The Trunk 29/10/2017: State of the Elephant, Winter 2017/18

We're five-sixths of the way through 2017! Good heavens, hasn't it gone by fast? We've released no fewer than twelve albums with more to come before the year's out, and it's been an absolute blast. Still, we're not quite ready to bid this year goodbye just yet, and so, to cover the final stretch, here's a roundup of everything happening in the next three months...

Live Elephants

Progtoberfest 2, featuring the trinity of The Far Meadow, The Gift and The Rube Goldberg Machine, is today at the Bedford! We understand there are still some tickets going, too; they'll be available on the doors for the slightly higher price of £12, which is still a screaming good deal for five great acts and an afternoon of music. We'll keep you updated on the results, of course, and, if you're seeing this early and at a very loose end, here's something to do with your Sunday!

After that, there are two more festivals left in 2017. First up, in collaboration with Prog Sausage, is Prog for Peace on November 11th. The Far Meadow and The Gift will be back, hot on the heels of Progtoberfest, and joined by Konchordat and The Room. This one's at the Iron Horse in Sidcup, from which you can pick up advance tickets, and proceeds go to charity.

Last but not least comes Masquerade 2! The brainchild of The Gift frontman Mike Morton, this is another one-dayer featuring BEM's Big Hogg alongside such esteemed acts as Magic Pie and I Am The Manic Whale. Tickets are available here.

That's about it for upcoming live shows, but there's still plenty else to look forward to, such as...

Studio Elephants

There are still two more albums to go before we call it a year. The first is coming up very soon indeed: Charlie Cawood's The Divine Abstract finally comes out on Friday, and we seriously can't wait to get this one out to you all - it's one of the strangest, most wondrous things ever to pass through our offices. If you want to make sure you get it as soon as possible, you can still preorder, and download the preview track 'Garden Of The Mind' right away!

In early December you can expect the debut album from BEM alumnus Tom Slatter's latest project, Murder and Parliament. There's a preview track here, as well, and you can download it absolutely free, so what are you all waiting for? Preorders for Murder and Parliament will open soon.

And, though we're not quite ready to give you the full details, we've another new signing to unleash on the world in January, so stay tuned...

The Fifth Elephant

Not this one.

We close with a look a little further ahead.

Next year is Bad Elephant Music's fifth anniversary. To be honest, we're still trying to wrap our heads around that. It doesn't seem like all that long ago that we were debating what to call the project and working out what all this record label business was really about.

But five years... that's a big one. And we're definitely going to celebrate.

You can expect new music from the bands behind our first two albums ever, BEM's hoariest veterans - Shineback and The Fierce And The Dead. You can expect a couple of other new developments which I've just been told I can't say any more about, on pain of voltage-calming. And, in general, we expect 2018 to be a very big year for Bad Elephant Music.

Keep an eye on our Facebook page, if you aren't already. Great things are afoot!

Status Update

What, you really want another one after all that?

Review Roundup

Two new reviews for The Divine Abstract flew off the presses this week: one from Progradar, where Emma Roebuck describes "clever sophisticated music that opens doors both spiritually and emotionally", and one from The Progressive Aspect, where Phil Lively praises a "meticulously presented" album that's "sublime by any definition of the word".

And, while it's not strictly a review, Birthday Cake For Breakfast recently sat down with Trojan Horse to discuss some of the musical influences behind Fukushima Surfer Boys. That one's available right now and fully streamable on Bandcamp, and there are still some copies left of the cassette version, too!

The Trunk 22/10/2017: The Making of Unlike Here

"Syncage, well... they are an interesting band."

So says Mike 3rd, the producer of Italian progressive fusion band Syncage's first full-length album Unlike Here. We released this album earlier this year, and it generated quite the buzz from review sites like Progradar and The Progressive Aspect. It's a concept album about two young men escaping a strange dystopian city-state, and it's one of my personal favourite BEM releases of the year. (And no, I'm not just saying that because of the editing work I did on the sleeve notes.)

Earlier this week, Syncage released a documentary on YouTube that takes a closer look at the production of Unlike Here, from the initial concept to recording, production, and the live shows that followed. The band and producer offer their insights on Syncage's writing process, what makes their sound special, and how they adapted a rich, diverse album to an equally rich and diverse live experience. The background music is all taken from the album, too, so it's ideal if you're looking for a taste of the music.

Syncage really are a joy to work with. They're eager, passionate people, and we think that comes through especially well in these interviews. So, rather than ramble on much longer about the video, we're just going to show it to you. It weighs in at about half an hour, and, if you enjoyed Unlike Here or you'd like an insight into what it's like actually making the music we release, it's well worth a watch. (Fair warning, the audio is all in Italian, as you'd expect, but English subtitles are available and switched on by default.)

Unlike Here is still available from the BEM webstore here.

Status Update

The Divine Abstract is less than two weeks away! It's still available for preorder here.

It just so happens that today marks a year and a day since the release of Sphelm's These Roots Know No Boundaries. It's a fab album and still sees regular play here at Elliott Towers, so why not give it a look?

And speaking of Elephant Towers, the Grand Elephant has been reorganizing his CD collection this weekend...

Not pictured: the many, many cups of tea it took to reach this point.

Review Roundup

Two new reviews arrived this week: one from The Progressive Aspect of the new hotness, Fukushima Surfer Boys, and one from Record Collector magazine of something a little further back, Schnauser's "hauntological slice of life" Irritant. Both reviews are pretty complimentary, and both albums are well worth your time!

The Trunk 15/10/2017: The Life of a PR Gremlin

Who is Bad Elephant Music?

Well, if you're mostly familiar with us through Facebook, you could be forgiven for thinking that the mind behind Bad Elephant Music is a man named Huw Elliott. Hell, you may well have found these very words through a post made under his name.

You'd be wrong, of course. David, Martin, Stefan and James are the white-hot core of the label. I'm just the digital face.

The face, and the ill-advised apron-clad power pose.

Not pictured: regret.

But today, dear reader, I'm giving you a look behind the curtain. You're finally going to find out what it's like being Bad Elephant Music's number one (out of one) Public Relations Gremlin.

If it's a weekday, I'll be roused by the incessant trill of my phone alarm. It's earlier than I'd like, and sometimes I'm tempted to stay in bed out of spite, but David has assured me that, if I don't get up in good time, he can hack my phone and play We Can't Dance at foghorn-level volume. Nobody deserves that, not even my terrible morning self.

I'm studying for something called a "degree" at the moment - I'm still not 100% on the specifics, but I am reliably assured that it'll significantly improve my future ability to buy Magic: the Gathering cards, so I persist. I'm usually in Central London by early afternoon, and I'll spend a couple of hours talking about history, or war, or the history of war.

It's not until I get home that the real fun begins.

Nuts and Bolts

Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday are scheduling nights, time to queue up a post for the following morning. News, discussion points, pretty much anything goes as long as it's at least vaguely label-related - and it can be pretty bloody vague. I got away with posting a photo of an elephant's trunk with the caption "coming soon" once, so I'm still pushing the limits.

Tuesday is the hard one, though, because that's when I have to choose the Wednesday track of the week. If something is new or resurgent or otherwise relevant, that gets top billing, but it can be surprisingly difficult to pick something if there's no obvious choice. I have legitimately just rolled a die before.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday are sharing days. I used to have a consistent timeframe for when I shared out the morning's post to all the various discussion groups, but student life has proven far too mercurial and weird to let that happen. I have a list of groups that get everything, and I'm currently working on finding more places to share more selectively for music that might appeal to narrower crowds. Same deal with Reddit: finding the right communities has proven the toughest hurdle.

Saturday is a special night, because that's when I usually write The Trunk. I tend to write the whole thing in one sitting - it works for essays and it works here too - and then give the whole thing a spellcheck before blasting it out haphazardly into the intertubes. Sometimes I have a topic suggested, but more often than not I have free rein to write about basically whatever I please. Even myself!

Ups and Downs

I'll be honest, I find some of our bands a little more challenging to listen to than others. I can respect the musicianship in almost every case, but I'll admit to being a child of my time when it comes to musical preferences. My tastes lean fast and heavy, and it can be difficult for me to wrap my head around the slower, mellower stuff, though there are plenty of exceptions.

But there are perks. BEM puts out a lot of music I genuinely enjoy - my favourite act of ours is The Fierce And The Dead, who I was lucky enough to see live recently, and I'm also fond of The Rube Goldberg Machine and Konchordat, to name just a couple. And I get a copy of each and every one on the house!

On a more practical note, the job's done wonders for my work ethic. I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with my life once I'm out of uni, but getting into the habit of writing for an audience on a regular basis has been very good for me, both my writing skills and my ability to work to some kind of consistent structure.

So I'd say I do enjoy gremlinhood, on balance. Hopefully I get to keep being a gremlin for a while yet.

Status Update

Fukushima Surfer Boys is finally out, and The Divine Abstract is ticking down steadily towards its November 3rd release. Get yer preorders in now!

David and Martin had a great time at Summer's End last weekend - David, especially, has been playing a lot of the bands he saw there around the house. This weekend is looking substantially quieter at Elephant Towers, though.

Review Roundup

Just a couple of reviews of the new hotness that is Fukushima Surfer Boys this week. "Trojan Horse reinvent prog, again," says Joe Banks of PROG, and, while that's a bold claim, we do see where he's coming from. Meanwhile, Ben Forrester, from Birthday Cake For Breakfast, says in his review that the boys are "ready to fry our brains out" and "as eclectic and eccentric as we've come to expect for them". Top stuff!

See you next week for more Trunk - until then, do not adjust your sets.

The Trunk 8/10/2017: From the Vaults - Pandora

Welcome back to From the Vaults, the semi-regular feature where we dive back into the BEM archives to revisit some of our older releases. Last time, we jumped back a year to immerse ourselves in some of our Liquid of Choice. This time, we're going a little further back, two and a half years to 2015, and to an album by the name of Pandora.

Caution: not a real circuit board!

"Progressive fusion" group We Are Kin hail from Manchester, and, though they're now a quartet, the core lineup of Pandora-era We Are Kin was originally just a duo - drummer Gary Boast, and multi-instrumentalist (and current BEM team member) Daniel Zambas. It's worth mentioning that this is technically a re-recording. The original version of the album was released as a download in late 2014, and David Elephant liked what he heard so much that he and Dan concocted a scheme to record a new version with bassist Dave Hopkinson, singer Lauren Smith, and guitarist Adam McCann. Thus was born the version you can find on Bandcamp today.

Pandora was We Are Kin's first full-length album, and it set a strong tone for their work: a firm, surprisingly deep conceptual base, a coherent, original sound that wove its pieces together expertly and near-effortlessly, and a set of smooth, inexorable songs that neither rush nor drag. Pacing in music is deceptively important, and few people get it quite as right as these guys.

From the soaring, wistful 'Tides of Midnight' to the powerfully disjointed 'Weight of the World' to Hannah Cotterill's beautiful vocals on 'Soul', Pandora displays an impressive range as well as quality songwriting, and most tracks stand just as well alone as they do as part of the wider album. My personal favourite piece on Pandora, though, is 'The Speech', a stripped-down piano line supporting a superb spoken-word performance by poet Alex Dunedin, who also wrote the lyrics for much of the album. It gets... different towards the end.

Seriously, just give this one a listen and you'll see what I mean.


It'd be remiss to talk about We Are Kin without mentioning their live shows. Anyone who caught the Evening of BEM in Manchester earlier this year will testify that We Are Kin put on a magnificent live show. While I've yet to watch them in concert myself, the live footage I've seen shows a tight, well-realised performance with just the right amount of verve.

Reviews of Pandora were consistently pretty damn good. The Progressive Aspect's Phil Lively called it "a mature and well realised album", and our friends in Europe seemed to like it too - in Germany, BetreutesProggen and Babyblaue both gave it generally positive reviews. (More on what they actually say when I can get hold of Stefan. My German's still a little rusty.) Their second album, ... and I know..., was similarly well-received (and might well be worth its own From the Vaults episode someday!)

If this tickles your fancy and you'd like your very own copy of Pandora, we've still got plenty of copies over at the webstore, now at the reduced price of just £5 for a digital copy! Think of it as a kind of... um... late-bird discount. Sure. Let's go with that.

Status Update

Fukushima Surfer Boys continues to be a thing that is going to happen. It's not time to turn off those hype jets yet - and preorders are still open!

In case you missed it, there was a brand new Lab 558 very recently, featuring the exclusive first play of a new track from Charlie Cawood's soon-to-be-released solo album! If you've not heard it yet, give it a listen. If you have, give it another listen. Can't hurt.

It's Summer's End this weekend, so David and Martin are both living it up in questionably sunny Chepstow, leaving Huw in charge of the operation.

What could possibly go wrong?

Pictured: BEM HQ.

Catch you all next week, if there's still a BEM left to report from!