2/12/2018: 2018 In Review, Part 3

The tour continues! We've passed the halfway mark now, but there's still plenty of year left to go. Without further ado...

29th June: Old Town

Between this and Six Questions, Twelve Answers, it's been a good year for silhouettes.

Evenflow is a BEM double act, a dream team of instrumentalist Stuart Stephens (from Whitewater) and vocalist Mike Kershaw (from, er, Mike Kershaw). This compact little EP, only just breaking twenty minutes but deserving of every one, is a great exhibition of both musicians' talents, a mellow, thoughtful collection of smart tunes and Kershaw's signature slightly unsettling stylings (of which we shall see more later in the year).

6th July: Synchestral Works Vol. 1

Anyone else getting Rez vibes from this? Just me? Okay.

When Jordan Brown isn't playing up a storm as part of The Rube Goldberg Machine, he's jamming out in homage to the majestic soundtracks of sci-fi classics. This album is the culmination of a longstanding love affair with 80s science fiction. Close your eyes and picture the blazing neon and gritty retro-tech of the cyberpunk golden age, and you really can't go far wrong - there's even a track specifically labelled as "Montage Music". Synths are the order of the day here, whether soaring lead riffs or booming pads, and aficionados of sci-fi grimdark or just damn good electronica will find much to like here.

20th July: Unidentified Dying Objects

Don't look at the water, don't look at the water, don't look at the -

This hotly anticipated return from German prog legends Argos was a pretty exciting release for us, as several in the BEM camp were already fans, and it's an excellent continuation and evolution of form. With many comparisons drawn to the 70s but enough diversity and weirdness to keep it distinct, Unidentified Dying Objects is about as progressive as they come, complete with a near-20-minute epic to close it out, but this is a rare prog album that can evoke the past without feeling overly tethered to it, and continue carving out what's becoming a very recognizable signature sound.

17th August: Arms Open Wide

Don't look at the brickwork, don't look at the - wait, I've done that one already.

If you like your music thought-provoking and absolutely dripping with atmosphere, they don't come much better than Mike Kershaw. Arms Open Wide is his second solo release with BEM and it only reinforced how glad we are to have brought him on board back in 2016. Mike has a genuinely uncanny talent for knocking listeners off balance with thoughtful critiques and open questions. We often compare music to music, but Arms Open Wide draws the strongest comparisons to The Twilight Zone or the better episodes of Black Mirror: it's good entertainment and good food for thought rolled into one.

Status Update

Ooh, new music! Every Night Something Happens, the debut from psych-pop supergroup Lost Crowns, is now available to preorder, complete with an instant-access preview track. The album drops on January 25th, so, if you've ever wanted to hear Vox amplifiers and harpsichords in the same place, or if you just can't get enough of Charlie Cawood (making his fourth appearance as part of a BEM act), don't miss out!

Review Roundup

Jerry Lucky rates The Great War - well, he doesn't give it a rating, but presumably he would rate it highly if he did, is my point, because he likes the... ah, never mind.

And here's a big one: Sanguine Hum got a four-page feature in the most recent edition of PROG. Here's page one - buy the magazine for the other three, featuring some great musical insights from Matt and the team!

25/11/2018: 2018 In Review, Part 2

Welcome back to this whistlestop tour of the year that was. Climb back aboard and hold onto your hats - here's another four albums BEM released in 2018.

20th April: The Singularity

Wow, I knew Fallout 76 was a new direction for the series, but...

The Trunk's author is, at heart, a nerd. Say "electronic rock heavily influenced by retro gaming" and I'm already scrabbling for my headphones. But this impressive debut delivers on the hype I felt and possibly even surpasses it, with a collection of hard, driving synths and powerful riffs that I still play from time to time as gaming music - it's difficult to listen to this album without picturing the kick-ass boss battles it could accompany. The Singularity is vibrant and unexpected, a true feast for the imagination as well as the ears.

(The album was also released alongside a working text-based adventure game! Play it here.)

18th May: The Euphoric

I feel sorry for air traffic control.

What's this, another instrumental rock album with "the" in the title and gaming-inspired visuals? Spring was definitely the season for headbanging, but The Euphoric is a very different beast, all about unstoppable waves of guitar and bone-shaking drum lines. TFATD have had a very good year all round and this is their best offering yet, critically acclaimed and boasting a surprising amount of cross-genre appeal despite (or perhaps because of) a distinct shift towards metal. Plug in and prepare to have your face comprehensively melted.

15th June: Suite for Piano and Electronics

Wash your windows, mate?

Matt Baber's had a pretty busy year as far as releases go, between this solo project and the more recent release of Now We Have Power (but let's cross that bridge when we come to it). Suite for Piano Electronics was a welcome change of pace after the double threat of Singularity and Euphoric, offering something calm, measured, and perfectly handcrafted. Baber's style as a soloist is rather different from his band offerings, but the compositions here are assembled with the kind of skill and vision that sometimes only comes from a genuine one-man army like him.

18th June: Exo-Oceans

That is clearly not an ocean. I want my money back.

Okay, so this isn't technically a BEM release, but it's hosted on the webstore so we're counting it anyway. Exo-Oceans is an album of "Musical Sci-Fi" from The Tangent's Andy Tillison Diskdrive, and definitely one of the proggier offerings on our store this year: three tracks, between 15 and 42 minutes, about otherworldly oceans. This is another solo work, pulling in styles and influences from all over the musical sphere under a single watchful eye with a strange, coherent vision. And, from Tillison, the synth work is, of course, second to none.

Status Update

Cyclonic 5 or 6, increasing 7 to severe gale 9, occasionally storm 10 for a time in central areas, then becoming westerly 5 or 6 later. Moderate or rough, becoming very rough or high for a time except in north. Rain or thundery showers. Moderate or poor, occasionally good.

18/11/2018: 2018 In Review, Part 1

God, is it that time already? The end of a long, exhausting year is finally on the horizon, and, as we all look ahead to what fresh horrors 2019 might visit upon us, we must also spare a moment to look back at BEM's progress this year and some of the music we've unleashed on the world. This has been a slightly quieter year than last, but we still have plenty of albums to get through - let's get to it!

2nd February: A Map in Fragments

All these moments, like tears in rain...

As is traditional (kinda), the BEM year started in the early days of February, this time with art-rock outfit Tonochrome and their first new music in almost five years. With an impressive array of guests - both strings and brass! - and Charlie Cawood, by now a BEM veteran, on guitar, the bar is set high, but A Map in Fragments surpasses it with easy, genre-melting aplomb, delivering a characteristically unclassifiable collection of songs with elements of everything from grunge to jazz. The big challenge of writing for BEM has always been in describing music with very few clear points of comparison, and... well, "damn good" feels like a bit of a cop-out. But there it is.

23rd February: Close to Vapour

This is what Amazon delivery drones looked like in 1850.

Dutch duo Fractal Mirror have been releasing music since 2013, but they climbed aboard for their fourth album this year, and it was a delight to host and to listen to. This is one of the best albums I've heard in a long time for relaxation - there's enough subtlety to the arrangements that you can tune in and dissect them to your heart's content, and enough depth to keep the songs alive for multiple listens, but Close to Vapour doesn't demand that kind of close examination, and is equally effective as a chill-out album for a long, slow afternoon such as the one on which you might be reading this.

23rd March: Where the Moonlight Snows

"What's that noise? Why's the ground shaking? Is this a volcano?"

"Um... kind of?"

Mothertongue made a huge impression on us, and on the listening public, with their BEM debut two years ago, and Where the Moonlight Snows is a truly worthy successor. You wouldn't expect a band with three guitarists and complex vocal arrangements to be this good at sharp, carefully crafted moderation, but they pull it off. More so than many, this is an album that feels like a genuine collaborative effort, everything working in concert towards a magnificent, harmonious whole that'll have you humming the hooks for days to come.

6th April: Six Questions, Twelve Answers

This is what passed for a professional recording studio back in '99.

Our fourth major release of the year was actually a charity effort: a collection of unreleased tracks, almost twenty years old, by brothers Jem and Simon Godfrey, compiled and sold in support of Tim Smith, legendary frontman of the Cardiacs. These twelve instrumental pieces, six apiece composed in response to the same set of six very vague questions, are a fascinating insight into the musical development of these two great names, while also being smart, eclectic, and downright listenable in their own right.

Status Update

BEM continues to wind down for the winter and hatch plans for the year to come. Be cautious and watch the skies.

Review Roundup

Kev Rowland's hotly anticipated review of Dial is out now! Like Kev, we can't quite believe that it's been five years since Shineback's debut, but he seems to agree that it's been worth the wait.

And The Great War has picked up another review. Unfortunately for us, it's in Polish, but I've enlisted the help of a Polish friend of mine and, according to him, it says the album's an appropriately difficult listen for appropriately difficult subject matter, and well worth the effort.

11/11/2018: From the Vaults - Flightless

Welcome back to From the Vaults, the semi-regular feature where we dive back into the BEM archives to revisit some of our oulder releases. This week, we're going back the furthest we've ever gone, because today's featured album, while technically released in 2017, is a reissue - not merely a reissue, but one from 1989, before some of this article's readers (and indeed its writer) were even born. So gate your snares, dust off your neon pink knee socks, and then put them away again because this is definitely not that sort of album. This is Flightless.

blublublublublub

I'll have to eschew my usual rundown of the band, because this is a one-man show: Rog Patterson contributes "guitars, basses, vocals, and lunch". Patterson was a veteran of the so-called "heavy wood" scene, appearing as one half of Twice Bitten (whose album Late Cut was also reissued by BEM a couple of years earlier) throughout the 80s. Originally engineered by Dave Hadley and mixed by Chris Walker and Dave Chang, the 2017 release of Flightless is a remaster, guided by the able hand of Daniel Bowles of Seren Sounds.

So what exactly is a Flightless? What, for that matter, is "heavy wood"? Have a listen and find out. (This track wasn't actually on the original release - the remaster includes some demos



So we have our key elements: sharp, focused guitar work with bass backing, and thoughtful, often bitter lyrics. It's no coincidence that we chose to rerelease this album at the time we did: it may be nearly three decades old, but Rog's "characteristic bleating on the subject of human stupidity" feels almost painfully timely. I chose this track for a reason. "It Can't Happen Here" is also the name of a satirical novel from the 30s which sees America brought under the yoke of a totalitarian demagogue. At the time it was a response to those Americans who dismissed fascism as a uniquely European phenomenon, but how many times did we hear variations on this theme repeated after November 2016? Is the shoe perhaps on the other foot now?

Saying that a piece of music "makes you think" is perhaps most common nowadays as a sarcastic jab at those who fancy themselves visionaries, but Flightless does, in fact, make you think. Stylistically, it's the perfect fit, heavy enough to carry weight but spare and restrained enough to give you space to reflect. Patterson wrote in 2017 that "I suspect that the worst is yet to come", and the sense of foreboding still burns strong as the last notes of the album fade. This is quite an intense album, and I don't listen to it very often - it demands time, space, and above all thought, and all three of those are becoming harder to come by. But isn't that, in a way, the point?

Flightless is available now from the BEM webstore.

Status Update

On this, the centennial of the armistice that ended the First World War, it's only fitting that we release The Great War - available now on CD and download. Pick up a copy if you can, and have a read of my writeup from last month if you'd like a slightly closer look.

Review Roundup

Two for The Great War this week: a 9/10 from The Prog Mind, awarded for "all the edge and grittiness that is needed for this subject matter", and another strong writeup from Phil Lively of The Progressive Aspect.

28/10/2018: Office Takeover

The wind whistles outside, inaudible behind double-glazed windows. I kick back and gaze at the screen and two million little lights shine back at me. This weekend, Elephant Towers is all but deserted, with the Grand Elephant off on a trip. The only sounds are the ticking of the orange clocks, my jovial, sanguine hums as I wash the dishes, and the cat's protestations that this isn't enough food, human.

... I wish.

All is not well. Yesterday, my computer picked up a nasty Trojan horse that turned my screen into a delightful but useless Rube Goldberg machine of error messages. I'm having to reformat my hard drive to get the damn thing working again. Worse, it was mid-backup, and the syncage wasn't quite finished, so some of my data may well be corrupted even there. The brackish white water of the pond outside is attracting some unseasonably late mosquitoes, and the quiet keeps being interrupted by next door's dog, Valdez - a schnauser, but you wouldn't think it from the way he squeals like a great big hog - and by some guy revving his car out front, a custom job with a ton o' chrome.

I need to get out of the house. Not like my PC's moving any time soon. And, what the hell, I could use a paradigm shift.

I put down the Argos catalogue I've been idly leafing through and step out for a walk. It's brisk outside - temperatures in London aren't forecast to hit single figures - but I've long been blessed with the gift of cold resistance,

I miss the Grand Elephant, in whatever far meadow he's off to. I know he'll be back soon, but we are kin, and the household hasn't been the same without him. As his representative online, though, I have to hold the line in the meantime, stand under the banner and make sure I'm one of the fierce as opposed to the dead.

It's a dark and dangerous vigil at times. Dark powers wait at the edges of my perception, ready to walk, crawl, or even flow into our reality at the slightest hint of weakness (or failure to release interesting new music with creativity and heart). They whisper in their mother tongue, asking me why I'm being so bloody weird this week, what's happened to the completely serious Trunk that probably existed at some point.

I look back at them and it's like staring into a fractal mirror.

"Because," I say, "I felt like trying to squeeze as many band names as possible into 500 words of prose, and there's nothing you can do to stop me."

They hiss and contort in shock and fear. "How many did you get?"

"23, I think." I smirk. "And I wonder if you can spot them all."

"You've a tricksy spirit", snarls their leader, a coiling mass with a face made of rocks: nine stones, close and jostling for position.

"Maybe so," I retort, "but that's 25 now."

Status Update

See above.

Review Roundup

Jerry Lucky likes Now We Have Power! In fact, he "urge(s) you to check them (Sanguine Hum) out."

Two more strong reviews en Francais this week: one for Now We Have Power and one for Old Town.

And yet more love for Now We Have Power comes from The Prog Report: "the type of progressive, thoughtful, inventive music that I think the world needs right now."

Last but by no means least, the hardworking folks at DPRP have given Arms Open Wide an 8.5!

21/10/2018: All Hallows' Elephant 2018

We're coming up, ladies and gents, to the darkest, strangest time of the year. A time when all the spirits and spectres of the underworld rise up and roam the Earth, tracing unknowable patterns in the ether as they move, unseen but felt, through mortal headspace.

That's right, it's All Hallows' Elephant!

Wooooo!

All Hallows' Elephant is a festival of spooky music which is entirely legally distinct from a certain other celebration of spookiness coming up in just over a week. How does one celebrate All Hallows' Elephant, you ask? Why, with a carefully curated selection of BEM's very spookiest tracks, of course! And yes, some of these picks may seem a little left-field at first, but bear with me. I can explain. I think.

The Black Box Society

What better way could there be to kick off such a spooky episode than with something from Confound and Disturb? It's right there in the name, people. Rob Ramsay is a master of the unsettling and the uncanny, and all this talk of black boxes does absolutely nothing to reduce my pre-existing paranoia about sealed containers, black or otherwise.

Discord (Domestic Policies)

Ah, the scariest monster of them all... The News.

Don't let the major key and ostensible cheeriness deceive you. There's something thoroughly weird going on in the background of this song that stops you from relaxing. There are moments, especially towards the end, when that weirdness threatens to break through, but, like any good horror movie, the tension lies in not letting the monster surface fully, in building the anticipation of what lies beneath.

Even Then We're Scared

It would be absolutely criminal to leave Mr Slatter off this list. In Happy People, he sheds life on a distinctive fear of his own: fear of this strange phenomenon we laughingly call existence, of whatever the hell our place is in the world and how we're meant to cope with it. That, to me, is spookier than any ghost or goblin.

Save Me From The Rain

Konchordat's forceful, near-apocalyptic tone has wonderfully grim overtones of the dark and dangerous - granted, intimidating might be a better word for this than spooky, per se, but it still feels to me like it's in the spirit of All Hallows' Elephant. And the album cover of Rise to the Order evokes Pyramid Head, one of the best-known and scariest creatures in popular culture, so that's a point in its favour.

Bedhead

Now We Have Power is... it's, um... it's been spookily well-reviewed? Okay, look, I know these connections are getting a bit tenuous, but, honestly, you'd be amazed at how hard it can be to work to this theme even when you're working with all music, let alone when you're restricted to the releases of one smallish independent label. It was this or the Monster Mash. You don't want me to post the Monster Mash, do you?

Status Update

Summer is over, much as the weather will try to convince you otherwise. It's quiet here at Elephant Towers. No new releases on the immediate horizon for now; this is a time of rest and scheming for us. You're safe.

For now.

Wooooo.

Review Roundup

A trio of reviews for you this week: Echoes and Dust with a positively glowing review of Dial, neoprog.eu with an impressive five stars for Now We Have Power (and hopefully some fitting commentary, but my French is rather rusty), and DPRP imploring you to give Suite for Piano and Electronics a spin.

14/10/2018: War and Music

We opened preorders recently for The Great War, the sophomore album from industrial rock artist Saul Blease. To be released on November 11th, the centenary of the end of the titular war, it's an expansion on a previous project to produce one piece of music for each year of the war, with new material to form a full-length album.

World War I, arguably the first modern war and certainly one of the ugliest, claimed around forty million lives in a protracted, bloody stalemate, collapsed four empires, and laid the groundwork for an even larger, deadlier conflict two decades down the line. Yet it has served as the basis for a huge amount of popular media, including a surprising amount of music. From Sting to Metallica to Coldplay (no, really), the Great War has been the subject of songs in almost every conceivable genre and style.

But all this raises a pretty big question: how do you turn one of the most horrific episodes in human history, a four-year slogfest with no real long-term winners, into something people want to listen to?

I think about this question a lot. As the centenary of the war draws closer, there's been a notable uptick in media based on it, and, while I like to think you can make good media out of anything with enough creativity, World War I in particular strikes me as challenging. As I'm sure many of you did, I read All Quiet on the Western Front for school, and, while it was a powerful book, I wouldn't exactly call it entertaining. More recently, the game Battlefield 1, the confusingly-titled fifteenth installment in the series, dodged the question by focusing on lesser-known theatres of war, staying away from the trenches. Is it actually possible to turn the Western Front into something you can enjoy?

Yes. Absolutely.

The Great War uses its medium to its advantage. Industrial rock is the perfect genre for one of the first truly industrial conflicts: World War I involved mass production and mechanization on scales never seen before, and even the conflict itself was often described in mechanical terms, a vast, uncaring machine that swallowed up millions in the service of its purpose. So music as huge as this - deliberate and monolithic and best played very loud - really couldn't be more appropriate for the subject matter.

It doesn't neglect the human element, though. One of the main narratives surrounding the war is that of brave, heroic soldiers caught in the machinations of generals and politicians. On this album, the vocals play the part of these "lions led by donkeys", and Blease doubles down by keeping them almost trapped in the mix. They're often distorted or drowned out by the titanic drums and guitars, conveying the sense of, as the song titles would have it, 'Valiant Hearts' swallowed up by the 'War Machine'.

At points, though, individual moments of humanity take the spotlight. 'Angel of Mons' refers to the mythical appearance of angelic forces appearing to fight alongside the British during the Battle of Mons, but it's the penultimate track, 'Hellfighter', that really shines for me. The American 369th Infantry Regiment, popularly known as the Harlem Hellfighters, saw more action and suffered more casualties than any other American regiment, and were heavily decorated for bravery and tenacity in battle, and the song that honours them is just as gritty and desperate as it should be. As a primarily African-American unit, the Hellfighters had to deal with discrimination by their command staff as well as enemy action, and their valor even in the face of this adversity deserves an arrangement as powerful as this one.

I think it'd be fair to say that The Great War proves, to me, that World War I can inspire more emotions than existential despair (though there's nothing wrong with that once in a while). This album has it all: awe, fear, and even a little bit of hope.

Give it a try.

Status Update

Now We Have Power is out now on CD and as a digital download. Much praised by critics and fans alike, we highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already.

Elsewhere in our roster, Orange Clocks have released a live album, of all things: Tope's Sphere 2 in its entirety, as performed at Sonic Rock Solstice, plus a new song, all for the bargain price of whatever you like. Check it out here!

Review Roundup

Bit of a quickfire one this week, as we've had a lot of reviews recently:

Amplified Magazine reviews Close to Vapour and A Map in Fragments.

Classic Rock Society reviews Old Town (two parts there).

Popgruppen reviews Now We Have Power.

New Boots reviews Orange Clocks at Sonic Rock Solstice.

And Jacques Becker reviews Unidentified Dying Objects, which I believe is French for Unidentified Dying Objects.