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.