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.

30/9/2018: BEM In Charts

The Young Elephant, author of this fine column, started a new day job this week in his civilian identity, working with staggering amounts of data. On that note, we've prepared rather a special Trunk this week - BEM in charts!

We've come quite a way since 2013 and its two BEM releases! The figure for 2018 is, of course, a touch low because the year's not over yet.

There's a lot of variance in the length of a BEM release, from EPs (that's Minotaur down at the low end there) to epic double albums (Emmettronica messing with the scale at a hefty 29 tracks). This isn't the whole story of course - most of the tracks on these records aren't your typical three-minute pop songs!

BEM's BQ (Beard Quotient) is actually pretty low at the moment. These figures are, of course, subject to change, so you should not use this chart for serious research purposes. (And that's the only reason why.)

We run a very tight ship here at BEM, with zero tolerance for unapproved slacking. The operative word there being "unapproved".

I didn't want to include this one. Bem made me do it.

Status Update

Now We Have Power is less than two weeks away! Be sure to preorder to avoid disappointment (and to get hold of the preview track 'Speak To Us' right away).

Review Roundup

PROG Magazine had two lovely reviews for us this month - one of Now We Have Power, and one of Dial. As always, we'd encourage you to pick up the full issue if you can, but these reviews are worth a read regardless.

We close out today, though, with a very prestigious review indeed - a rare perfect ten from The Prog Mind, awarded (rightfully, of course) to Dial. "The only real danger with technology is that often, the music loses some of its soul. This is not the case with Dial." Damn right.

The Trunk 23/9/2018: From the Vaults - The News

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 winding back the spools over two and a half years to February 2016, and to the second full album release from N.y.X. Do not adjust your set - it's The News.

This is a really nice album cover but I can't think of anything witty for this caption, so I'll 

N.y.X is an Italian experimental rock band, first conceived in Turin in the early 2000s and first heard on record in 2005 with their self-titled debut EP. Starting life as the multi-instrumentalist duo of Walter F. Nyx and Danilo A. Pannico, backed up by a healthy selection of guest performances on their 2009 album Down in Shadows, N.y.X took on a third full member, the ever-enigmatic Klod, to produce soundscapes for The News, and the guest sheet this time around is impressive, featuring both Adrian Belew and Trey Gunn (King Crimson (yes, that one)).

The News is a concept piece about, as the name might suggest, the news, and the chaotic, unsettling portrait it paints of our world, the strange light it casts on an already-strange reality. Each of the first five tracks is subtitled with a stage of one's morning routine - waking up, getting ready, and the newspaper read over breakfast to start the day properly. And what a start it is.



The News is an album of ups and downs - not in quality, we should stress, but in overall pace and tone. The interplay between intense rushes of sound and fury and lower-key moments of relative peace is by far the strongest feature of the album as a whole. The oscillation serves as an immensely compelling through line that reflects the ever-conflicting moods of news media - with so much information rushing in at us, how exactly are we meant to feel? Is the only reasonable reaction to laugh? I don't know, and N.y.X seem to revel in that uncertainty.

Composition-wise, the album's thick like a Sunday paper, with a heavy focus on soundscapes and atmosphere. It's full and rich without ever straying into extravagance or getting too cramped, and it's clear that the many, many elements of each song have all had thought and care put into their placement. The News can be a challenging listen at times, but it doesn't force you to respect it, instead almost daring you to. Go on, it says. You can take it. And you absolutely can.

The News was well-reviewed - both Shawn Dudley at Progradar and Phil Lively at The Progressive Aspect gave it strong writeups, with the latter proclaiming it "proper stuff" and noting that it will push you out of your comfort zone, but you should let it, if you can. Veteran Russian music journalist Dmitry M. Epstein even gave it five stars. "Such is our reality," he said. Strong words, but the music lives up to them.

The News is available from the BEM webstore. And now onto... the news. Eh? Eh?

I'll get my coat.

Status Update

Dial is out now! Shineback's triumphant second album is a masterwork of smart electronica, and we'd encourage you to check it out if you've somehow not done so yet.

Turning to the future, three weeks remain before the release of Now We Have Power - preorder now for a preview track download and for the earliest possible access to the new hotness.

Review Roundup

Two new reviews of Dial came staggering into Elephant Towers this week. Phil Lively's for The Progressive Aspect features a little snippet of interview with Simon Godfrey himself and some very spurious claims about the origins of our label, and is well worth a read. Jerry Lucky was also kind enough to cover the album, declaring it a set of "great tunes with catchy riffs and singalong parts that at the same time run all over the place with brilliant sounding dramatic Progressive Rock signature elements" - proof positive, we feel, of Godfrey's mastery of genre blending.

The Trunk 16/9/2018: Review Roundup Special

It's been a while since our last Review Roundup Special. Let's remedy that, shall we? It's a bit of a mixed grab bag this time, with a few releases both newer and older getting some attention, so it's high time we shed some light on them. We'll be grouping reviews by the album to which they apply, and in each case you can click on the album title to be whisked away to the Bandcamp page. Without further ado, bring on the reviews!

Argos - Unidentified Dying Objects

The Progressive Aspect - "The PR information describes them as 'maybe the most British-sounding progressive rock band to come out of Germany', and I think that is a spot on description... It has taken me a long time to write this review, partly due to my enjoyment of the album. When I play it I just become immersed in the sounds, forgetting that I should be taking notes!"

Jerry Lucky - "Overall there’s a nice blend of melodic lyrical lines mixed with extended instrumental passages moving songs emotionally one way or the other... I love the fact they include a variety of musical influences and execute them so well."

Echoes and Dust - "With the sounds soaring through the skies, Argos is taking the listener on a magic carpet ride from start to finish."

Profil (French) - "In short everything is there and everything is going very harmonious way to a gradual end... I am captivated, moved and never bored."

Eclectic Shadows (Greek) - "They are just interested in the composition and play for the song rather than for themselves... if you urgently need a prog dose to keep breathing, maybe this album is for you!"

Matt Baber - Suite for Piano and Electronics

Echoes and Dust - "Joy is wrought and wrangled from that wide, toothy grin and any sense of darkness or danger is swiftly doused in a shower of gleeful sounds. From the start to the finish, this work seeks out and finds jubilation in every potential sonic corner."

Mike Kershaw - Arms Open Wide

The Progressive Aspect - "Arms Open Wide is an album well worth investigating, filled with interesting sounds and intriguing lyrics, all played with great touch and skill."

PROG Magazine - "A marked leap forward that brims with artistic confidence... It's his most ambitious and complete work to date."

Eclectic Shadows (Greek) - "Mike has created a very interesting album, far from manners and replicas, with serious lyrics and really interesting progressive music, an album that progressive rock fans will have to check."

Shineback - Dial

Progradar (?) - "If you want rocky guitars, it’s here. If you want extended prog rock structures, you get them too. If you want synths and electronic drums you get those. Above all you get songs that really pay you back for multiple close listens... Is it good? I’m biased of course, but yes I think it’s fantastic."

Progressive Music Planet - "And once you’ve embraced Shineback, go and check out Valdez as well (also on Bad Elephant Music). This is how the poppier side of prog SHOULD sound."

The Trunk 26/8/2018: One Year of Trunkage

It has been three hundred and sixty-four days since the publication of the first ever edition of The Trunk. I think that's close enough to a year to call this the blog's first birthday.

Tempus fugit.

Pictured: me, feeling old.

When I first pitched The Trunk, it was little more than a pet project, something to keep me writing and hold me to some kind of schedule during the stressful final year of my degree. Since then, BEM has released fifteen new albums, I've graduated, and we've had some time to experiment a little with the format of this thing. While I'm overall pretty happy with where it's ended up, I do think The Trunk can be better. So this week, instead of looking back as we often do, I'd like to look forward and talk about some of what we're hoping to bring to this blog in the weeks and months to come.

More Interviews

Thus far, The Trunk has interviewed Matt Stevens of The Fierce and the Dead, Louis Smith of Mothertongue, David Elephant, CEO, and, um, itself. These pieces are, unsurprisingly, some of our most-viewed content - they're exclusive insights into the creative process, and they're always fun to conduct and publish. They're also the sort of thing we really couldn't publish on the Facebook page alone, so they represent The Trunk at its best and most useful.

I think it's only reasonable that we do a few more. Now that I'm out of university, I have a lot more free time and brainspace to dedicate to preparing questions and planning interviews in advance, which was always the main obstruction to getting them done. We've got some new material in the works which is definitely worth talking about, but nobody can do that better than the artists behind it.

More Participation

The recent Talking Point posts have been unexpectedly successful - we knew we'd get a few responses, but we've generated some genuinely interesting discussions, and it's great to see our audience pitching in and having their say. So we'd like to do a little bit more of that.

We're still experimenting with what works and what doesn't for this - our survey didn't get many responses at all, but opening a more freeform discussion went a lot better, so that's what we're going to stick to going forward. Talking Points will continue as a semi-regular feature, probably a little less regular than From the Vaults (which will keep going strong until we run out of albums to cover, which, at the rate we're putting them out, seems unlikely to happen anytime soon), but we're also looking into a few new kinds of content. Stay tuned!

A New Look

The Trunk doesn't look half bad at the moment, but I still can't help but feel that something's missing. We don't have the logo, we don't really have any graphics at all, and the whole thing just feels a little bit spartan. With that in mind, we're hoping to jazz it up a bit soon. I have a redesign planned which will keep the fairly minimal aesthetic we have at the moment but hopefully bring a splash of Bad Elephant verve too, and I'm going to stop talking now before I spontaneously turn into a wedding planner or something.

I can also tell you that I'm doing a little bit of work on the Facebook page too... keep an eye out for that when it arrives.

And... that's about it. Here's to another year of Trunk action!

Status Update

Dial, now fully tracklisted and including a preview track in 'Consider Her Ways', will be released in just under three weeks. Get yer preorders in now.

The Trunk 19/8/2018: Godfrey at BEM, A Retrospective

Few artists can claim as broad a musical range as Simon Godfrey. Even just in his time at BEM, he's been a very busy boy, and the tunes he's given us vary wildly in genre and tone. Dial is out there on the horizon, less than a month away now, so let's take the opportunity to gaze back into the archive and take a look at Simon's many ventures with the label...

Shineback

Simon's first solo project with BEM was Shineback, which the man himself describes as "intelligent dance music" - the infectious beats and synthy instrumentation of EDM without compromising the ability to tell a story or play with compositions. Rise Up Forgotten, Return Destroyed was a hard-hitting concept piece that also had some prime examples of what I believe the kids these days are calling "bangers", and it was exactly the right note to start BEM's publishing career on.

About this time last year, after a while without any Shineback, Godfrey stirred up our appetites once more with Minotaur, an EP (a pretty long EP at well over 20 minutes) that brought back the sound afresh in a few more standalone pieces, "paving the way", as he puts it, for Dial. This second full-length album is something we're very, very excited to share with you - it's a very different album from Rise Up Forgotten, both musically and thematically, but we're confident that established fans will still find a lot to like here.

Valdez

What's this? Okay, no, we've run that joke into the ground already.

Valdez are a great pop-rock band made of four great musicians from great bands who continue to insist that they are not a supergroup. When you hear the music, though, the distinction is academic. It's just the one album, but This is a fantastic example of what can happen when formidable musical minds cooperate. It sees Simon's deft songwriting and ear for a melody drawing on the talents of Echolyn's Tom Hyatt, Cold Blue Electric's Joe Cardillo, and Stone Jack Baller's Scott Miller, and the four of them bring the songs to life with practiced verve. This is well worth a listen whatever your usual tastes - you might just find a few of the tunes worming their way into your brain and staying.

As Himself

We have to confess, Motherland gave us whiplash. After the walls of electronica Rise Up Forgotten had given us, a whole album of almost entirely acoustic work was a bit of a shock to the system, but it was far from an unpleasant experience. With re-recordings of a few Godfrey standards, some never-before-heard material, and a tight twelve-week recording time that gives the album a very intimate feel, it's probably Simon's most personal work, and it's held up very well indeed.

A lot of creative types end up with a lot of fragments that don't fit comfortably into a larger whole. I write, for instance, and if I had a penny for every time I ended up with a passage I really like that doesn't have a story to slide into, I'd have quite a few pennies. For those, Simon has the Black Bag Archive (volumes 1, 2, and 3), collecting songs that range from as far back as the late 90s to as recent as just a couple of years ago. These compilation albums may be mixed bags in terms of style and content, but the quality is consistently worth your time.

Status Update

Arms Open Wide is out now on CD and digital download! Kershaw's latest is a brooding collection of darkly relevant songs, well worth a listen if you feel like a dose of foreboding and fear.

Meanwhile, if you've been keeping an eye on the Dial page, you might have noticed that the tracklist has been released! Just names for now, but hopefully enough to get the mind spinning with possibilities...

Review Roundup

Many thanks to John Simms for this lovely review of Arms Open Wide! He's damn right when he says it's "not an album to put on to cheer yourself up", but he likes it nonetheless as an expression of some of the darker roles music can play.

Next week on The Trunk, I think we're going to have to do something special to celebrate our first birthday... has it really been that long?

The Trunk 12/8/2018: Genrefluid

David Elephant, CEO, is adamant, as we mentioned a few weeks ago, that Bad Elephant Music isn't a prog label. We are, as he puts it, "genrefluid". This week, we'd like to dig into that term a little - what exactly does that mean, and what are the implications for you, the audience, or the music industry, or, dare we say it, the world?

These are all real, serious questions!

The word "genrefluid" isn't a BEM creation - we shamelessly pilfered it from Knifeworld's Kavus Torabi, an exemplar of the term if ever there was one. To us, it has two distinct meanings, depending on whether you're talking about music or us as a label.

Firstly, it refers to music that eludes conventional genre classification, either by including elements from so many different styles and influences that the distinctions between them become meaningless or by being so unique as to be unrecognizable as part of any established category. We at BEM love this kind of music. In an era in which many genres have fallen into something of a stagnant period, breaking the mould completely is one of the best ways to stand out. Obviously, all music is at least a little derivative of something or other, but our kind of band is the kind that makes you think "there is nothing else out there quite like this".

This can make our music a pretty hard sell - back when I wrote BEM's press releases, I remember typing out a lot of lists of seemingly unrelated bands and feeling like I was only gesturing at the harmonious whole I was describing. That said, it can be a useful hook at times. You can't read "XTC meets Pugwash" and not be at least a little bit intrigued. (I'm talking about Valdez, by the way.)

When we use "genrefluid" to refer to ourselves, though, what we're talking about is almost the opposite. Rather than being so specific and unique that nothing else quite compares, we mean that we're a broad church, and will consider acts from almost all points on the musical spectrum. A lot of smaller labels develop a strong, focused brand for themselves, with artists that share a lot of stylistic features and that can be a very successful pursuit. But that's not us. We hope to cultivate an audience that's not wedded to any particular set of traits, and is thus willing to expand their musical horizons even when we release something that might not usually be in their wheelhouse.

Even just taking a look at our first few releases, there's intelligent dance music, instrumental math rock, symphonic prog, heavy psychedelia, and whatever the hell you call Tom Slatter. More recently, we've had spacey dub-pop, a piano-and-electronics solo suite, and even a spoken word album! So I think it's fair to say that we have a pretty broad stable. And we're proud of it.

So that's genrefluidity. Do we still fit the title? Are there any other bands you like that you'd call genrefluid? Let us know in the comments!

Status Update

This week, we finally revealed the packaging and album art for Dial, which is now just barely over a month away! You can check it out in all its glory here - and make sure to get your preorders in too.

Review Roundup

Mothertongue got some extended coverage in a Limelight spot about Where The Moonlight Snows in the latest edition of PROG - you can check it out here, and there's a link there to the album if you like what you're reading.

We also had some coverage from Poland this week, specifically a hopefully positive review of Mike Kershaw's Arms Open Wide. Thanks! We think.

The Trunk 5/8/2018: From the Vaults - World Turned Upside Down

Welcome back 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. This week, we're back in 2014, the year we successfully landed our first space probe on a comet... and, more relevantly for this piece, the year Trojan Horse released their second album and one of BEM's early titans, World Turned Upside Down.

If your night sky looks like this, contact an astronomer, or possibly an exorcist.

Trojan Horse is built around the core of the Duke brothers: broadly, guitarist Nick, bassist Loz, and keyboardist Eden, though in practice they all play a great many instruments. On World Turned Upside Down, they're joined by drummer Richard Crawford and produced by "collaborator" (their words) Danny The Red, which I choose to believe is his real name. They had one self-titled album and one EP under their belts by 2014.

At their core, Trojan Horse are psychedelic progressive rock. Thick guitar, deep compositions, big vocals, and a hell of a lot of flair. We often give opening tracks as tasters for a band's sound here on The Trunk, but this time we're going to show you the closing track from WTUD, as a perfect summary of what these guys are all about in less than two minutes.



Give yourself a moment, and maybe a second listen, to drink it in. Get a load of those vocals! Everyone pitches in their voice on this album, and the bouncy, reactive vibe all those voices lend is infectious. I often find myself trying to sing or hum along to all the parts at once, which usually goes about as well as you'd expect.

That same sense of bigness extends to the rest of the instrumentation too, from guitars you could probably drown in to powerful, razor-edged synth lines. But, somehow, it doesn't overwhelm you. Here we have another all-too-rare example of a band that loves deep, full compositions but doesn't see that depth and fullness as the final goal. These songs still sound like songs - bloody good songs, at that - rather than bulging collections of noise.

While reviewers sometimes had a hard time describing what this music was, exactly, most were in agreement that WTUD was a sterling collection of music, from The Progressive Aspect ("an album of fierce independent spirit and unstoppable energy") to PROG Magazine ("everything that’s great about both classic and modern prog") to Already Heard ("might just be the most interesting album you’ll hear all year").

If you like the sound of all that... well, World Turned Upside Down is still available from the webstore, and the dazzling follow-up Fukushima Surfer Boys is also worth checking out. Climb aboard this Trojan Horse and you're sure to leap out into a defenceless Troy of... um... good... music?

Wow, I'm good at this.

Status Update

Come rain or snow or thunder or, in this case, frankly unfair heat, the Elephant Towers stand as a bastion of stiff-lipped endurance. The release clocks wait for no heat wave or summer storm, and we keep them running. The clock for Arms Open Wide ticks ever closer to the 17th, the timeframe for preorders trickling away into the void like oiled sand. The clock for Dial has a little longer left, but the march towards September 14th is no less constant, and again only a preorder will thwart time's tyranny.

Review Roundup

Two more reviews rolled in for The Euphoric this week from Europe - one from relatively close to home, an 8.8 from Profil, and a fantastic six out of six stars from Uzbek site Progressor. If you fancy a "wild, eccentric yet also compelling production", look no further.

And here's something we never expected to say: it's not strictly a review, but one of our artists was featured earlier this week on Radio 3! Part 10 from Matt Baber's Suite for Piano and Electronics got a spot on Nick Luscombe's Late Junction, and, if that doesn't establish our genre-fluid cred, I don't know what does.

The Trunk 29/7/2018: History of the Hum

Sanguine Hum. A band with seven years' experience under their belt, over a decade more if you count their previous ventures. We're absolutely delighted to have this critically acclaimed outfit on board with us for the release of their fourth full-length album, Now We Have Power. But just who are Sanguine Hum, and what makes them so very special as a band? Well, you've come to the right place for a recap!

Before the Hum

Before there was Sanguine Hum, there was the zingy ambient-progressive act Antique Seeking Nuns. Founded at the turn of the millennium by vocalist/guitarist Joff Winks and keyboardist Matt Baber, ASN marked the start of the Hum story, releasing several EPs and exploring new sounds throughout the noughties. Two of the duo's old contacts, bassist Brad Waissman and drummer Paul Mallyon, climbed on board not long after the first EP, Mild Profundities, and the quartet was in place.

This EP's called Double Egg, but I'm more concerned with a distinct shortage of beans.

This was all slightly complicated by the other band these people were involved with: the Joff Winks Band, a very different act playing very different, more singer-songwriterly music in sharp contrast to the experimental, composerly (that's a word now) edge of the Nuns material. Juggling these two dissonant styles, though, was difficult at the best of times; the excellent JWB album Songs for Days was an early sign of the kind of genre-blending progressiveness the quartet was capable of, but it proved a hard sell for both bands' fandoms.

And so, as the 2010s drew perilously close, the decision was made to bring the Nuns, the Winks, and "Nunbient", an ambient project by Winks and Baber, together as a new, unified entity that would combine influences from all of its predecessors into a new and exciting sound. And a new sound needed a new name. That name was, of course, Sanguine Hum.

Dives and Developments

Diving Bell was Sanguine Hum's first album as Sanguine Hum, and it catapulted them to a much wider audience. Initially self-released, Diving Bell was soon picked up and re-released by Esoteric Antenna to impressive reviews; from this moment, it was clear that going forward as the Hum would yield great rewards to come.

This busy transitional period also saw a personnel change. As Paul Mallyon departed to tend to other commitments, the band found themselves approaching a RoSFest booking with no drummer; fortunately, Andrew Booker (of No Man and Henry Fool) stepped in at the eleventh hour to cover both the gig and the upcoming new album, and he stayed on board.

I love this album cover, by the way. One of my favourites.

That new album was The Weight of the World, and it was the group's greatest success yet. Between a PROG Awards nomination, a spot among Stuart Maconie's top albums of 2013, and more great reviews, the appeal of the Sanguine Hum sound was now undeniable, and the band were clearly destined for more. And more was very definitely on its way.

Now We Have...

Sanguine Hum's next project had been conceived back in 2002 as an Antique Seeking Nuns project under the name of Buttered Cat, and over a decade of quiet tweaking and refinement finally came together in early 2015 as the double concept album Now We Have Light, "a future parable set in an entirely possible scenario". It proved to be their biggest hit yet in both critical and commercial terms, and saw their audience expanding and evolving with their sound - a great relief for a band that's never been shy to innovate and change their angle.

Pictured: the BEM cat, Sid, when lunch is five minutes late.

Early 2016 saw the band looking back almost a decade to the days before Hum were Hum, releasing the double compilation CD What We Ask Is Where We Begin, featuring the first ever CD release of the Joff Winks Band's Songs for Days and a smattering of other material from rare tracks to hitherto unreleased extra bits and remixes. Even now, though, in this moment of reflection, the cogs were turning in pursuit of the next big thing.

It had been clear almost since the inception of Now We Have Light that it was going to need a sequel. Now We Have Power was, again, partially composed and assembled, but putting it together for a release demanded some changes: Andrew Booker stepped aside and original drummer Paul Mallyon, who'd been an integral part of the early design of Now We Have Power, came back as a guest. And, of course, this album would have a new publisher. Enter a plucky independent record label by the name of Bad Elephant Music. You might have heard of them.

Now We Have Power will be released this coming October, and, while preorders aren't available yet, they will be soon. As always, keep a close eye on our social media to make sure you catch the news as soon as we let it slip!

Status Update

The doors to Arms Open Wide will open wide in about three weeks - preorder now to get it at the moment of release. Dial is a little further away, but our excitement remains; we can't wait to show you just a little more of Godfrey's next masterwork!

Review Roundup

Our thanks to Real Gone for this live review of The Fierce and the Dead, performing in a support slot alongside the majestic Hawkwind. We've long held that TFATD are best experienced live, and a quick read of this review should be evidence enough of that!