo, in Sicily. An ideal place for those with artistic and humanistic interests because you are surrounded by history, beauty and decadence. I studied art and I (still) work in this field. Music has been a great passion since I was a child, when I put records on the turntable at my parents’ house. There were all the Beatles albums, including dozens of 45s, then classical music and American and Italian pop records.

My first instrument was a fabulous Farfisa Commander, with two keyboards, when I was 10, I think. My parents took me to lessons, but I don’t know why, the teacher unnerved me. I never studied music, like many kids I tried to learn the chords of the songs by ear following the vinyl or the cassette.

At 15 – 16 I listened to everything, from new wave to progressive rock to heavy metal. I started singing with small groups of friends in high school and started playing the guitar, even the bass when I could. But I didn’t continue.

The (prog) albums I listened to were those that the older brothers/friends, parents and especially teachers at art school had introduced me to. Among those, I was particularly struck by the first one by Hatfield & the North. This was different, it had an incredible beauty, sophisticated, never heard in progressive rock, at least by me as a young fan of Genesis, ELP etc. An album that I never stopped listening to and loving.

Like so many other kids that play for themselves sing songs with friends, I learned the riffs of rock songs that were then called “alternative”. The desire to start recording came around the age of 25-26. I made sound collages and tried to play over them, so the hi-fi system recorded from a makeshift microphone a tape sent by another tape player plus the part played over it, this could be repeated creating a brutal lo-fi. A few years later, with a small four-track tape, my partner Francesca and I – (we are still together!) started making slightly cleaner pieces, but always ultra homemade and always with pre-recorded bases. These experiments and demos flowed into an album entitled “Meat balls flying underground” under the name Mutable, published in 2001 by Snowdonia. A situationist thing, let’s say. This project led us to meet and hang out with several friends from the Palermo underground, who helped us and with whom we created a great musical and human understanding.

Immediately after, microcomputers arrived with little programs for recording and simulating instruments. It became easier to make music. We did several crazy things that I will put online sooner or later, created without pretension, just for fun.
In 2002 I, Davide Mezzatesta (of Mezz Gacano, a great avant prog band), Federico Cardaci and Domenico Salamone (both of Airfish, a historic industrial art rock band) founded Otopodo, a jazz-rock-punk improvisation group. You can find some material on Bandcamp (d’Alessandro operates under the pseudonym of McCoy Timer). This band was a training ground for me to play live. We played a few concerts.

In the meantime I was writing pieces and crystallising them on a piano roll  as midi and therefore as notes on a tempo track. I was making electronic rhythm bases over which to dub guitar, bass, keyboard, voice and noises. And I had accumulated several demos. I had also suggested a first version of “Rifondazione Unghie” (which would later appear on the first Homunculus Res album) to Otopodo and we even played it live in 2009 for my last concert with them.

Also in 2009, the drummer Daniele Di Giovanni and I met through mutual friends and jokingly decided to start a prog group. His brother Davide immediately joined us on keyboards. Domenico, whom I mentioned earlier, was added on bass. From the following year onwards we met more and more regularly for rehearsals and a few pieces became dozens. Homunculus Rex was born (the name changed slightly at the time of the release of the first album, so as not to be confused with an unknown Californian group of the same name).

Our first live performance was in September 2010 and quite a few songs were already arranged how we recorded them on the first album.

I asked about Dario’s apparent obsession with the homunculus concept.

This is about all the esoteric junk I had read, and a way to make fun of it. I also read Goethe’s beautiful ‘Faust’ and got the idea from there. But it is portrayed in a mocking way, like a deformed and grotesque lens on the human being. Plus I wanted the grandiloquence of progressive rock: as a portrayal of the little man who rose from his smallness and insignificance to king.

The band is the extension of my ideas, but the particular human and musical alchemy with my companions gives the peculiar Homunculus Res sound brand. In each album there are also one or two pieces composed by the multi-instrumentalist Davide.

All subsequent Homunuculus Res albums would contain a grand concept, a depiction of the homunculus in a particular environment, but the first album  ‘Limiti all’eguaglianza della Parte con il Tutto’, as well as being an extraordinarily diverse musical statement (there are 18 tracks, 10 of which are less than 3 minutes long), had its own agenda.

The first album is the wild fruits of two years of experiments and fun, especially with irregular rhythms. Perhaps it should be considered album zero, a hotbed of mostly bizarre ideas, a happy exploration, a delirium, even. However, it contains some of the most representative stylistic features for us. We certainly enjoyed the idea of ​​doing something unpredictable and cheerfully provocative. Even if it is not conceived as a whole, but as a sum of parts, it has its own internal stylistic coherence. The title of the album (a Beckett quote) might also refer to this fragmentation, as well as the difficulty of the individual (homunculus) in relating to society and nature and, for those who believe in it, to the spiritual.

Our material was in fact fast accumulating and needed an outlet  – there was even a first germ of ‘Ospedale Civico’ (the band’s opus from the second album) that we decided to postpone until later. The first version of the album, already partially skimmed by us, lasted more than an hour and, in addition to the arranged and finished pieces, contained jokes, parodies, improvisations, noises, small schizoid fragments, so it was intentionally more chaotic and disorienting. Our producer Marcello Marinone of the excellent Altrock label thinned out the material telling us that the listeners would be too disoriented and would lose the main pieces as they were dispersed in the general flow (that was maybe our crazy, perhaps self-destructive initial intention).

Dario had told me in a previous email that Limiti all’eguaglianza della Parte con il Tutto contained a ‘desire to explore irregular rhythms (with the help of mathematical tricks: Fibonacci series, triangular structures, enneagrams, palindromic pieces) and to expose the themes in a situationist form’. I’d asked for a bit of clarification on this but wasn’t quite prepared for the detail of the response. I was familiar with the ideas of palindromes being words or numbers which read the same forwards and backwards, Fibonacci as a numbers sequence (where the last two digits are continually added together to form a new one), and also the fact that ‘Enneagram’ was a track by Egg (!) but Dario gave me the full lowdown on the compositional makeup of several of the tracks and their roots. I had thought of picking out a few salient examples, but the level of complexity behind what, on the surface appear to be often jaunty, throwaway, relatively accessible ‘songs’, is absurd to the extreme and deserves to be documented.

As we delved deeper into our friendship, drummer Daniele and I fantasised about golden sections, complex geometries, palindromes, paradoxes, Möbius strips. Here are specific examples:

‘Culturismo Ballo Organizzare’ is one of the pieces inspired by the Fibonacci sequence. It is suggested by the numbers (1 1 2 3 5 8) pronounced in the first section (like progressively more intense gymnastic exercises) and settles in the central part (Ballo), deliberately composed in 13/8. The third part (‘Organizzare’) is a compendium of the entire album, a sort of summary in which fragments of all the songs that follow are mentioned and stitched together, practically self-quotations with the addition of a quote from the Beatles that appears several times.

‘ΔU’, which in physics represents the variation of internal energy in a thermodynamic system, is the title of one of our songs vaguely inspired by the idea of ​​the Western God. The structure of the song is in fact pyramidal. (The initial idea was to use triangular numbers, then abandoned in favor of increasing odd numbers.) So we have 3 bars of 3, 5 of 5, 7 of 7, 9 of 9, (11 and 13 are missing, I don’t remember why!), then a whole series of 15 or 5×3, which however are not 15 in total, in fact the piece goes haywire, towards shapeless chaos.

‘χΦ’, which is read ‘Per Fidia’, meaning dedicated to Phidias, the Greek sculptor and architect to whom Fibonacci dedicated his study on the golden section, is another song inspired by this fascinating topic. Unlike “Culturismo Ballo Organizzare”, this is a piece with a much more rigorous structure. Positioned in the center of the album, the song lasts 89 seconds (F11) and is divided into 55 bars (F10) of 4/4. By setting the metronome to 147 bpm we obtained a bar/pattern of 0.618 seconds, that is Phi, the number of Phidias, the golden ratio (89 divided by 55). The song has another peculiarity: it is a perfect palindrome (try to invert it and you will find that it is the same the other way around). The voice sings the verses backwards (“isoc aizini” etc.) and is inverted in the second mirror part, restoring the comprehensibility of the words (“alla rovescia” etc.). Some instruments are also inverted both in the “straight” part and in the backward part, always in the name of Perfidy.

“Centoquarantaduemilaottocentocinquantasette” (142.857) is a stylistic exercise, a piece that aims to represent in some way the Enneagram, a symbol introduced by Gurdjieff, not in its mystical or psychological meanings, but simply in its form and internal succession of numbers, in order to obtain strange rhythmic passages that amused us a lot. So we have a first representation in which this sequence manifests itself in all its clarity: a note/percussion, then 4, 2 etc. in unison. In the second part these values ​​are set in a rhythmic flow of 10/8, breaking it up. You can see this figure behind our Elvis impersonator logo, as a sort of crown, as the King (rex) of rock, or as a 9-based clock with the 1 indicated, as the number 1 of rock, but also as a representation of the schizophrenic man of the twenty-first century, a parody of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man. The song also refers to Egg’s ‘Enneagram’, which lasts 9 minutes and 9 seconds.

There are other more distant numerological references or quirks within other tracks on the album – these include references to the randomness (or ‘stochastic’ nature) of love, whilst the phenomenon of crop circles are tackled on ‘Cerchio nel Grano’

We do a version of ‘Sintagma’ live which is doubled in length, the second half is a mirror of the first, with parts of the piece where chords and riffs proceed in the opposite direction (this is captured on a compilation album available at https://www.discogs.com/it/release/9425841-Various-No-Palermo)

Crop circles are complex geometric figures and animate the conspiracy of the character who speaks. ‘Cerchio nel Grano’ also contains quotes from two great Italian singer-songwriters, Lucio Battisti and Fabrizio De Andrè, plus a ridiculous TV presenter of pseudoscientific popular programs, Giacobbo.

All these numerological references fit well with the (joking) alchemical concept of the homunculus.

We moved on to talking about the second album Come si diventa ciò che si era

The second album is the first one that was conceived and designed as a concept, a complete and concluded work and not a sum of its parts. It follows the adventures of  the homunculus who comes out of the safety of the ampoule and faces the world like any other man. And the world of men is characterised by pain and illness.

The theme is quite delicate and probably reflects some of my negative experiences (not dissimilar to anyone else’s), but it is treated with unreasonable lightness – something fatalistic that we can only accept and laugh about for its inevitability.

The cruelty of the world is expressed in the song ‘Vesica Piscis’ (an ancient Marian symbol). The characters in the song go to the sea to breathe healthy air and during the journey they see ferocious seagulls that attack and devour smaller birds. Or in the song ‘Dogface’ (which I wrote way back in 2003 or 2004) in which a dog is abandoned by its owner, whilst ‘Happiness’ (‘La Felicità’) is portrayed as being something unknown, like a term to look up in the dictionary.

“Doppiofondo del Barile” is a preview of the ‘Ospedale Civico’ suite – it was the first piece that was composed and it is around this the whole album revolves – and shares the same refrain (“Se ti senti mal devi andar all’ospedal” – “if you feel bad / you have to go to the hospital”). It is not autobiographical, it is as if someone suggested and described a song to a producer which was scraping the bottom of the barrel having had all previous proposals rejected, but finding that there is a false bottom. ‘S invertita’ is another self-quote from ‘Ospedale Civico’, the same melody played in a different way.

Undoubtedly ‘Ospedale Civico’ itself is the most ambitious and complex piece we have done. I remember with joy the amused astonishment of my companions when, every time we saw for rehearsal, I brought an extra section to attach to the previous ones. It had to be big and full of different environments, like a hospital in which to get lost, like a Dantean purgatory.

There are certainly references to National Health and Egg’s “A Visit To Newport Hospital” (my brain exploded when I first heard it). So it’s definitely a statement of intent and revelation of influences. Furthermore, one of the reasons it is so long, is to answer frequent criticisms of the pieces of the first album being too short.

‘Belacqua’ is a character from Dante’s Divine Comedy, taken up by Beckett. He finds himself suspended in the ante purgatory for his indolence, having not repented, which could be interpreted as wisdom. He does not do good or evil. ‘Opodeldoc’ is a medicinal ointment invented by Paracelsus (the inventor of the homunculus term, also the title of a National Health track), so as not to miss references to alchemy.

Come si diventa ciò che si era is also notable not just for the full-time involvement of guitarist Mauro Turdo, but for the increasing appearance of guest musicians outside of the core band. These include Dave Newhouse, who memorably adds bass clarinet to ‘Ospedale Civico’, Aldo de Scalzi of Picchio dal Pozzo, Alco Frisbass… plus Steve Kretzmer of Rascal Reporters

After asking permission to publish a small tribute for the death of Steve Gore of the Rascal Reporters on our first album, I got in touch with the other Steve (Kretzmer), who gave me one of the many unfinished pieces of the group dating back to ’75. This was a very complex piece lasting 10 minutes, we only set the beginning to music. The unreleased Rascal Reporter songs were completed later by my friend and collaborator James Strain

The Rascal Reporters are my favourite group, I put them next to Hatfield and the Beatles and Picchio dal Pozzo in my personal Olympus. When I heard ‘Happy Accidents’ for the first time I was very excited and in disbelief, it was the music I always wanted to listen to, a mystical revelation, a miracle!

In part 2 of the interview, Dario moves on to talk about a further 3 Homunculus Res albums, his thoughts about placing the band within a ‘neo-Canterbury’ context, and details his involvement in other projects.

You’ll find links below to the first two Homunculus Res albums talked about in the article:

Limiti All’Eguaglianza Della Parte Con Il Tutto https://homunculusres.bandcamp.com/album/limiti-alleguaglianza-della-parte-con-il-tutto-2

Come Si Diventa Ciò Che Si Era https://homunculusres.bandcamp.com/album/come-si-diventa-ci-che-si-era

For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here

A lot of music autobiographies have passed my way in recent years relating to musicians with direct or peripheral connections to the Canterbury scene. They seem to fall into a variety of categories: the ghostwritten and mass produced (Karl Jenkins), the unexpectedly confessional (Mike Oldfield), biography as creative writing artform (Carol Grimes), the humorous and self-deprecating (Bill MacCormick) and the riotous (Pam Windo). When I got news over the summer via Burning Shed of the fact that Jakko M Jakszyk (guitarist, vocalist and composer) was publishing his own autobiography, locating a copy became essential: as well as being a friend to Facelift over the years in its various guises, Jakko’s life has been so utterly extraordinary, within and without music, that there was always going to be one hell of a tale to tell.

‘Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair’, the title a poignant nod to the last words said to him by Camille, his adopted mother, is essentially a story with three different strands.

The first is probably what will attract most readers of this blog – Jakko’s tortuous route through the fandom of – and ultimately performing with – musicians written about on these pages, which included close relationships with Dave Stewart and Pip Pyle; interactions with Bill Bruford and Allan Holdsworth; members of Henry Cow; and we can include by extension both his solo work and ultimately becoming Robert Fripp’s henchman in the last (to date) incarnation of King Crimson.

The second thread is the parallel universe which has satisfied other creative urges and one suspects largely funded the first: the acting, the voiceover work, work as a producer, as commissioned composer, and a quite extraordinary body of work which has crossed over, directly with artists as varied as Ray Davies, Al Murray, Lenny Henry, Nigel Planer, Sam Brown, Tom Robinson, Danny Thompson, Tony Hawkes. Or slightly more tangential connections en route with Neil Sedaka, Cliff Richard, Chris de Burgh, Uri Geller… and Michael Jackson…!

But it is the third component which makes Jakko’s story (and ultimately this book) so utterly compelling: its personal backdrop. Jakko has always been disarmingly honest in interviews about his complex personal situation. But even though this has also permeated some of his musical output too (the autobiographical pieces ‘The Road To Ballina’, originally commissioned for Radio 3, as well as tracks and liner notes within solo albums such as ‘Mustard Gas and Roses’, ‘The Bruised Romantic Glee Club’ and ‘Secrets and Lies’), there is still so much more to say in what is clearly an ongoing process. For those of you not familiar with the story: Jakko’s upbringing was as something of a child prodigy in terms of music, acting and even football; whilst at the same time grappling with a complicated family background: brought up north of London by adoptive parents from Poland and France respectively, and learning of his ‘real’ parentage by an acclaimed Irish singer and an unidentified American serviceman.

‘My adoptive parents came from different cultures and from a different time, almost…. At times, they may as well have come from a different planet’. Somehow the stifling and seemingly anachronistic circumstances of his upbringing didn’t seem to quell either his spirit, or temper his precociousness (he admits at one point to having been ‘bloody unbearable’) –  even as a mid teen in the mid Seventies he managed attendance at various seminal gigs, often as a lone wolf – (one of the book’s highlights is the story of him being stranded after a Henry Cow gig and being picked up and taken back home by the band).  The unearthing of further details throughout the book is extraordinary, and it is only Jakko’s known willingness to share this information that perhaps softens a voyeuristic guilt in the reader in wanting him to return to this particular narrative in amongst other unlikely revelations. Yes, so he encounters Michael Jackson in a studio; OK, he hangs out with Gene Simmons; sure, he seems to be on friendship terms with most of the Comic Strip and Young Ones; and he even once told Pete Waterman to ‘fuck off’. But when do we get back to the narrative about tracking down sibling X over in the States?

The book is engagingly written, with humour, some self-deprecation and clarity of direction, all resonant of erstwhile mentor Dave Stewart; and compels all the more because of its confessional element – for the most part Jakko doesn’t complain about his vicissitudes overly, although he certainly marvels at their frequent occurrences, and is all too aware of quite what an unfathomable life he has endured which extends well beyond his musical world. For example, there is an extraordinary diversion at one point in which he has a prolonged exchange of views with Millwall Football Club on the subject of racism.

There are uplifting moments: the reconciliation with his adopted father, and the discovery of new siblings, but this is no inexorable advance to a fairy tale conclusion: the deception close to home alluded to in tracks such ‘No One Left To Lie To’ on ‘Bruised Romantic Glee Club’, or even more tellingly through the title of his last solo album ‘Secrets and Lies’, is laid unsentimentally bare. And, having diligently concealed the identities of previous partners in earlier parts of the book, the gloves come off rather in later chapters… in detailing the breakdown of his marriage, his fractured dealings with one erstwhile member of King Crimson, and eventually the deterioration of his relationship with most of the members of his ‘found’ family. There is a sense indeed that all of the latter processes are still ongoing, and therefore the tone is still more than a little raw..

This is in strict contrast to the almost exultant progress of Jakko within the ranks of King Crimson-related projects, from Seventies fandom (he even reveals that his childhood dog was named ‘Fripp’), through membership of the  21^st Schizoid Band from 2002 (with ex Crimson members), through to eventually meeting the aforementioned Robert Fripp, working initially with him on the ‘Scarcity of Miracles’ album, until becoming, as was apparent on the recent King Crimson documentary ‘In The Court of the Crimson King’, a favoured right hand man within the core Crimson band. Subsequent accounts of increasingly lavish gigs abroad with the band might start to blur into one another after a while (in the same manner as the celebrity connections also do), but one senses that both have helped provide a well-deserved sense of self-validation in direct contrast to the tribulations of his early musical career.

Readers of Facelift in its various guises will know that I am a sucker for  Jakko’s solo work: and even though I knew that all of his first three albums had been almost farcically derailed at various junctures in the Eighties, the full details finally emerge here. So does the backdrop to his wonderful Seventies band 64 Spoons; the almost mythical Rapid Eye Movement (with Dave Stewart, Pip Pyle and Rick Biddulph); his key role in Dave Stewart’s early solo work; Dizrhythmia; and his brief but eventful journey with Level 42.

As I write, social media posts inform me that Jakko continues to inhabit a peculiar hybrid world: on the one hand he is currently in Italy with old compadre from The Lodge, John Greaves (alongside Annie Whitehead, Annie Barbazza and Mel Collins) – I am sure this will be critically well received there but might otherwise pass largely under the radar. On the other hand the autobiography itself is being publicised through a series of interviews with premier film critic Mark Kermode, whilst the  launch itself on 11 October at West Hampstead Arts Club will be curated by acclaimed comedian Stewart Lee. The Jakko rollercoaster story continues apace… and there will undoubtedly be further bumps en route….

Thanks to Jakko for sharing an early version of the book and for permission to use some of the images contained within it for this piece

An Evening with Jakko Jakszyk with Stewart Lee – https://www.tickettailor.com/events/westhampsteadartsclub/1375951

Order the book at Burning Shed – https://burningshed.com/jakko-m-jakszyk_whos-the-boy-with-the-lovely-hair_book

Jakko also speaks at the Berkhamstead Book festival on Sun 3 November https://bookfestival.berkofest.com/

Jakko continues his run of gigs in Italy with the John Greaves band in October

In part one of the Zopp interview Ryan Stevenson talked to Facelift about his own musical backgrouund and influences, and the events which led up to the recording of the first Zopp album. In this second and concluding part he moves on to talk about the ‘Dominion’ album, taking the music out on the road with band Zopp, and future plans for the project.

Ryan: ‘Dominion’ was more of a confidence boost. Every human being is based upon confidence and if you don’t receive feedback you don’t know how good your stuff is, do you really? So I had great reviews from the first album and it gave me that confidence. I finished the first release in April 2020, and as soon as these reviews came in, I was like ‘this is cool, I’m doing something good here’ and I remember writing ‘You’ (the album’s superb opener and probably Zopp’s defining piece) very early on, that was one of the first things, where the staccato piano came in, and then the whole track – that came about really quickly that song. And I was basically again just trying to write the best thing I could do incorporating the Canterbury thing but I wanted it to be more psychedelic.

I mention this word psychedelic, but not many people…  maybe it’s not turned out psychedelic! That was the idea with ‘Dominion’ with the album cover, to have something that was a bit more of a ‘summer’ album. The first one felt a bit cold I think, although again we’re talking in abstract terms.

I’m really proud of the ‘Toxicity’ track (this is the track which both concludes ‘Dominion’ and also ends live sets) – there was like a puzzle, I was trying to work out this long song and so I worked hard on that – there are still elements from the first album in there. If you know a band called Tame Impala, an Australian band, they’re some sort of modern pop music but with a lot of psychedelic guitars and I was very much into that, still am, and I was trying to incorporate that into the music for ‘Dominion’:  washed out guitars, delays on the guitars and you hear that on ‘Toxicity’ and ‘You’ quite a lot but then again there’s the Zappa element with ‘Reality Tunnels’ and this complex stuff and ‘Bushnell Keeler’ (where Ryan had written much of the track on midi) and I suppose a very Canterbury piano ballad thing like ‘Wetiko Approaching’, the shorter song before ‘Toxicity’.

But again for me the album flows well – I heard it a few days ago, a couple of songs and it still sounds all right. Again nothing is perfect, but a more confident album, and I tried the vocals too.

Indeed, ‘Dominion’’s greatest departure in comparison to Zopp’s debut album is that introduction of Ryan’s own voice, and the surprise 18 months on is perhaps that we hadn’t it before. My initial feeling on hearing it was that it was a clear attempt to widen the project’s audience to a wider prog crowd, but it has become such an essential part of Zopp’s sound (integral but not pervasive) that it’s becoming difficult to separate it from the band’s overall identity.

The earliest memory I have (of wanting to use vocals), is having an instrumental version of the song ‘You’, rehearsing it with Andrea and then me hearing vocal lines. So again it was intuitive, it was like, ‘let’s try this’. Originally the vocal line was a saxophone melody (the saxophone was another element I wanted to use a lot more like in  jazz) – so you can hear that on ‘Toxicity’ and a few others.

I’m not a keyboard player, it sounds really modest but I’m not a keyboard player, not a singer. I’m just trying to make music that I want to hear.  I think  voices just become a part of the identity, even if they’re not like trained singers, it’s just becomes part of that sound, part of the palette. I try to get a blend of instrumental and vocal stuff, so it’s not all one format for every song.

I read one comparison online with the vocals of Richard Sinclair, which seemed to set the bar unnecessarily high. Ryan’s voice is certainly not as fulsome, but it does have that range, clarity, and works particularly well in harmony (he has found an admirable foil live with guitarist and backing vocalist Richard Lucas). Inadvertently, perhaps, he has also stumbled on the ‘Canterbury’ vocalists’ formula of being oneself, a tradition which dates back to Richard Sinclair’s Wilde Flowers demo of ‘A Certain Kind’, where he sang Hugh Hopper’s pop tune with choirboy rigidity, because that what was truest to his experiences up to that point.

On this third album I’m trying to sing how I sing.  I’m trying to hear how I would sing, not trying to ape anyone per se, and I think that is again trying to be genuine.

That said, he’s not impartial to a touch of burbling Wyattesque scat singing as is heard live for the intro to ‘The Noble Shirker’.

You probably heard during Crescendo I did a bit of a scat thing – again that’s just an element that I thought would sound great and again I can’t help that! Who’s doing that type of singing? Not many people!

I asked Ryan about his lyrical inspirations for the brief number of tracks that have appeared under the Zopp name so far, primarily ‘You’ and ‘Toxicity’ and on the surface at least these appear to represent the ‘release’ he has found in forsaking a relatively mainstream, even dystopian existence, to pursue his musical calling.

It’s all about my own experiences and in life – not trying to be sci-fi – not trying to be too fantasy. It’s more about existential things. I have had a lot of very unusual experiences, like spiritual experiences. The last few years have been very profound and I tried to write about that: things like synchronicities (meaningful coincidences), reality manifestation realisations, and basically believing in yourself to change your reality. For example ‘You’ is a basic song about – it’s about many things – it’s about being an individual and the importance of being an individual and being who you are, not trying to be part of the crowd. (‘There’s a victory in knowing who I really am’ is just one lyric in ‘You’). As you picked up upon, being introverted in a positive way, being comfortable in your own skin and understanding who you are as a person. Those type of lyrics are very introspective –  I’m not trying to discuss politics or anything like that per se, it’s more about my personal experience…

The Zopp project to date has been largely a one-man band with Ryan composing all pieces and playing the majority of instruments himself (the notable exception being drumming from good friend Andrea Moneta, an Italian expat who now lives in Derbyshire). This means that behind the dominant keyboards you hear on all Zopp tracks, the bass and guitar elements are also ones recorded by Ryan. But in 2023  tentative plans took hold to put Zopp into a live context, and a number of gigs have materialised since, two of which (the initial gig at The Sumac in Ryan’s home town of Nottingham and their most recent at Crescendo festival in France), I was lucky enough to attend and review. I asked Ryan what the criteria had been for various musicians joining the live band and he talked us through his connections and a little history of each member, starting with Moneta, with whom the connection goes back further.

The obvious criteria is can you play this song?! Can you handle the odd time signatures because when I’m writing this stuff I’m not thinking in terms of the time signature or how one part is offbeat – these are very unusual things which somebody with a musical training can read in the music by listening.

I met Andrea through an ad in 2017, a Gumtree ad. Andrea has done many things, he’s probably played the most professional gigs –  I think he’s even played with or he shared the stage with Tony Levin the bass player (from King Crimson). He toured America with a bluegrass musicians, and many shows with his band ‘Leviathan’ who played a lot in the 80s – some sort of neo progressive Genesis sounding Italian music

It was the same with Ashley (Raynor, on bass), he also replied to an ad. He used to do functions, weddings and stuff like that so he’s got a lot of live experience. As many people have said he is a very natural guy on stage – he just very looks very comfortable and he can learn these complex lines so kudos to him.

Richard (Lucas, guitar, backing vocals) I knew through a friend and got him on board. He’s more from a soul and funk background. Richard is good in the sense that he’s open-minded musically – he knows what’s good and bad, he’s got an open mind.

Rob Milne is the sax and flute player who played with us for Danfest and who has  performed with Guranfoe. Miles Noble is going to play with us hopefully for the next two shows, at least, and he’s involved in many projects, but we had a rehearsal yesterday and he’s a very good fit, he’s an amazing player.

As noted in both Zopp live reviews on Facelift, the band appear to have seamlessly taken a studio project into the live arena both in terms of sympathetic personnel and some tweaking of arrangements. The clearest manifestation of this is the extension of ‘Uppmärksamhet’ from ‘Dominion’, a reflective piece which has developed a new element, the improvisational extension ‘Prospectiv’.

I’ve always had an affinity with Scandinavia for some reason – I’ve been there many times, I like a lot of the prog music there too like Dungen and Anekdoten.  Uppmärksamhet means ‘attention’ in Swedish, paying attention, and I just wanted a song that had that title. It was sort of a link with the first album with ‘Sellanra’. I liked the version on the ‘Danfest’ recording – we did a really nice version of that and then I basically split it into two with ‘Perspectiv’ (being the improvised element).  I like those two a lot, we do that a lot, people say that’s one of the highlights of the show – the jam in the middle, so we carried on doing that…

As a band I wanted more improvisation so on ‘You ‘ there were more solos in the middle, there’s just room with that bassline in the middle,  so probably that idea came early when we had a band together the Zopp band. I think Tom Penaguin (the French multi-instrumentalist who was interviewed at the start of the Canterbury 2.0 series, who Ryan originally put me in touch with)  mentioned, because he saw the clip at Danfest – he said ‘it be good if there was a break in this’ – so now there’s a break in the middle with Ashley where the riff is in 7/4 and I told him to play in 7/8, so that’s like a break in the middle of the song which I’ve incorporated. So things happen organically I suppose, or ideas develop – that’s the great thing about the band format, and that has helped me to write for the third album (the band have already performed live a number of new pieces which will appear on future projects)  in a healthy sense because you hear the new songs in a live format, and you hear what works and what doesn’t work. And I think that’s very healthy again and it helps the understanding from a different perspective.

Ryan is also expanding his familiarity with improvisation in other ways.

I’ve joined a band – it’s called the Nottingham Soul and Jazz Collective – we turn up every few weeks and we just get together and the songs are very jazz in the sense that you’ve got a theme at the start, and then it’s free for all in the middle, everybody’s jamming and then we return to the theme at the end. That’s sort of the loose format and that would be a good experience for me to develop as a musician I think. I’m on keyboards – I’d love to play something else than keyboards, because I think I’m a better bass player or even better guitarist than a keyboard player but I’m happy to play keyboards..

Which leads us on to future projects. When we spoke in France Ryan made free reference to both  ‘third’ and possibly ‘fourth’ Zopp albums.

I’m writing the third album – there are three songs I really like from it. There’s one that we played for the encore (at Crescendo) and I really really like that song – I think that’s going to be called ‘Intuition Made It’. Again, the intuition thing again is powerful. It’s a bit poppy but it’s got proggy bits in and complicated bits – so that’s an eight minute song. There’s another song called ‘Bizarro’ – actually the album is going to be called ‘Bizarro’ too – but this is a  really good instrumental song which gives me goosebumps actually listening to the demo in the car, and I know I’m on to something good when I get the goosebumps. So the  Canterbury people will love that because it sounds like Soft Machine but it’s got the Zopp take on it. And there’s a song my dad wrote when I was a kid, that he said sounds like Greenslade but to me it sounds more Zappa, a bit like ‘Hot Rats’, simple but very melodic so I’ve reinterpreted that in my own way and that’ll be on the record.

And then there’s the ‘Living Man’ song which I’m still trying to perfect. We’ve been playing that for a year and I’m still not happy with the bit in the middle. I find it cheesy and it sounds very prog rocky, you know very cliched, but the guys in the band love it and  I don’t really resonate with it.

Yesterday the band were like ‘no, we’re not going to change this because we got a gig next month’. That’s fine, I respect that but it doesn’t feel right yet – and this sounds really pretentious but I really am being sincere –  I’m trying to make the best thing that innately, intuitively feels complete. That’s what an artist is. One of my idols is David Lynch, the American director, the avantgarde post modern,  whatever you want to call him. Not just in his art, but who he is in interviews is a big inspiration – the thing is done when it feels complete, and that can drive you mad, insane, because I really am trying to do that with everything. I could make an album quickly, but it would be crap. Andrea yesterday said that the ‘Living Man’ song is the best thing I’ve ever done. I was like ‘thank you, but it just doesn’t feel right’. I know that is the main thing, if I’m not happy with it, it can’t be on the album. I do raise the bar high for myself which is good.

And then there’s other little pieces now which I’m working on every day to try and finish and then we’re hopefully going to record the drums next year sometime.

The fourth one is called Zomm and we recorded the drums for that two years ago now, and that’s the stuff I wrote before Zopp in 2015-17, so this was a band that I had and it broke up but I wrote a lot of music for it. We’ve got a Venn diagram here of Magma and Mr Bungle (an American experimental rock band)  – avant garde dark weird doom stuff!

Ryan also assiduously documents his live performances so far, and a couple have already seen the light of day, snippets from the band’s debut gig in Nottingham (https://zopp.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-the-sumac-centre reviewed here ), and in the last few days, a much fuller reflection of the band’s live repertoire, captured at Danfest in November 2023 (https://zopp.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-danfest)

I’ve recorded most of the gigs with Zopp so they’re going to be released eventually, either bandcamp or maybe another CD so people get that fresh perspective on the live format versus the studio.

Finally, one of the primary themes within the whole Canterbury 2.0 series in Facelift has been to ask musicians their thoughts on how they see themselves fitting (if at all) within a wider Canterbury scene.

This is an important question. A neo-Canterbury movement?  In one sense yes, in another sense no – that sounds contradictory! The DNA of some of these bands I observe and acknowledge is being carried forward with Tom Penaguin’s music, with my music and with many other bands you’ve interviewed such as Amoeba Split. I acknowledge that, and it’s true, and I don’t hide that fact.

But when I’m making music I’m not thinking, ‘I’ve got to be a part of a scene’.

So there’s two different perspectives, two different ways of looking at it when I make music. As I’ve said, I’m trying to please myself all the time to make an album that I want to listen to. That’s it. But I don’t want to be boxed in or continue making the same album forever. Those elements are always going to be in Zopp, whether that’s the weird melodies, the fuzz organ, some scatting like Wyatt,  these things will always sort of be in there somehow. But I’m going to try and shake it up, which might upset people, and that’s fine because fans go, some come in. I try not to think too much about it.

But even talking about it still helps promote the (original) music and it’s a romantic thing about a scene and I get that, I totally get it. And I love it too because this legacy is important in one respect, because otherwise these bands would just be forgotten.

Thanks to Ryan for his ongoing support for Facelift and related projects and for all the wonderful music he produces.

Live at the Sumac is at https://zopp.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-the-sumac-centre

Live at Danfest is available at https://zopp.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-danfest

Zopp’s bandcamp page is at https://zopp.bandcamp.com/ where you can also buy the first two studio albums, T-shirts and merchandise and rare artefacts such as gig posters, early demo versions.

Zopp’s next two gigs are at HRH Prog at Great Yarmouth https://hrhprog.com/line-ups

and in Southampton on 15 December https://www.ticketweb.uk/event/haze-zopp-the-1865-tickets/13423464

This feature is number 6 in a Facelift series interviewing ‘ne0-Canterbury’ acts which started earlier this year. Read earlier interviews with Tom Penaguin, Lunophone, Fabio Golfetti, Amoeba Split and Carla Diratz

For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here

Of all the artists interviewed for the ‘Canterbury 2.0’ series, Zopp are the probably the only ones who have apparently appeared from nowhere, made an instant impression based on impeccable and clearly recognisable musical credentials (Egg, Khan, Hatfield and the North and National Health are all clear reference points), and are now starting to bring their wares to a wider audience in the progressive music field.

Zopp is the ongoing project of one Ryan Stevenson, a 33 year old from Nottingham, a multi-instrumentalist who has provided practically all the components bar drums on their two studio albums to date, but is also masterminding an inspired transition to live performances with his very conducive band. Since the considerable impact of Zopp’s first album in 2020, I’ve kept in touch with Ryan on a regular basis, as well as witnessing his band’s first gig in Nottingham in November 2023, and its most recent gig, arguably its finest hour, at the Crescendo Festival in France in August 2024, where we spoke at length informally the day after. This piece takes information from all those sources, as well as a 2 hour interview over Zoom earlier this month…

Ryan is a compelling character: his command of a range of instruments and production techniques is matched by a thorough approach towards the challenges of getting his music out to its growing audience in a changing musical landscape. He refutes the term perfectionist, but meticulous he certainly is. He acknowledges the introverted nature required to spend the requisite number of hours putting together albums of such musical and sonic complexity as Zopp’s first two releases. And yet he exudes a natural self-confidence and managed an easy rapport with the crowd at Crescendo (where he made a virtue of his lack of native French). This belied his somewhat mysterious presence on stage, where, side on to his audience, he often appeared to be inexorably navigating his band smoothly through new waters.

As will be revealed within the interview, Ryan acknowledges and even courts Canterbury comparisons, but provides compelling evidence that this should neither define or limit the band’s ongoing appeal and development.

I firstly asked Ryan about his own musical upbringing and influences.

Ryan Stevenson: In terms of playing music really I’m completely self-taught, I’ve never been to a music class, never studied music. I still am a bit of an autodidact, completely self-taught. Music appeared in my life when I was maybe 13 or 14 . ‘Sound of Muzak’ by Porcupine Tree was one of those watershed moments – I really resonated with that. I remember the exact moment my dad played it for me. He was into a lot of progressive rock stuff and the Canterbury scene too. My dad had them all, he still has them, Hatfield and the North records – he wasn’t a Caravan fan – but he was really into National Health and I heard some stuff from Egg and I loved it.

I got into wanting to make music. Something I think changed in the psyche or makeup. Previously I was into sport, I played cricket a lot and stuff like that, and then music came along and it became a very integral part of my identity.

The prog rock thing, I was soaking it up – Prog archives… I was just like ‘what’s Captain Beefheart’? and I remember doing a pastiche of ‘Trout Mask Replica’,  recording weird stuff in my bedroom, having a whale of a time.  Such a beautiful time in my life, it’s like a kid, a toddler that plays with a plastic candy wrapper and that they’re just engrossed in something that might seem banal, the novelty of the experience, it’s so beautiful.

So how did this manifest itself in terms of actually playing?

My dad had a keyboard, a Yamaha workstation, where he composed music himself. So I get something from my dad, maybe genetically. He’s been a self-taught musician himself too but I’ve taken it to another level. Within maybe a year, maybe within a few months of me listening to Egg I started to play on the keyboard, not knowing anything,  (I still don’t know much!) and then same with guitar. If you have a guitar lying around – just you gravitate towards playing it.

I felt very quickly I wanted to make my own music and that’s always stayed with me. I’ve never been a massive consumer of music – I’ve always wanted to contribute my own, just to be creative. Human beings are very creative beings – I wanted to be lost in a sound world, it’s like an advanced form of playing, composing music and I was fortunate that when I was 15 or 16 my dad saw this in me and he bought me a multitrack recorder, a 16 track so I could overdub in my bedroom and record.

It’s an archetype, but I think I’m an archetype of being somebody that’s not necessarily interested in learning an instrument per se, it’s more about ‘how do I make an album?’, and I remember even at school thinking of album titles in my head and  track sequences, imaginary things – that’s the archetype of who I am.  I just want to make albums – a producer is probably the best word to describe if I’m going to be honest. So I’ve always had that, maybe from 14,15,16, that age, It was very powerful and then with the Zopp stuff, I wrote a lot of that in 2010 (when Ryan was still in his late teens).

I bought a bass guitar off a guy at College, again 16, 17 years old and had keyboards at home and a guitar and I’d just be overdubbing and making music, and some of the early stuff was very Canterbury-like. My dad had a fuzz organ, like a distorted organ sound and one of the first things I made was this Egg pastiche, which I still remember in my head actually. It’s never ended up on a record, compositionally it was a bit boring maybe, but I think it’s in you, something clicks at an age and you just want to make music and that’s my archetype I think…

When I studied at college I took some music technology classes and then an A level in it, and I got used to using Protools so I’m a modern musician in that sense.

I asked Ryan what it was about Egg in particular that struck him at that tender age, as well as an ongoing admiration for the work of Mont Campbell, whose writing re-emerged in possibly even more uncompromising fashion later within National Health. It seems particularly remarkable, given that he does not read music, that Ryan should be drawn towards, and eventually emulate through his own complex pieces, the music of the most compositionally complex of the Canterbury genre’s musicians.

He’s a genius, an underrated genius and it’s just the way it is, isn’t it, those people that make genius compositions never get the deserved praise. I did reach out to Mont Campbell to get him to play on ‘Dominion’ but he told me that he had sold his French horns in 1975!

I don’t read music. I think I’m lazy in that sense but also I don’t need to.  Obviously with a band, starting the Zopp band, I’ve had to communicate ideas to people. Andrea who drums in Zopp, he can read music, he’s taught formally but no I can’t read music, but those guys did didn’t they? Mont Campbell obviously studied the French horn, Dave Stewart (read music) and that probably allowed them to compose music to a high level of complexity. But for me being in the 21st Century I have the luxury of using a computer to overdub ideas conveniently, so the studio is almost like an instrument in a sense.

For me music is abstract, and it’s getting the ideas down from here (my head) into the material world, so the quickest way of doing that is using technology for me. If you think about it, midi is a form of musical notation in a way, you’re notating the notes on a grid, with a keyboard on the side, so in a sense like in the old days you could write on the staff and write notes but you couldn’t actually hear it unless you got musicians to play it.  I can hear the notes in real time by doing that and that was an interesting exercise, but if I’m not using midi it’s a case of layering 10 seconds of a riff down, say something like ‘Before the Llight’ (sings intro) and then add more to it and then it incrementally ends up as a song.

We spoke a bit more about Mont Campbell’s unique compositional work. In our early communications back in 2020 Ryan had introduced the band as a ‘UK Canterbury prog group in the style of Egg and National Health’, and but then expressed surprise that I’d picked up on the track ‘Sanger’ being redolent of the latter band’s extraordinary retrospective album ‘Missing Pieces’, one track in particular…

‘Agrippa’! (from National Health’s ‘Missing Pieces’ retrospective album). Jesus Christ! I don’t know how that hasn’t had the praise, that’s what turns me on musically speaking. I don’t know how long ‘Agrippa’ is, it is maybe it’s seven minutes or something is it? It just  seems to flow… In progressive rock they (often) stitch ideas together. I was listening to Stravinsky the other day and he also stitched things together, but there’s this flow with (Mont Campbell’s) compositions and there’s that beauty, that sort of ethereal-like beauty about it and with the complexity and the intelligence behind it and it’s just very tasteful, it’s very hard to put into words. It’s the same with one of the shorter tracks off ‘Missing Pieces’ – it’s got a really strange title ‘Croquette For Electronic Beating Group’. 

Zopp’s defining characteristic is complex instrumental-based pieces whose sound is dominated by those Canterburyesque keyboard tones and whose compositions show much of the same complexity. Ryan admitted to being less familiar with the work of Dave Sinclair (with Caravan) but also eulogised about another Canterbury keyboard maestro.

I resonate with Mike Ratledge a lot – I’m not as good as him technically speaking but I resonate highly with his take on the instrument – the speed and the aggression, but from a very civilized Oxbridge approach!

Someone like Steven Wilson would explain, that he might come up with a song and he thinks it’s very unique and somebody goes ‘it sounds like Pink Floyd’! But it’s in your musical DNA somehow. People are just going to keep on saying ‘wow, it sounds just like Mike Ratledge’, it depends if I’d use something different from the fuzz organ sound in the future, but… I love those sounds and there’s not much music that I’m hearing with those sounds done in an organic way today. So that’s why I’m making this; it’s a very pure intention, I want to hear this music because I don’t hear this music today and you know that’s why artists should be making music so that they can hear the stuff in their head.

You don’t do it from an egoic point of view, you do it because you really want to make it for your own entertainment, it’s entertainment for me. You do it for yourself first and then you give it to the world, you make a bit of money off it and if people give you compliments that’s a bonus!

We moved on to specifically talking about some of the music that Zopp have produced in their short recording life. Ryan talked first about the genesis of Zopp as a project

I wrote a lot of Zopp music between 2010 and 2014/5 between the age of 19 and 25ish, and then  I just parked it to one side for a while, then basically I fell out with this band – I’d played in bands for a bit. And then there was a moment when I was 27, I was working in marketing, like a pretty decent job and then I thought fuck this, I just really want to make this album, so that’s when I got Andrea on board and I really committed to making the album (which eventually appeared as ‘Zopp’ in 2020) and since then there’s been a lot of learning. When you’re making an album there’s so much learning from even when Andrea got in the room, and the dynamic between me and him and playing the songs through the PA speaker, the demos and ‘oh the song is too fast, we got to slow it down’…. Again it shows that working with people gives you that fresh perspective.

Their first album was entirely instrumental, a startling debut which was described by Facelift thus: ‘‘Zopp’ is almost a lost album in the Egg canon, albeit imbued with a fresh energy without some of that band’s austere and self-consciously classical reference points.’ ‘Whilst Stevenson acknowledges Mont Campbell as a reference point in conversation, and even more obviously so Dave Stewart in sound, there is a lightness of touch more in common with the expanded instrumentation of Hatfield and the North, the comparisons helped by the fact that Stevenson doubles (or triples) on guitar and bass respectively’. Ryan concurs but is keen to acknowledge a wider range of components:

So as I alluded to when talking about National Health’s  ‘Missing Pieces’ record, it was this Zappa/Stravinsky/National Health thing – it’s like a Venn Diagram I always resonated with – that sort of crossover, and  so basically I wanted to make an album that was in line with that ethos really. So the first album was a distillation of many of those elements, probably more explicitly an ode to the Canterbury thing, and again I’ll admit that. There are really good compositions on there that I’m still really proud of. Sonically – as you’ll probably find with a lot of artists, they want to go back and change things, and are still learning a lot in that, but the first album is really all about the sequence for me, getting a nice musical journey, with different landscapes and musical rooms.

So there’s some darker moments on the first one, but there’s still a lot of the good things about this music, there’s a lot of Easter eggs in there, there’s stuff under the surface- even some rhythmical bits were taken from black metal – like really dark music – so on the surface it’s Canterbury but there’s a lot things from my personality – not just Canterbury . But I suppose it’s chapter one in the music and most of it, 70% of it, was written when I was in my early 20s and late teens.

And that includes ‘Before The Light’, ‘Noble Shirker’, ‘V’. (all three have survived to the band’s current playlist). I think I wrote ‘V’ when I was 22 – that’s a long time ago. ‘Zero’ was an early track and ‘Eternal Return’ and  ‘Being And Time’, those two tracks were written during the Zohmm period (this is a reference to the band that Ryan had pre-Zopp, alluded to above, more of which later) – it was this darker music. 

So, the Zappa thing, the Canterbury thing, there’s also a band called Jaga Jazzist, a Norwegian band that I was really into, and that inspired a lot of ‘The Noble Shirker’ because they have so many elements in their music, you hear like sequencers, sax, guitars, synths etc. The start of ‘The Noble Shirker’ was inspired by the start of (Soft Machine’s) ‘Out Bloody Rageous’, where I looped a couple of Hohner pianets and me and Andy (Tillison) used some DJ software to manipulate the sound – some weird stereo effect. The end of ‘The Noble Shirker’ does sound a bit like the end of ‘Moon in June’ – but that wasn’t conscious! In your review actually you’re talking about the Soft Machine staccato bit at the end of the noble Shirker, just the organ chord carrying on – that didn’t come from that – but I know what you mean!

We also talked about the brief contribution of current Soft Machinist Theo Travis on the first album.

I was working with (progressive musician) Andy Tillison on the album. Theo is in The Tangent too. Apparently Theo owed Andy a favour so he played flute, he sent the song to Theo, the song ‘V’, which is one of my favourites (described by Facelift at the time thus: ‘Bass sounds wander around underneath keyboards which alternately ripple or fanfare stridently … in search of that perfect countermelody’). I like that song a lot and he played flute on it. Unfortunately I didn’t want the flute to be too loud in the mix so on the song it’s a bit buried really, he wasn’t showcased really . He did some flute loops, you probably hear on the song – I don’t know what technology he was using but manipulating the flute at the end of the song.

Although Ryan met Theo briefly at the time (this would have been in 2019), their paths have not crossed since, although this might be rectified at the forthcoming HRH Prog festival in Great Yarmouth, where both bands play on the Saturday. We also talked about the contributions of Caroline Joy Clarke on the first album, providing plaintive wordless vocals in the style of another familiar Canterburyesque identifier:

The Northettes thing was an element I’ve always liked –  I mean you can’t really beat Barbara Gaskin and the other Northettes (Amanda Parsons and Ann Rosenthal) – did you hear the recent separated AI tracks of just their voices? – I heard it and it sounds amazing isolated, it was so pitch perfect.

In Part Two of the Zopp piece we move on to talking about the ‘Dominion’ album, Zopp’s emergence as a live band in 2023, news of two upcoming albums, and Ryan’s thoughts on the ‘neo-Canterbury’ tag.

All things Zopp are at https://zopp.bandcamp.com/

For other interviews in the Canterbury 2.0 series, please click here