Ethiva- Sublime Island (Clostridium Records CR026) + Interview

The Spanish trio Ethiva are finally back with a great follow up to their first record which was in my top 10 back in 2014 when it came out.  Like they’re previous record there are several editions include a die hard one with a jigsaw puzzle (like last time) of the album rear cover artwork. The artwork is very cool and creative.  The album starts off slowly with the track Walk among the Stars. Cris Alverez is a guest vocalist on this opening track and also Velvet Fog (2^nd track on side B) and has a voice a bit like Jon Anderson but with his own unique quality as the band plays a beautiful building track with the guitar going from clean to spacey to solo mode while the drums and bass give Javi a lot of space to play great guitar. While the Hills is another emotional track sung by Jandro, the bass player. He has a similar style as Cris but can not sing in as high a register. The track is a great 70s style melodic rock number though with lots of dynamics. Long Lost Friend starts off like One of these Days by Pink Floyd but then goes off in its own path and features some very nice guitar playing by Javi. Side B starts off with Eslinga, which has a great instrumental start and faster pace and is a very cool song but sadly is faded out way too soon (maybe to make it fit on the vinyl?). I want to hear the whole jam?? Please…  Velvet Fog is a more melodic track but again a bit faster and different. Emptiness slows the pace down and has some really excellent melodies, feelings and guitar playing. The whole band just plays so well together. Great song. Love the openness and cool vibe they have. One of Them is the last track and very short instrumental (perhaps edited as well?).  Lovely record. The whole package, presentation and music. Great…. 

http://ethiva.bandcamp.com

http://www.clostridiumrecords.com

Interview with Javi

1. How long have the three of you been making music together?
Jandro and me since I started to play guitar, like 15 years ago,in several bands but Ramón joined the band in 2012.

2. What is the origin of the band name? 
Ethiva is not a real word, We created it trying to put a name to the concept that we had in mind,  a kind of fantasy world in context of our music.

3. Who's idea was it to include a puzzle with the die hard versions of the two albums you have released?
The Idea was of Andy (clostridium records), he always includes a little present in his "die hard editions"

4. Describe what a live concert is like for Ethiva? Do you improvise at all or just play the songs like on the album?
For us is really important the feeling in the moment to play, ambient, people, place....i don´t know,  but we play in fuction of this feelings, some parts we try to play similar the album, vocals parts specially, but we always let space to the improvisation time.

5. Would you like to play outside of Spain?
Yes, of course, in fact for us is like a target. As I told you privately, sometimes Spain seems to be very far from anywhere, we just need the opportune call.

6. What do you see in the future for the band??
Well, about the future I hope see another record, i think we have not more pretensions.

Colour Haze- In her Garden (Elektrohasch 011)

The band did not take that long to come back with another new album which is cool. The band has expanded their sound and approach to songs on this recorded and recorded most of this stuff live in one take with some overdubs, going for a more live feel. After a short intro the band Kicks into Black Lilly, which reminded me of a less funky Grand Funk and Stefan sings in a sort of high register. This one features a nice long guitar solo. The sound production has a bit more of an open feeling (more reverb) (which is a good thing) on this track. Magnolia features some keyboards that I find a bit strange, not fitting that well but it sure makes, a pretty straight up Colour Haze instrumental sound different!! Stefan actually experiments with some effects (pedals or added to the guitar channel afterwards) to change his guitar tone (finally!!!!). Abores kicks in quite fast, almost like mid-jam and is a bit faster of a track and Stefan plays some super cool guitar and uses some cool effects pedals. Nearly the first time ever!! Sdg1 is a strange interlude track with horns. I liked it. Lavatera starts slowly but then kicks in with a quite heavy riff.  The vocals kick in around 3mins. After the first vocal section some nice organ kicks in. Later the band seems to be actually jamming out! Islands is next and  Stefan uses a wah pedal for maybe the first time ever on a CH record! Very cool sound and great playing and one of the longer songs on the record at 11mins . Later on the track there is some vocals and keyboards as well and gets a bit psychedelic at the end. SdgII is another short interlude track with synths and some drone. This leads into Labyrinthe and Lotus, two tracks that feature horns (the first) and strings (cello, violin and viola). Labyrinthe also features some sitar (?) and later the horn section. This is a really strange and interesting brooding, plodding track. I feel like some of the themes I have heard before (Led Zeppelin??) somewhere. At 5mins the track takes a new direction. Colour haze has never made a track like that. Wow!  Lotus starts with a repetitive guitar and bass line. Around 2mins the string section starts to play and different melodies take place  and Stefan starts to sing around 3.30 til 4 mins. After a brief interlude, the strings return and then the vocals. Sdg 3 features acoustic guitar and sitar in a sort of happy short raga. Skydancer has what I would call a signature Colour Haze guitar sound and groove. There is a nice section of guitar and organ interaction. The last track on the album is Skydance, where the band revisit their roots!

I have to say I was blown away and extremely happy to see this amazing band, let go of some of their chains (like Motorpsycho has done in the past 5 years), and allow themselves to have a new sound, a more loose free, jammy sound, use some guitar effects and open up.  WOW… stunned…. Amazing album guys. One I can just play over and over.

 ALso check out this interview where Stefan talks a lot about the new album and Colour Haze sound and how he hates jam bands and live improvisation. 

http://www.elektrohasch.de

http://www.colourhaze.de

Astralasia- Oceania (Fruits de Mer, Winkle 27)

I really liked the last Astralasia record a lot. I had no idea they had a new one. The group is very diverse so you are never quite sure what you will get but for sure a lot of spaced out electronic music and maybe some guitar as well. This is a double album with most tracks between 5 and 7mins with the exception of the long side 4 22 min Time, Tide and Eternal. The album starts off with Alooland, a sort of new age synth piece. This is not my favorite style of stuff from this band at all.  It slowly builds up with synth bass and programmed drums. Ghosts in between is another synth piece with some nice piano. Oceania has a very fast synth arpeggio and some really cool psychedelic guitar playing. Great track.  Tangerine Skies starts with a female spoken voice and then a dreamy synth line starts and there are some more ethereal voices mixed in as it builds up. Kaleidoscopic returns to this new age Kurzweil like synth with some piano stuff, a very floating happy elevator music track. A bit of lounge jazz like guitar which later evolves into some cool guitar. This ends and it changes into a very much piano focused song until the end. North Star features a pretty cool saxophone, played very slowly. This track slowly builds in some pretty cool layers over the 7mins.  Side 3 starts with Astral Voyager with some Ozrics like guitar as the track builds up. Mushroom heartbeat starts with a piano work out before the synth and female voice kicks in. A long Shore is a 2.5 min track that ends side C with another floating new age like thing with some saxophone.  Side D is the 22 min long track.  It takes a long time to develop and features flute, electric tabla (?), and some other extra percussive sounds we have not heard yet on the album. A quite deep bass that shakes the floor is also present (mostly likey synth) as the track grows.  It gets really spaced out and lost in space around 15mins until the end. If you like the last several albums you will dig this one as well.

http://www.fruitsdemerrecords.com

Close to the Edge- How YES’s masterpiece defined Prog Rock by Will Romano

 I was very interested in this book. I have never read a book on YES and clearly the majority of this book is focusing on their classic album from 1972. The book is broken up into a number of long chapters. There is a small section with some interesting pictures in the middle of the book as well. The first chapter is dealing with a sort of history of psychedelic and prog rock in the 60s and how the definition came about and the most important artists such as the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson, etc..

The 2^nd chapter (Sweet Dreams) is where I really learned a lot about the early line up of YES and the band that most of the members were in before called Mabel Greer’s Toyshop. This was very interesting and a lot of totally new information about Jon Anderson, Peter Banks, and Chris Squire. Bill Bruford came into this band at the very end before they changed the name to YES (Peter Banks suggestion).  A lot has been written about Peter Banks and why he left (basically the band was becoming to structured and he did not have enough space to improvise!). Also in this long chapter he goes through in a lot of detail the making of The YES album and Fragile as well. A lot of interesting information about these records to compliment the liner notes of the Steven Wilson editions, for those of you that have them!

Eddy Offord

The 3^rd chapter (Spiral Aim) takes on the making of Close to the Edge (CTTE) in amazing detail. The authors spends quite a long time making parallels with a lot of spiritual stuff relating to the number 3, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Om, etc.. I am not sure everyone will buy this and wonder if he just got way too deep into this album. There is not that much evidence to support that YES were thinking so deeply about all this stuff. They were trying to make the best record they could and were inspired to try anything in the book and the amazing engineer, Offord, was keen to go for any idea and see if it worked so in the end, the album was cut and pasted from many many short layers, loops, multitracks to create a very artful piece of music. One thing I thought was interesting to learn was that the way they put music together in these few mins at a time to create the track, that they in the end actually had to learn how to play it at the end because they always ended up with something very different from where they started. Cool.. Very creative people and super talented.

The 4^th Chapter, I did not really get. It is called What’s a Khatru and it is trying to pull out some sort of religious, otherworldly deep deep spiritual meaning to the YES lyrics, particularly relating to CTTE. He brings up a lot of questions and speculation that could easily be clarified if he just asked Jon Anderson. He has clearly met and spoken with him before based on quotes in the book, so why not just go to the source and ask, rather than spend 20 pages speculating when you can found out by asking Jon, who is still alive. This was a hard chapter to read.

Valley of Endless Seas is about the artwork of Roger Dean and relating to CTTE. Again, I think he tries to make too much of it all and spends a over a page just on why the cover is green and if this relates to some deep spiritual thing and relating that the cover can look like an green overflowing glass of Guinness is pretty far out!  The logo is cool but the album artwork on the outside is hardly mindblowing in anyway, it is the inside that is most impressive.  Again, he could just ask Roger Dean, rather than spend so many pages speculating about really deep, religious, spiritual meanings in the figures hidden in the art, etc.. It was nice to see reference to Ed Unitsky, an visionary artist that has done some album artwork for my band (Øresund Space Collective).

Artwork by Roger Dean

Seasons will pass you By, the 6^th chapter, is mostly about the how and why Bill Bruford left the band. There is a lot of very interesting information and insight about him as a drummer and person as well. This also leads into how Allan White came into the band.

The Journey takes you away, is about the success of the album, the elaborate stage and sound set that they took on the tour. The tour was quite long for them running from July 1972 until April 1973 seeing the band play most in the USA but also some dates in Australia (New Zealand was all cancelled), Japan and three dates in the England. Europe never got to see this tour and there were more concerts in Japan than the UK!!  A lot of details are presented about the sound, lights, etc… a video (YEssongs) was shot on this tour and released (never on DVD though) and triple live LP as well but that material was not from the YESsongs video (except one song) and the rest was recorded in the USA.

They regard the summit, is about the impact YES and CTTE had on the world in general. I think some of this is a bit overstated and a bit too much. YES were for sure a huge inspiration but there were a lot of other super creative bands out there at this time pushing the limits of rock music, not only YES. Many of these get mentioned in the book, of course, and mainly a focus on ELP as it was easy to draw comparisons to them. 

For me, I actually think the band did not peak at this point as the author tries to push his point. For me, they took it two steps further and I would say that Tales of Topographic Oceans is the bands highest artistic achievement ever and they took what they did with CTTE and went even one step further. No one at this time in rock music had made a 42min song (The Ritual). The Steven Wilson 5.1 mix is just mind blowing. Also, I felt that Relayer even though Wakeman was gone, had the band pushing to it’s most extreme ever. I have always loved this album and its very aggressive nature but also multilayered, head music… After this, with Going for the One, the band became more polished, a bit commercial but still made great records.

Anyway, there is an epilogue, CTTE tour itinerary, band and artist discography of all their major works, and all the bibliography at the end. I really enjoyed the book a lot and I would have liked Will to have just got the answers directly from the band members on a lot of the stuff that you uses maybe 50 pages of the book to speculate on and theorize about. He could have just asked Jon and Steve, the two main music men in Yes.. A very cool book..

https://www.halleonardbooks.com/index.jsp?subsiteid=168