The Trunk 1/10/2017: Progtoberfest

Ah, October! The days are getting shorter, the winds colder, and, most importantly, it's almost time to get spooky. I'm not talking about Halloween, you understand, but about the spookily good lineup you can expect to see at...

Wooooo!

Progtoberfest 2 is the brainchild of Mike Morton, frontman of symphonic prog trio The Gift, one of BEM's first ever signings. The man himself describes it as showcasing "the best of contemporary UK progressive rock", and it will feature five bands across ten hours for the frankly excellent price of £10 (if you book in advance). Performing alongside fiery young heavy prog trio Habu and hard-to-Google neo-prog outfit IT, three of these bands - The Gift themselves, The Far Meadow, and The Rube Goldberg Machine - are BEM acts. But, if you've only joined us recently, you may not be familiar with their work.

Let's fix that.

The Rube Goldberg Machine

The Rube Goldberg Machine joined BEM to release their debut album Fragile Times, which arrived in April 2016. They describe themselves as a "forward-thinking prog rock band", and that sounds about right to us! Distinguished by soft yet sharply defined instrumentation and surprisingly incisive lyrics, this is deep, reflective music that manages to be very, very catchy too - a difficult combination to pull off if ever there was one.

For what it's worth, TRGM is one of my favourite BEM acts. I was lucky enough to catch their first ever live performance as a band at the second Evening of Bad Elephant Music earlier this year, and I was very impressed by the tightness and energy of their performance. We're looking forward to seeing them in action again!

The Far Meadow

Hailing from BEM's native London, The Far Meadow are a five-piece symphonic prog group with an impressive mutilayered style that draws equally on metal and jazz for inspiration. Perhaps most strongly identified with the striking vocal performance of Marguerite Alexandrou, they offer a rich vein of distinctive sounds. They joined BEM for their sophomore album Given The Impossible, featured here, which released towards the tail end of last year.

As well as their appearance at this year's Evening of BEM, The Far Meadow were at the first Progtoberfest back in 2015, and David Elephant assures us that their live excellence is undiminished!

The Gift

The Gift, under the leadership of Mike Morton, are the hosts and headliners of Progtoberfest 2. They were one of BEM's earliest acts, releasing their second album Land of Shadows with us in April 2014 and their third, Why the Sea is Salt, last October - exactly a year and a day before the gig, in fact, though Mike has yet to confirm whether or not this is significant. Or deliberate. True to their prog roots, The Gift are all about long songs and esoteric arrangements, assembled in some truly enchanting ways.

If you follow prog in the UK even a little bit, you may well have caught The Gift at least once - they're frequent, enthusiastic live performers and have been sighted all over the country, and even further afield in Norway and the Netherlands. They'll have the home ground advantage for this one, though, so prepare yourselves for The Gift at their very best.

I want in!

If any of these bands catch your eye and you can make it to London on Sunday 29th, advance tickets for Progtoberfest 2 are available HERE! Tickets will also be available on the door for the slightly higher price of £12.

Status Update

It's a quiet week for us here at Elephant Towers. We're counting down the days until Fukushima Surfer Boys is unleashed on the world - less than two weeks to go! Other than that, it's been our usual mix of plotting, scheming, conspiring, and other nefarious-sounding things. We're not at liberty to disclose any more than that.

Review Roundup

Hot off the presses, Whitewater's Universal Medium got an impressive writeup from Emma Roebuck at Progradar, who praises a "measured and careful" approach to composition and an ambient album with a bit more to it than most. And, though you won't get to hear Fukushima Surfer Boys for a while yet, Gary Morley already has, and he thinks it's well worth your time!

Meanwhile, Record Collector Magazine dives a little further back with Alex Neilson's four-star review of Big Hogg's Gargoyles. "Not remotely hammy" indeed, Alex!

The Trunk 24/9/2017: 10 BEM Myths Debunked

Distinguished readers of The Trunk, it has come to our attention that certain aspersions have been cast in recent weeks about our beloved record label. We were hoping that such baseless hearsay would die down on its own after a while, but rumours continue to proliferate, and it's about time we set the record straight. So, this week, we're going to address some of the speculation surrounding Bad Elephant Music, and just how much of it is true.

David Elephant, CEO, is not a real elephant.

FALSE. David Elephant is 100% elephant, and DNA tests by multiple trusted loxodontologists have verified this. We can, however, understand where the confusion originates, because Mr Elephant is an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) as opposed to the more common, and arguably more iconic, African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana). Thus, he is smaller and hairier than the traditional image of an elephant, with smaller ears, and only 19 or 20 pairs of ears compared to an African elephant's 21; however, he has a more dexterous trunk that can perform far more complex tasks.

Left: an Asian elephant in the wild in Bandipur National Park, India. Right: David Elephant, CEO.

The name "Bad Elephant Music" has secret occult symbolism.

FALSE. Well, as far as we know. There may well be some secret society somewhere for which "Bad Elephant Music" resonates with unfathomable amounts of eldritch power, but it's probably not us.

BEM is soon to announce that it has signed a newly-reunited Gentle Giant.

FALSE. We keep pitching them the idea, but Gary Green's stopped returning our calls.

BEM has no PR department, and public relations are handled by an experimental supercomputer.

MOSTLY FALSE. PR reps Huw Elliott and James R. Turner are definitely real people (last time we checked), and they handle BEM's public relations themselves, without the aid of supercomputers. A pilot scheme to replace Huw with a Markov chain bot went awry when the bot gained access to his hard drive and started posting blurry photographs of Magic: the Gathering cards instead of news, featured tracks, and other label-related content. We suppressed the incident as best we could, but we are unlikely to experiment with public relations AI again for the foreseeable future.

David Elephant, CEO, committed acts of physical violence against Tom Slatter at the 2016 Prog Awards.

FALSE. Mr Slatter's reports that David Elephant threw "knives, plates, [and] the smaller members of Big Big Train" at him in a fit of violence at the 2016 Prog Awards ceremony, fatally wounding a parallel universe version of Mr Slatter in the process, are heavily exaggerated. However, Mr Elephant wishes it to be known that, if he wished to do so, throwing the larger members of Big Big Train too would be perfectly possible, what with his elephantine strength.

BEM is soon to announce that it has signed Steven Wilson.

NOT A CHANCE. Steven Wilson's success is as dust on the wind compared to the plans we have for the next twelve months. Quite a lot of dust, granted, and a rather strong wind.

The recently announced third album from Trojan Horse, Fukushima Surfer Boys, now available to preorder from the BEM webstore, is intentionally being released three years to the day (because it's their third album) after World Turned Upside Down.

TRUE, ACTUALLY. We literally said as much in last week's post. Keep up.

Acclaimed comic book artist Mark Buckingham is behind the cover art for several BEM releases.

ALSO TRUE! Recent examples include Valdez's This and The Fierce And The Dead's Field Recordings, as well as BEM's 2016 Christmas sampler. Beeyootiful!

BEM is soon to announce that it has signed popular grime artist Stormzy.

FALSE. We do at least know where this one comes from - David Elephant did once see Stormzy for a moment while out for dinner in central London. You're not going to see him on Bad Elephant Music anytime soon, though.

BEM is a shell company used as a front for an international panda-smuggling ring.

FALSE. David Elephant, CEO, is vocal in his disdain for pandas. This would just be stupid.

Status Update

Universal Medium is out, Fukushima Surfer Boys is up for preorder, and Charlie Cawood, who you may know from My Tricksy Spirit, is signed to the label ahead of a November solo album release.

The Fierce And The Dead are playing live tonight alongside Monkey3 and Lo Chief. At the time of writing, there are still a few tickets left, so, if you're at a loose end tonight, come and catch three great bands for the price of one!

We're leaving our next Review Roundup until next week when word's out about Universal Medium. Until then, may your time signatures be irregular!

The Trunk 17/9/2017: Trojan Horse, An Equospective

"We listened to a load of King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Yes LPs, and dragged the 70s kicking and screaming through the subsequent decades, whilst cutting away all the 20 minute keyboard solos and ditching the capes." Thus begins the biography on Trojan Horse's Bandcamp page. With new album Fukushima Surfer Boys on the horizon and available to preorder now, it's a good time to look back on sevenish years of "Prog Nouveau" with those wacky horsey boys.

Trojan Horse and Trojan Horse Redux

A rare candid shot of the conference room at Elephant Towers.

Trojan Horse's self-titled debut album exploded into existence in November 2010, and then a second time a year later with redone mastering (and viola). Right from the start, the genesis of the "Nouveau Prog" moniker is clearly audible, with rich instrumental layering, unconventional song structures, and, yes, a thirteen-minute mini-epic in 'Bicycle Jam'.

Oh, and if you'd like to take a look back at this particular chapter of Trojan Horse's career, the whole thing's available digitally for whatever price you like. Including "absolutely nothing". You won't find a better deal than that anywhere, folks.

The Fire EP

I'm not sure how to tell you this, lads, but you're meant to face towards the audience.

The Fire EP was released in 2012 and contains one new track, some remixes thereof, an acoustic version of 'Disciplining the Reserve Army' from the first album, and a surprising (and surprisingly good!) cover of Neil Young's 'Ohio'. It's certainly a mixed bag in genre terms, but the quality holds all the way through, with one listener noting that it "really gels on repeated listening".

And as if the first album wasn't good enough, Fire is also now pay-what-you-want.

Paper Bells

"You know, this was a cute idea at the time, but none of these bells are actually fit for purpose..."

Early 2014 saw Trojan Horse's first single, Paper Bells, both an impressive, impactful track in its own right and an appetizer for what was to come. This song marked a tighter, more cohesive direction for Trojan Horse's music, bringing together a vast web of influences into something stabler and more refined - a trend that would continue later in the year under the grey, leathery wings of a certain independent record label...

World Turned Upside Down

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a stegosaurus-shaped hole in the sky.

World Turned Upside Down was finally released by Bad Elephant Music on October 13th, 2014. (Remember that date!) As well as including 'Paper Bells' and a new version of 'Fire', it brought together around three years' worth of songwriting into a deluxe package of punchy riffs, cutting vocals, and a generally harder edge than their previous work. It was well-reviewed, garnering praise from Silent Radio, Already Heard, and PROG Magazine.

World Turned Upside Down is still available from the BEM webstore at the newly reduced price of £5 for the CD or £2 for the digital version.

After the release of World Turned Upside Down, Trojan Horse's Nick Duke told CEO David Elliott that he'd "try to make sure it doesn't take us three years to get the next one out".

Ahem.

Fukushima Surfer Boys

I'm not sure what this is, but I think wearing it will protect me from malicious radio waves.

Trojan Horse's third full-length album, Fukushima Surfer Boys, will be released on October 13th of this year, slightly less than a month away. Yes, that's three years to the day after the release of World Turned Upside Down. Oh, those Trojan Horse lads. What rogues they are. What scoundrels.

If you like what you've heard so far, you may well be inclined to preorder the album, and you can do so here.

Join us again in 2023 for Trojan Horse's next album, which will probably have an even more confusing name than Fukushima Surfer Boys!

Status Update

Aside from Fukushima Surfer Boys going up for preorder two days ago, we're less than a week away now from the release of Whitewater's Universal Medium. Preorders for that are still open, too so grab 'em while they're hot!

This week has mostly seen New James (we're calling him that to distinguish him from BEM co-founder James Allen, who we'll now refer to as Previous James) getting settled into his new role for the label. Full disclosure, by the way: while James (New James) will be continuing his reviewing work, he'll no longer cover BEM releases due to potential conflicts of interest. He did, however, get a couple more in just before the whistle, which you can find in the...

Review Roundup

(Did you see that segue? Where's my damn Pulitzer?)

James' last couple of BEM reviews for Rock Society covered The Fierce and the Dead's Field Recordings and Schnauser's Irritant. You can read these in full dead-tree format in the magazine, but, now with 30% more camera tilt, here they are in all their embedded glory!

And as if that wasn't enough for you, James also covered Sky Architect's Nomad, which we're handling in the UK through a collaboration with FREIA Music. You can grab a copy right here!

The Trunk 10/9/2017: From the Vaults - Liquid of Choice

From the Vaults is an irregular series which takes a second look at some of BEM's older releases, those you may have missed if you're relatively new to the label. For this inaugural edition, we're going back to last October to revisit an album with what may well be the most confusing cover art we've ever seen: Liquid of Choice, by Bristolian instrumental quartet The Brackish.

We should start doing caption competitions.

The Brackish is composed of guitarists Luke Cawthra and Neil Smith, bassist Jon Short, and drummer Matthew Jones. Their first record was 2014's Big Guys, a varied, adventurous album that was extremely well-received, even finding some success outside progressive circles; Tom Colyer of Drunken Werewolf went as far as calling it "true musical genius", noting how effectively and seamlessly it blends influences from a huge number of different genres and styles. Indeed, Liquid of Choice continues this healthy tradition of stylistic mixing. Nobody's quite sure how to classify it - various websites have put it under "pop/rock", "krautrock", and "jazz-rock", and The Brackish themselves add psychedelic and metal to the laundry list in their official bio.

One might expect music like this to lack focus and drive and end up as a sort of homogeneous musical soup, but one would be sorely mistaken. What we have here is a record that can claim to draw equal influence from "Steve Reich, Sabbath, Can and Tortoise", as the band puts it, and continually make good on that claim over the course of slightly less than an hour.

The album starts out solidly psychedelic with the title track and closes on a similar note as 'Cactus Gulch and the Hellish Walk Home' winds down, but, in between, there's the faintly unsettling jazz-funk of 'Something Negative on the Dancefloor', the ominous crunch of 'Fun Factory', and the metal-inflected wall-of-sound guitars that dominate 'Physical Jerks'. Yet it's never quite clear where the transitions happen, exactly. The joins and seams are there, but you don't feel them.

I don't think I'm alone in this assessment, either. Québecois progressive podcast Profil praised "the perfection of every style and fluidity of the instruments" on the final track in particular, while Progradar mentioned that they "had no idea at all how... The Brackish have slipped through [their] radar". (That James R. Turner bloke seems like a pretty good writer! I wonder if he'll turn up later...)

All things considered, it's safe to say that The Brackish are a truly fascinating band and Liquid of Choice is an album well worth your time. You can pick up your copy from the BEM webstore right here.

I still don't know what that kid's doing there, though.

Status Update

This week, we're pleased to welcome James R. Turner (there he is!), who's taking his place alongside me as another PR mastermind for Bad Elephant Music.

The label is also now officially affiliated with the House of York. Sorry, Henry IV.

Other than that, it's business as usual at Elephant Towers; we're mostly preparing ourselves for the release of Whitewater's Universal Medium. It's less than two weeks away now, and still available to preorder here.

Review Roundup

My Tricksy Spirit's self-titled debut album continues to draw praise, with PROG Magazine's Kris Needs saying the band deserve "a bong of your time". And I didn't even know it was possible to measure time by pieces of drugs paraphernalia! The album is available right now here.

Also, this isn't strictly a review, but Mark Barton, former webmaster of losingtoday.com, really rates Schnauser! If that sounds like your cup of tea, you can grab a copy of Irritant here.

The Trunk 3/9/2017: Interview with the CEO

For our first week of actual content here on The Trunk, we sat down with our benevolent overlord, Mr David Elephant, to chat about his experience running the label! Without further ado, let's get down to business...

The Trunk: Let’s get started with the question on everyone’s lips. Where does the name "Bad Elephant Music" come from?

David Elephant: Well, back in the 1930s, when I was in the military in India... er, no. It’s actually quite a mundane reason. So, when I first had the idea for the label back in 2012, I didn’t really have an idea as to what sort of label it was going to be – at the time, it was just about one artist. Coming up with the name was something I was really struggling with. I wanted something a bit quirky, and, although we were looking at a lot of progressive rock bands at the time, I didn’t want anything that would identify us too closely with progressive rock.

I actually had the idea from a film we had out of the library, which was a film of Ivor the Engine, Oliver Postgate’s animated series. The film featured an Indian elephant which had escaped from the circus, and was rescued by Ivor the Engine and his hangers-on. There’s a scene in the film in which, in a very broad Welsh accent, Jones the Steam says "Oh, you’re a bad elephant!" I forget what it had done. But that’s where the name came from.

TT: You mention that one artist, so can you tell me a little more about that first collaboration that led to the creation of Bad Elephant?

DE: Like so many people, meeting Simon Godfrey has been my downfall. I met Simon through my podcast, The European Perspective, and I interviewed him and Rob Ramsay, another BEM artist, around 2009 or 2010. Tinyfish [Godfrey and Ramsay’s previous band] ran its course, and Simon wanted to release an album under his own steam, and came up with the project name of Shineback.
He played me some demos, and it was some of the most remarkable music I’d ever heard. And I said to him “I’d love to release this under my fledgling record label”, and Simon said, “yeah, that’s great”. So, yes, Shineback was the first release, we started planning it in late 2012, and released it in July 2013. That was where it all started.

TT: So, since 2013, how would you say that the process of running the label has changed?

DE: There’s a volume element to it. We released two albums in 2013, five in 2014, and then the whole thing just exploded. We’re up now to doing around fifteen releases a year. I couldn’t have done this without more people coming on board. The key guy in the operation these days, apart from myself, is Martin Hutchinson, who’s our sales director, and who basically looks after the BEM store and handles relationships with wholesalers. That was an element of the business which I just never expected – the idea that there would be interest from record shops outside our own store and people we already knew.

Also, as the label has become better known, we don’t feel that we’re the underdogs as much any more. We’ve got a core of fans who buy absolutely everything, which I find remarkable, since there’s such a wide variety of music. There’s one guy called Andy Langridge who’s just fantastic, and every time I see Andy, I tell him I live in mortal fear of releasing something he doesn’t enjoy. Fortunately, it hasn’t happened yet.

The Elephant himself, in his natural habitat.

TT: The label’s become better known, but you yourself has also become quite well known in some music circles, as Mr Elephant. What’s been your experience of that?

DE: It’s very pleasant, having people coming up to you at gigs or on social media and wanting to have a chat about the music or the label. If I was going to give advice to anyone setting up a record label, I think the most important thing is to be nice. You are essentially selling a brand, and it’s in nobody’s interest if you treat people in an offhand or unpleasant way. Fortunately, almost everyone we deal with is absolutely lovely. The musicians, the fans, our partners, everyone’s great.

Tom Slatter coined the "David Elephant" phrase. Elephant is not my real surname, folks! But yes, becoming known as an individual is actually quite fun. We don’t get paid for this, none of us make any money out of it, so it’s nice to get a bit of recognition.

TT: What would your biggest piece of advice be, then, to anyone who would like to work with Bad Elephant?

DE: A lot of it is about expectations. We are a small label. We haven’t got the clout of Sony or Universal, or even some of the bigger independent labels like Inside Out or Kscope. We’re never going to be able to have the same sort of reach as those guys have got. Having said that, it’s a very different proposition. I think we give you more artistic freedom, and the ability to express yourselves the way you want to, musically. We’ll do our absolute best, and I think the offering we’ve got now is better than it’s ever been, but it’s important to be realistic.

I also think you’ve got to be realistic about the way that the industry has changed. Even over the four years that we’ve been releasing records, we’ve seen huge changes in the way that music is distributed. Although things like streaming existed in 2013, and had been there for a while, the growth of that has really made a huge difference. An album that would have sold a couple of thousand CDs in 2013, you’d be lucky to reach a thousand now.

The third thing, I suppose, is that we can’t do it all. We really need bands to help us to help them. We’ll push your stuff as hard as we can, but, for best results, you need to be doing the same.

TT: They say elephants never forget. Do you forget, Mr Elephant?

DE: Sorry, what were we talking about?

Status Update

It's been a quiet week for the label, but everything's ticking over just as planned.

My Tricksy Spirit's debut album, My Tricksy Spirit, is out now! If you've not picked up a copy yet - maybe you were waiting on reviews (and there are a couple below) - then now's the time. Whitewater's Universal Medium also drops in less than two weeks, and preorders are open here.

Review Roundup

Hot off the presses, My Tricksy Spirit has been met with acclaim from both Progradar's Emma Roebuck and The Progressive Aspect's Roger Trenwith! Roger describes it as "a record for the sultry summer evening, star gazing or soul gazing, glass of Pimms in hand" - and, while I'm not a big Pimms drinker, I can't help but agree.

That wraps it up for this week. Until next time, happy listening!