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!

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!